Deliciously Nourishing Eats

When I wasn’t spending time with my mom, I was in the kitchen with my paternal grandmother, who was well known for her kitchen prowess and ingenuity. There was nothing this feisty and determined woman couldn’t make. Teta Jeannette effortlessly made her own jams and preserves, kettle potato chips, and even pasta. I often helped her make pearl couscous from scratch, my able little hands hard at work rolling teeny tiny balls of dough for a rich tomato-like broth enjoyed with chicken, tomatoes, leeks, and green onions. She would pickle anything in sight—from beets to onions to carrots—nothing was safe from her love of white vinegar. Her innate ability to take standard, store-bought items and easily whip up a dish that made them even better in the process really struck a chord with me. It is thanks to these two strong, talented home cooks that I developed a heartfelt affinity for cooking, creating, and entertaining family and friends.
After high school, I moved to Toronto to attend university, where I had obtained a scholarship and completed business school. After graduating, I found myself working my first “real job”—it was an exciting new chapter of life. However, shortly after I turned 24, I lost full control of my health in a pretty bizarre, unexpected twist of events. Experiencing aches, pains, sharp jolts and stiffness, I felt like I was losing range of motion in my lower back and pelvis. I would wake up stiff as a robot and worked hard to slowly recoup mobility throughout the day. The joint pain was debilitating, and I was prescribed every single NSAID and painkiller doctors could muster to try and alleviate the discomfort. Lying down in bed and then attempting to get up was the most painful of all activities. Soon enough, I was put on cortisone and started to develop the classic “moon face.” But nothing seemed to fully fix my problem, and as soon as the meds would wear off, the pain would return. I was in this cycle of pain and prescription meds with no real answer, until six months later, through bloodwork, we found one.
Ankylosing spondylitis, the doctors said . . . ankylosing spondy-what?! I felt angry and confused. I could hardly believe, let alone pronounce, what the doctors were sharing. It’s a degenerative form of arthritis, they explained. It causes irreversible damage, and in my case, fused certain areas of my spine together. As far as they could tell, it had affected my sacroiliac joints, hips, right shoulder, and left eye. They had finally found the source of the intense joint aches that had left me bedridden for two to three days at a time when they flared up. They prescribed steroids and painkillers to try to get me back on my feet, and while I had a diagnosis to blame, that didn’t make it any better or fix it.
I dove into a medical roulette of rheumatology visits, physical therapy, and many unsuccessful attempts to go off my meds. Throughout this process and despite the many challenges, I was able to carve a happy and fulfilling personal life for myself. My son, Ethan, was born, followed by Grace two years later, and Miles in 2019. Out of desperation and what felt like a lack of options, I decided to cut out gluten, white sugar, and cow dairy from my diet in 2014. Two weeks went by and nothing eventful happened, other than some terrible headaches from white sugar withdrawal.
Plot twist: my sugary cravings started to fade. Three weeks into this experiment, my pain levels started to diminish too. I could suddenly cut my medication doses in half and go about my day with a pretty tolerable amount of discomfort. Life started to feel different, and I regained some normalcy. Nourishing my body from within resulted in major weight loss, but the bigger and more significant picture was that I recovered my health. Losing weight was never the goal, but was a natural side effect of eating more home-cooked meals and buying and consuming less processed food.
I felt strong. I was motivated. I started cooking more than ever before. Inspired by my health journey, but also by those moments early in life with my mother and grandmother, I started a small WordPress blog for family and friends who had tried the recipes at our home and enjoyed them. The blog, The Dish on Healthy, was a creative outlet that allowed me to continue to explore my passion for cooking, albeit under healthier parameters. I started receiving encouraging messages from my early followers, who were thrilled to find healthy recipes they actually truly enjoyed. I was equally thrilled. I started hearing from fellow moms and women struggling to manage autoimmune diseases who shared that they loved my recipes because they were healthy, quick, and easy to follow. They found my cooking approachable, fun, and, most importantly, not intimidating.