“The woman who will make you want to go gluten free – the latest in vogue cook who considers health as much as taste”

(The Times, London)

I’ve had an unconventional journey into a career in food and into the world of Gluten Free living and baking.  I haven’t always been the healthy, gluten free and slightly kale obsessed Bikram devotee I am today.

My interest in baking actually came about due to a period of bad health, which I battled from the age of ten until 18.  At around 12 or 13, my health condition was so poor that I was home from school much of the time and unable to do any of my old, more physical hobbies. I decided to fill my days with baking.  I started with simple recipes but became more creative and ambitious over the years, loving the freedom of expression cooking gave me.  Cooking remained my favorite hobby throughout high school and then college, but I saw it as simply that- a hobby.

During my college years, my lifestyle was the polar opposite of the one I live now. I had dropped out of college twice and was completely unhealthy and directionless. Somehow, I knew the right path was to follow my one enduring passion: cooking.  I decided to enroll at the French Culinary Institute in SoHo.  Being immersed in cooking and learning French cuisine was an incredible, rewarding, and challenging experience. Over the course of the program, I felt less and less healthy.  I was exhausted all the time and gaining weight, had poor sleep and digestion, and my skin was an inflamed mess.  It wasn’t until I graduated that I realized what was making me sick – my daily diet of delicious baguettes, croissants, tarts and pasta at school.

Making the change to a completely Gluten Free diet took some time, but once I fully committed to it I felt total change in my body within a month and was shocked with how quickly my symptoms disappeared.  Going Gluten-Free forced me to completely change the way I ate and cooked.  It also provided the challenge to recreate all those pastries and breads that I loved in a new, healthier, and better form.  Rather than feeling deprived as I initially expected, eating Gluten Free has been an incredibly full and healing diet for me and has extended into every part of my life.  I’ve become much more conscious of everything that I eat and I truly believe that food is medicine and that in some sense we become what we eat.  Now that I’ve experienced first hand how changing to a Gluten Free diet can be transformational in your life, I want to share that knowledge with others.