About Me

Hi and welcome to my website! Here you will find recipe ideas and great tips about healthy eating and healthy living. I follow a whole foods, plant-based lifestyle and I hope I can inspire you to embrace it too. I have a passion for nutrition, animal well being and overall health. I hope to encourage you to live the best life you can, be more conscious of your food choices and their impact on the world around us and at the same time enrich the lives of all living things.

I was born and raised on a dairy farm in Zimbabwe and honestly never thought about the impact of my food choices until September 2011 when I watched the documentary Forks Over Knives. In the summer of 2010 my teenage son announced that he was going to be a vegetarian and I was sure it would last a week or two. A year later he was still vegetarian and I insisted that he was not getting enough protein and needed to add chicken back into his diet. I am pleased to say that he simply refused which got me thinking that I should really look more into this “whole vegetarian thing” and that was when I stumbled over Forks Over Knives. On October 3rd 2011 I started on my plant-based journey. Giving up meat, poultry, fish and eggs was very easy but the dairy took a little longer. I ate vegan at home but vegetarian outside the house. I am by nature a "people pleaser" and did not want to seem “difficult” when going to restaurants or friends houses. It took a year or two before I stopped eating dairy completely and realized that I did not have to eat anything I did not want to regardless of where I was. The more I discovered about animal welfare and the environmental impact of animal agriculture the more I simply could not eat any dairy at all.

I am a cooking instructor focused on a whole-food, plant-based approach to everyday and special-occasion meals that are “delicious, nutritious, fresh and fast." See all of our cooking class offerings here!

Most of my recipes are gluten free and all are sugar-free, oil-free and salt-free. You will notice on the Recipe Ideas Page that for some of the dishes I simply have a list of ingredients. Keep checking back as I make updates and make them more precise.

Let me know how I can help you and your family make this lifestyle fun. The best place to see me in action is on YouTube and Instagram.

I am a 2013 graduate of Dr T. Colin Campbell's eCornell Plant Based Nutrition course and continue to learn every day from numerous experts in the field. Here are some helpful links to some of them:

• Dr T. Colin Campbell

• Chef AJ

• Dr. John McDougall, MD

• Dr. Dean Ornish, MD

• Dr. Joel Fuhrman, MD

• Dr. Garth Davis, MD

• Dr. Neil Barnard, MD

• Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, MD

• Jeff Novick, MS, RD

• Dr. Michael Klaper, PD

• Dr. Michael Greger, MD

• National Health Association

On a personal note, I'm delighted that all members of my family have embraced a plant-based diet.

I look forward to working with you,

Elspeth