Hello! My name is Kelly and I was born and raised in a small, quaint town outside of Toronto, Ontario. I’m a multidisciplinary co-creator and perpetual student of life, and I also enjoy growing food and sunbathing at solar noon.
On this blog I share photography, health hacks, and my favourite nourishing, delicious whole food recipes aligned with the seasons where I live.
With a Bachelor’s degree in illustration, I’ve served with a number of organizations including Sustain Ontario and Reader’s Digest/Best Health Magazine while exploring the impacts of place-based and interconnected food systems around me through volunteering at West End Food Co-op, assisting in the facilitation of events such as the Humber Ride 4 Real Food, and visiting farmers’ markets like the Village Market at Waldorf.
Eventually I’ve come to channel my creative energy towards the intersections of cooking, food photography, and cultivating health as part of a daily practice. The challenge of making pretty much any meal on my own was something I hadn’t appreciated in my earlier years. I never knew I could feel so balanced and full of energy. Home cooked, nourishing, whole food ended up transforming my life, energy, mood, and resilience.
I started this blog after slowly overcoming many of my own health issues and malnutrition over the past 15-ish years (severe acne, dental cavities, mild/moderate depression, anemia, lack of energy, irritability and mood swings, PMS, hormonal dysregulation, hypoglycemic spells), and becoming interested in the continual reclamation of health sovereignty in the midst of modern challenges through a proactive, functional, holistic approach. I am here to shed light on some of the modalities through which this can transpire in a daily practice, and I feel that one of the best places to start for almost anyone confronted with these challenges (especially if you’re able to read this right now) is through food itself: cooking it, growing it, and sharing it.
I focus on plant-based and paleo/primal/ancestral approaches, but of course, I encourage you to adjust the recipes and make substitutes to meet your own needs and preferences. Have fun and go wild!
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My Ethos
I personally believe food is one of the greatest expressions of self love and self care, and to reconnect with one’s food can potentiate profoundly transformative impacts as one part of the puzzle when it comes to living a joyful, adventurous, limitless and fulfilling life. I try to live simply in accordance with nature’s rhythms, and a large part of this involves cooking with seasonal foods. My hope is to share inspiration when it comes to food and well-being, and to gain confidence to try new things, no matter where you’re at in this lifetime.
Going beyond veganism and other restrictive dietary dogmas, the recipes on this site are a greater reflection of my personal food ethos which is rooted in a bioindividual, joyful approach guided by my intuition: whole, abundant, nourishing, nutrient dense, chemical and pesticide/herbicide-free, cultivated and raised with care for the soil food web through organic, biodynamic or otherwise alternative practices (as a baseline), informed by ancestral wisdom, and complete with nature’s codes in accordance with the earth’s rhythms. Many of my recipes are informed by the dietary wisdom of Weston A. Price. I like to think that when I eat the seasonal foods from my local ecologies (wild or cultivated!), I bring the land into my cells and rewild my microbiome; essentially becoming one with the land including the local microbes, secondary compounds, and a host of other things, and that is an incredibly special experience to me. Food is information on a cellular level; a priority for me is being able to find and grow food that makes me feel incredible, there is no need for guilt, no dietary dogma, no calorie counting, and certainly no compromise on deliciousness and enjoyment.
Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
In Fred Provenza’s Nourishment, animals were observed to have confidently nibbled on a vast range of grasses, shrubs, and other foods, remarkably fulfilling their nutritional needs with precision and wisdom. He contends that nutritional voices of “authority” and industry can disconnect us from a deeply personal search guided by intuitive wisdom when it comes to nourishing body, mind and spirit with life-sustaining energy. In Western/modern cultures, it’s easy to become inundated with a harmful, self-sabotaging diet mindset often rooted in a sense of lack, but he posits that we can “rediscover” our nutritional wisdom despite it. I’ve found that I’ve possessed it all along through keeping an open mind, trying different foods that make me feel good and energized while embracing wonder and uncertainty. Partly through my experience, I genuinely believe there is a rebalance for every imbalance that can be accessed through nature. When I connect to myself and the force in the world that activates motion and change from a sense of emptiness and openness, intuitive inspiration can flow.
The information in this space is for anyone who’d like to explore and make use of it, to pick and choose whatever resonates with you, to trust and follow your own intuition, and to use it to reclaim your power, potential, and fullest expression of yourself. I believe there is no limit when it comes to how good one can feel no matter the circumstance and that by finding the appropriate tools, you can transform your situation to where you want to be. With all of the conflicting information out there these days, what works amazingly for one individual may be terrible for another; I am here to share with you what resonates with me at this point in time. As always, it’s important to really listen to yourself, to discover your evolving needs, and seek the guidance of an accredited practitioner or additional research sources before diving into a new dietary practice or healing modality that will realistically and sustainably fit into your life.
I hope you find some aspects of this space useful and inspiring, and hopefully to learn from you, too, so I encourage you to comment and ask questions if you have any.
My heart is warmed by you supporting this blog. With deep gratitude I thank you for visiting.
May all beings be happy, wild and free.
May all beings feel peace.
Kelly
To get in contact you can reach out on Instagram or e-mail me at [email protected]
