Strawberries02

Growing up I remember boxed dinners, processed foods and microwaves moving into our everyday busy lives. These times brought about the change from women cooking meals for their families to buying dinners in a box, throwing it into a microwave and serving it. My mother grew up on a farm where they produced their own food, made bread, milked the cow and had homemade cheese.  Between her upbringing and marrying a man that loved eating gourmet food, she became an extraordinary cook. She taught me to cook and bake; once a week we’d spend the day making bread, noodles and exotic desserts.  My mother saved the compost, even during the winter, and would wait until a warm day when she could dig a hole to bury it. In Spring we planted our garden and in the last weeks of Summer we canned tomatoes, made pickles, strawberry preserves, brandied peaches from the fruits and vegetables grown in our garden.  My mother rarely purchased pies or canned items. Thankfully, we had a large basement to store the canned foods for use during the year.

My mother’s strong influence led me to believe that a good diet is the best medicine and taught the benefit of herbs, food supplements and eating a healthy vegetarian diet. When I was 10, she became a vegetarian and I gladly followed her footsteps. We learned the art of cooking plant-based meals and starting my life-long study of health and cooking nutritious meals.

Today, I love sharing what I’ve learned over the years about nutrition, cooking healthy vegetarian meals and the balance between work, family, meditation and recreational activities including extensive travel. I teach healthy veggie cooking classes in the San Francisco Bay and in major cities throughout the USA. One of my greatest pleasures in life is to cook with my friends and family, learning each other’s cultural secrets, then sitting down and enjoy each other’s company over the meal we just made.

I dedicate this website to my mother who has been my inspiration from childhood and one of my closest friends Bette Drew. Bette owned one of the first vegetarian restaurants in the United States, was an amazing chef, florist, poet and a great friend. She passed June 2012 and left me her vegetarian website, Your-Vegetarian -Kitchen.com. Healthyveggie.co is a combination of both of our efforts, insights and recipes.