Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm so excited to have you here today.
If we could get started, could you just tell the listeners about yourself and how you
started doing what you're doing and what you do, I guess, too, right?
So a lot of questions there.
Let me start by saying thank you very much for having me on.
I'm very excited to be here.
I am by trade and professional real estate broker.
That's how I make a living.
And over the last five years, I've sort of transitioned myself to a little bit more.
I used to do property management in a lot of deep dive into renovations of property and
all of that.
And now I'm more disselling and consulting on that.
And I host a radio show with my friend and I wrote a cookbook called My Love Languages
Food.
And so what I'm doing a lot recently besides, you know, making money in real estate is also
just going around and talking to people about how to incorporate, you know, home cooking
into a very busy life, how to incorporate making healthier decisions because I'm getting
older.
All my friends are getting older and how much of our lifestyle and our diet contribute
to the various diseases we have, you know, and I've had a lot of experience with that.
So that's sort of been my, you know, main talking points over the last six months.
Yeah, I love this.
As I told you before we hopped on, this was like how I started out and I kind of geek out
about food and nutrition and the certification was one that I took about just that just very
specifically eating real food.
And also one of the main points of the certification was how to boost the nutrition of the food
that you're eating, which was like a really interesting take.
And to this day, I really, I geek out about it.
I love and like, what else could I add to this to make it better?
What else could I add?
But I think like, I don't think everybody is like at that level really.
It's a little, it's a little bit of a weird hobby of mine.
So I think that what is really important to a lot of people is when we say eat real food,
what exactly, how exactly would you define that?
And why would you say that's important?
I would define it as eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains as much as you can.
Like I don't villainize white food.
So a potato is white, I don't think there's anything wrong with it.
I think cauliflower is a right.
I think we should eat it.
So I think, you know, it's been my experience that if you have real food, so fruits, vegetables,
some kind of carbohydrate in there.
I do eat pasta, you know, that is processed food.
But if you can, and I do believe we all need really good, healthy proteins and I'm an omnivore,
so I eat everything.
I eat a lot of fish, I eat steak, I eat chicken.
I recently had goat for the first time when I was abroad.
But I think if we can keep ingredients that grow in the ground and versus ones that are
made in a lab.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
I think that it's all about the label.
And I mean, you could start with things that don't even have a label, you know, like a sweet potato
or, you know, an apple.
And then when you go to the label, if you're looking at, like, say bread or pasta, you know,
one of the things I would tell my clients was like, when you look at a loaf of bread and
you see, like, an ingredient list that has maybe 20 or 30 ingredients, that's very questionable.
So there's not, all breads are not created equal.
Now, like some of those things are just supplements that they're adding, you know, some stabilizer.
Yeah, well, yeah.
And, you know, it really depends on what you're looking for.
So like, I'd rather not have all that stuff added to my food.
But they do add things like nutrition to the food, you know, and so looking up what the ingredients
are, so you know exactly what they are is very beneficial.
But at the same time, if you're eating real whole foods all the time and good quality whole
foods, then you don't need those, you know, added that added nutrition.
But buying like, like a loaf of bread from the farmer's market that has three ingredients
to me is like, it's like chef's guess, you know, it's just like, that's what I, that's what
I'm looking for.
But it couldn't be hard.
It could be very time consuming.
And maybe you have some thoughts on that.
Like, how, how does somebody navigate the food store or what most people call the grocery
store?
I realize that I'm from Long Island and we call it the food store.
But how could somebody navigate this and how could they, you know, what?
Without spending so much time looking things up on their phone or whatever, is there an
easy way to do this?
So I'll talk to a couple of things because a couple of the things you said were really
interesting.
So when I was younger, I, this was before the internet, I'm 54 years old, so I grew up reading
the back of cereal boxes.
Yeah.
There was nothing to do.
You read.
Yeah.
Whatever was in front of you.
And I ate cereal a lot.
And I remember reading the total cereal, total cereal, and they made the nutrition 100%
across the board on everything they listed.
And I thought, this is a healthy food.
Yeah.
You know, you know, you think.
Yeah.
Because it has 100% of everything I need, according to, you know, and so I, but I am a label
reader and my husband sometimes is like, oh, save yourself.
You know, you've been working all day, just grab fried chicken from the supermarket and
some mashed potatoes.
And we'll just have that when you come home.
And I would come home with the fried chicken, but not the mashed potatoes.
Yeah.
And he's like, why are you healing potatoes and making them from scratch?
This was supposed to be to help you be convenient.
And I would say because there should not be 25 to 15 gradients in mashed potatoes.
Yeah.
Bring myself to.
I'm saving all my, you know, omega sixes and all my trans fatty acids for my fried chicken
that I'm eating, but everything else has to be real, you know?
And I think that we have an accumulation.
So I think if you have those things once in a while, it's not the end of the world, but I
think if you have, you can summing those things, the human body can only be an organic,
organic.
Yeah.
And we're a very complicated, complex, organic creature that needs sustenance.
You know, nutrition to the right nutrition to make us healthy and whole.
So yeah.
And I think 50 years ago, they didn't have the amount of toxins that we have now everywhere.
We didn't have the level of medication pills that we have now.
So I think when you're talking to people from 50 years ago and, you know, they don't believe
this such a thing as gluten allergies.
It's like, well, no, yes, there are really such things as gluten allergies, but why is that?
I think that's a really interesting question.
Yeah.
But I think to help people navigate, I, when people feel like, cooking is not convenient,
it's like, yeah, it's probably not convenient, but it's so much better for you.
And can, will you tolerate mediocre conveniently or we put a little effort into something that's
fantastic?
And I love the ilk that we put a little effort forward so we can have something great.
Yeah.
So even if I am making a cookie, it's a homemade cookie that is absolutely fantastic.
They're going to feel like you're, you know, it's almost like a cocaine habit.
Like, you're going to be like, I have to have this cookie again, but it's a worthwhile cookie.
Yeah.
You're going to have the calories.
You might as well eat something that's real.
And I don't know.
I've noticed over the past, like, very recently over the past couple of years, when you're
buying, I don't buy a lot of processed foods because I've been on this journey since 2007,
I just don't buy a lot of processed foods like the processed foods I buy are like you said,
pasta or I'll buy tofu, but I'm not buying a lot of pre-packaged cookies or things like
that.
I'll do it every once in a while, but what I notice because I'm not exposed to it a lot is
that they really, really suck now.
They really suck.
They don't like, I bought very recently a package of peppered farm cookies and I'm not going
to say, I probably shouldn't have said that.
I'm not going to say the kind that I bought, but anyway, they just were not good.
They just were not good and I kept eating them, expecting them to get better and I ate a
lot of them and they just never got better.
And then I was just like, I'm just never going to, I don't know what happened.
They used to be delicious and they don't taste good anymore.
And I think that the ingredients that they're putting in a lot of these processed foods and
the companies that are producing them are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and they're
cutting corners and doing all these things so they're just feeding us a lot of crap and
it's beginning to really not even taste good.
I would definitely agree to eat a double dog if it's still taste good, but it doesn't.
It just doesn't.
And so I feel like there's that.
And I think one of the reasons why we've come like Americans have become ultra sensitive
to a lot of things like gluten sensitivities and a lot of allergies is because of all the
exposure that we have to all these different things.
So it's not, you know, they say, I don't know who they are, but they say that we're being
exposed to safe levels of some of these chemicals in our foods, but the more that we, like,
the more of these foods that we're eating, they don't know how much of this food people
are eating.
Right.
Like you could be eating 100% processed foods, which is the case for a lot of people and
you're being exposed, your body is being exposed to so many, as you said, inorganic things
that what is it supposed to do with those things?
Your body doesn't know what to do with them.
And so I feel like this puts a lot of pressure on the systems of our bodies and that is maybe
the response that we're getting because of it.
You know, it's like an invasion and your body is protecting itself kind of.
That's the way I look at it.
I don't know.
I'm not a doctor, not a dietitian.
So it's like, I don't know if that's true, but that's the way I look at it and it goes
a pen.
I got another one.
I just threw my pen accidentally.
So what are your thoughts on that?
I feel like, I feel like, yeah, I feel coming back to what you said about the cookie.
Like I feel like if you're going to eat the calories, God, just make it worth it.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So I grew up in a diet like my whole life, you know, I'm a master dieter.
I was on my first diet at 12 with my mother and all my friends and, you know, I got really
good at starving myself.
And even then it was like, well, if I'm going to have pizza, I'm going to have really good
pizza.
If I'm going to have whatever I want, really good, whatever because these calories were
so precious, you know, and one of the things I think of is we are not educated back to the
thing about the corporations.
So we've just recently in Greece.
Yeah.
And we had corn flakes.
I had corn flakes there.
I haven't had corn flakes in a decade.
We had corn flakes there and we had Coca-Cola there.
Their Coca-Cola tasted amazing.
Yeah.
And they don't use hyphrectus cancer.
And they're something different about their corn flakes because when we got back from Greece,
I'm like, I'm going to get corn flakes because I enjoyed them so much.
And I was crunching on them and I'm like, the milk isn't even making them soggy enough.
I can eat them and I felt like I was going to break off the cost of a two.
I hate that.
I don't know what they put on it to do that when I hate that.
Did you remember Christmas story when Rizwold is like, I have that non-nutrative varnish.
Yes.
You know, varnish.
I'm like, I think Chris, you know, Rizwold's, yes, the varnish is on my corn flakes and
they suck.
Yes.
I said to my husband, I'm like, why do these, where these stay?
He goes, what's up with these?
He's like, I feel like I'm eating cat food.
They're just crunching.
I said, I don't know, but I enjoyed the cereal so much in Greece.
So I do think, again, I don't want to get political about this because I really don't know what
the answer is, but I don't think the Food and Drug Administration was doing us any favors.
No.
I mean, they're not.
It's like, went to the Food and Drug Administration and went to a company and took
payouts and then went back to, so I think we've been led to believe that we put our trust in
these systems that we're going to help and that we were going to put our trust in industrial
farming and industrial this.
But I really think food can't be that.
I think it has to be on a much smaller scale to be sustainable to something that helps
us.
And we wouldn't go to a commercial jetliner and be like, why don't you just put, you
know, car fuel in there?
Yeah.
Don't use Avgas for the commercial liner and see how well the plane runs.
And that's kind of our bodies too.
If you're not giving it any vitamin A and vitamin K and vitamin D and magnesium and
salineum and zinc, if you're not giving it those things, it's not going to run well.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And we're surprised.
Yeah.
I think that too.
I feel like there's just a lot of people that are unaware because it's so time consuming
to learn about it.
We've spent the wrong information.
Think about the food pyramid that was on the back of every cereal box that I grew up with.
Yeah, just like throw that in the garbage everyone.
I mean, it's just, it's really upsetting.
The people who make the standards for the food pyramid are like the, the biggest corporations
doing the studies are like Coca-Cola and you know, they just don't have our, our, our
best interests in mind.
And like when it comes to like the foods that they make here as opposed to other countries,
I think a lot of people are aware that they use different ingredients.
If you want to learn more about that, a person to follow would be food babe.
I don't know if you're, that's why it's from, yeah.
So she, she actually calls these companies out for the fact that they put like, like,
for example, you know, Mountain Dew or something really horrible, they put different ingredients
in American, Mountain Dew, then they do abroad because the, you know, European Union doesn't
allow certain, you know, chemicals in their food.
So they make the good stuff for them, M&Ms, you know, all the, all the stuff, but like for
us, we're just getting all the poison.
So she's a good person to follow and then a book to read would be, I think it's called
Salt Sugar Fat.
I don't know who makes that book.
That book, that goes deep into the food industry and if you really want to learn about how they
designed processed food because it is, it is a design and how they almost, they design
it to be addictive as well.
And they do, they, that's why you kept eating the cookies.
Yeah.
Yes, maybe it is.
They were terrible.
They was something in there that caused you to contain sugar.
Sugar.
It's that sugar, that point.
They call it, I can't remember what they call it in the book, something like a bliss point
or something like that that causes you to eat more.
And maybe, yeah, maybe it was that because I'm definitely like a sugar person.
I struggle with that.
But yeah, that's an interesting book to read.
So you can really learn a lot if, if you want, but it is time consuming.
And so let's go back to like what can people do to simplify it while not taking up every
moment of their life being like the food police and still having fun, you know?
What do you think is a way to do that?
I think one of the ways to do that is realize that every meal doesn't have to be a culinary
feast.
You know, I think we've been in a food boom.
You know, we have all of these food network shows.
We have all of these internet recipes.
We have all of these things and food has become almost a pastime.
You know, if you really love it, you really do.
Doing it and everybody else is trying to get away from having, having someone else do it
and for the convenience and then expecting it to be as good as if they did it for themselves.
And I just don't think, I think you're either going to get convenient and cheap and good
for you.
Like you're not going to have three things.
You're going to need to have convenient or cheap or good for you, but you can't have
all three at the same time.
Yeah.
But with that said, if you're out, you know, I would be the first person who used to go
through McDonald's drive through.
But now it's like I could stop at the supermarket, pick up a piece of fruit, still eat that
like car, tied me over to like, he can get somewhere else.
Everything doesn't have to be this giant meal either.
You can have yogurt, you can have nuts, you can have smaller things that would probably
satisfy that really hungry craving because I think when we're too hungry, like really,
I make really bad decisions when I'm really hungry, I'm family, everything in my mouth.
But I think realizing that everything doesn't have to be this full blown epic presentation
of something.
You can make tasty food, it's fairly quickly.
But also not every meal has to be a 30 minute meal that you get home at the end of the day.
You know what?
Cook wants her to bite on the weekend and have some stuff that's left over to yourself
through the week by making food that doesn't take 30 minutes to make.
But the oven does 90% of the work.
Yeah.
And you can have it a few times during the week.
You know, I make a beef carbonate and sometimes one night I'll have it with egg noodles, one
night I'll have it with mashed potatoes, one night I'll have it with a coleslaw, like a hot
and cold thing.
So, and now I've had the same thing I cooked it once, the oven did 90% of the work.
And I've had something healthy, I've broken it up by not making myself feel like I'm having
leftovers by having the same exact meal all the time.
Yeah, yeah.
I do something very similar.
I was just going to say that I feel like you can have the best of all of those things if
you prep, if you do some food prep and some batch cooking.
And I'm like a batch cooking queen, especially now that my kids are out of the house.
I did this with my kids too a little bit.
I used to actually make like a sweet potato black bean burrito, right?
So I would prepare that like I would make a lot of it.
I would roll them and then I would freeze them as a burrito.
And then I, what I did was I tested it out.
How could my kids like come home from school and microwave this thing so it tastes good?
And it was like, you have to put like a wet paper towel over it and then microwave it for
two minutes and 30 seconds and it was like perfect.
And so I like made those and put them in the refrigerator.
And I, not only do you save a ton of money because you're just, you're removing all of
the chemicals and the unnatural things from it and you're feeding your family something
good.
Also another thing that I found to work really well is don't, don't eat your meals the
way they, those they people again, are telling you to eat your meals.
So like my kids would come home from school starving.
So I started and I had, I was able to do this because I was a, a, a realtor as you are.
So I started making dinner like when my kids came home from school, I would either have
it ready for them or something.
And that was their big meal because they were hungry, hungry.
And then instead of having an after school snack, we just did an after school snack later.
You know, like, so it was like, then you get hungry maybe a little bit later.
If you do, you just have a snack, have some healthy snacks.
But you could batch cook like you could even like make a batch of rice or batch of quinoa,
batch of like I would cook beans and I would stick them in the freezer and then if I knew
I was going to eat it, I would take it out for the next day.
So it's already cooked.
I just like have to put it together and there's just so many different ways I think you could
do this and in the summer of like in the winters, I would freeze chili.
I would make a huge thing of chili and then I would just freeze it.
Now I freeze in jars like canning jars and as long as you don't fill it up completely, I
have to emphasize that everyone.
You have to leave two inches from the top so it has, it can expand.
Otherwise your jar is going to break.
But it's a nice way to store stuff without using plastic, you know, bless you.
I didn't, thank you.
I didn't think you could freeze glass.
So that's really interesting because I love all my, all my stuff is glass.
What I do is you know that all of containers at the store, you get a bunch of those and
if I make stock, I just fill those out and throw them away because I don't like, once they
been frozen, I don't like them heated and I have plastic too.
I swear I can taste plastic.
Like it's sometimes out of glass or something inside of plastic.
Yeah.
I can definitely taste the difference.
And what's really funny is when I was young, I used to drink diapy instead of water because
my mother drank diapy.
And my father made a bet with me he would stop smoking if I would drop stopped drinking soda.
So I went to Poland Springs carbonated water.
Okay.
Used to be sold in glass bottles.
Okay.
And then one day they went to plastic and I was like, this tastes different.
My family was like, don't be ridiculous.
I can't possibly taste plastic.
And I was like, will it taste different?
Yeah.
And then we find out all these years later.
No, I'm not out of my mind.
Yeah.
That's true.
No, you're not out of your mind.
So there's obviously things people can do to make things easier for themselves and to be
able to eat like whole food.
Some people do not like leftovers.
There are, I came across that a lot working as a health coach and that makes it a little
hard.
Also when you're cooking for a family, you know, like so my idea of having the dinner
when the kids come home was kind of poo-pooed by a lot of people because then their husbands
or partner would get home later and not be included in the family dinner.
And I was just like, well, you got to do what works for you, you know?
But I think my whole point was stop sticking to the traditional.
Also like you can have minestrone soup for breakfast.
You don't have to have cereal, you don't have to have egg.
You can have whatever you want, whatever turns your crank.
And so I emphasized that.
Like you said, you can have yogurt for dinner.
You know, like you could have your whole family make yogurt parfaits for dinner.
That's fun, you know?
It's like having a nice cream sundae or something.
So I feel like there's many ways to manage this.
What are some of the things that you've come up with when you're talking about this with
people?
What are some of the things that people bring up?
Almost like arguing with you against how hard it is to eat real food.
They don't have time.
Yeah.
Time is always that thing.
Time is, but as someone who when I was going through college, I worked three jobs.
Wow.
I had 20 hours one job, 20 hours another job, and then I had like a four hour on Sunday job.
And I went to school full time.
And then in the summers, when I didn't go to school, I worked 40 hours, 20 hours, four hours.
So I, during that time, yeah, there was very little cooking I was going to be doing for sure.
So I do understand that that is a real issue.
However, if you put on your phone, try to come as time I spend on social media, yeah,
but on a day when a report comes out and you see that you've been on for three and a half
hours a day.
And if you said, what if every day I cooked for 30 minutes or what if two days a week I cooked
for an hour and posted on social media?
Like if you know or make me on social media.
But I think we've, the computer was supposed to make our lives easier and simpler and give
us more free time.
And it's done such the opposite.
And no one will talk about it.
They just keep claiming that new better things are coming more AI more this.
It's not fixing any of that underlying problem that we have.
We all have 24 hours on a day.
We're all doing that stuff.
We're all trying to accomplish things in the world.
We all have families.
We all have our friends.
We have our hobbies and things we like to do.
But you know, you can't do any of them when you're not healthy and when you're not healthy,
you will do anything to get back to a state of health where you can enjoy yourself.
That's right.
Because I've gone through a couple of health scares.
And at those times I'm always like, whatever I have to do.
Exactly.
I've been through health scares too.
That was one of the reasons I retired from real estate and started a coaching business.
And I had a stroke when I was 39.
And that was like the first thing I looked at was nutrition.
And then that slowly morphed into like nervous system regulation and stuff like that, which
really became the one thing that worked well for me.
But the nutrition, I've always been like very interested in nutrition.
And I just actually loved like diving deep into the nitty gritty of it.
Another thing that I think-
But you can go well with yourself.
So I know some people who will say-
Yeah, but my strawberries have pesticides.
So what differences do they make?
I'll just have your retos.
Yeah.
Because they feel like I don't know which can I get my strawberries don't have-
Because we can over educate ourselves into frightening ourselves as well.
Yeah, you could end up eating nothing.
And I think there's so many, there's so many tools that you could use.
So like ewg.org is a really great tool to free.
You can go on there and get the Clean 15 Dirty Doesn't List, right?
And the way you use this list is the dirty dozen, for example, these are the top sprayed foods
with glyphosate, okay?
And pesticides, I should say.
And so those are the foods that you're going to try to buy organic.
That's where you'll spend your money if it's a food that you want or you just avoid it.
And then the Clean 15, that is those are the foods that you don't worry about if it's organic,
you know?
Then the second thing you could do is support a local farm by joining a CSA, which is
stands for community supported agriculture, right?
So a lot of people have CSAs around them.
What that is is every week you pay like 20 bucks and they give you a basket of usually organic,
fresh vegetables.
Of course, you have to make sure they're organic.
Not everybody is certified organic because that certification is very expensive to get.
So you have to talk to your farmers and they'll tell you like, we do low spray or we don't
spray this crop, but we spray this crop.
So when you talk to your farmers, they'll let you know.
So that's another thing that you could do to help get good food.
Another thing I want to share that I take advantage of quite a lot is frozen vegetables
and fruits because when they freeze the vegetables and fruits, it's right after they pick them.
So that yes, they might be traveling to the store, but they're not disintegrating.
They're sealing in those nutrients, right?
So you like store berries, but you can't afford to buy organic store berries because they
are absolutely ridiculous by frozen organic store berries because for some reason they're
cheaper.
I don't know why.
So I go to Costco and I'm a blueberry girl.
So I buy the big bag of organic blueberries.
It's huge, right?
I don't know how many pounds it is, but it's huge.
And it's $10, right?
If I bought that many little things of blueberries in the store organic, it would probably cost
me $50, $70.
I don't know how much it would cost.
I don't know why it's like that.
And I just defrost them.
That's what I had right before I hopped on with you, like some blueberries, some yogurt,
some walnuts, very easy lunch, delicious, nutritious, and organic, right?
It took no time to make.
It took probably under the same amount of time to microwave something.
Yes.
Yeah.
So defrosting the blueberries, what I do is I put them in a bowl and I heat up some water
in my kettle.
I pour a little bit of water on them.
I cover them with chia seeds.
Then I cover them with yogurt.
I put a little bit of maple syrup on it.
And then I just let it sit for like 10 minutes.
And then I eat it and it's defrosted.
That's it.
And it's, you know, I'm like, how easy is that?
And it's delicious.
It tastes like dessert, really.
Like, kids would love it.
But there's different things that you could do that don't take a lot of time, but you have
to just change your habit.
You just have to move things around a little bit, you know?
So I lived in Syracuse, New York for a while and I was lucky enough to live near a bunch
of farms that did local CSAs.
And the amount of vegetables I would get was just incredible.
And another thing that you really notice when you're buying food right from the farm is
that it lasts.
So you could like get a thing of lettuce and like it's, it's, if you buy those plastic bags
full of lettuce, which is yes, I buy that in the winter all the time, right?
But you have to eat that within two days or it's going bad.
So like how long was that sitting for?
Is it really that good for me kind of deal?
But so you have to pick your battles and you've got to learn, you just have to, it's almost
like you just have to create a new lifestyle, new routine, I think, to be able to start doing
those things and it's not necessarily more expensive or more time consuming.
It's just a shift in the way you're spending your time.
Right.
And if you could think of it, like how, how could I do this?
So I was actually joyful doing it.
Mm-hmm.
Which, you know, does anybody want another thing on there to do a list?
Yeah.
Especially when people think they do not have time and you all of a sudden, you know, for
some reason they have to start doing it.
They come to it a little resentfully like now I have to do this thing instead of doing this
other thing.
But if you're like, how could I make this so I wasn't miserable?
Maybe one night a week you cook with a friend or a family member and you're doing something
together and that's your time together.
Mm-hmm.
So going out to a restaurant, go to one person's house, cook and take food home for yourselves,
put on music.
You know, music usually changes the vibe and the atmosphere and maybe you do it.
Absolutely.
But I think if you can do it communally, there's always something a little bit better about
doing it because most of us will do something for somebody else that we won't do for ourselves.
Yes.
So I'm glad you brought that up because I had a client once that came up with her own
solution that was, I thought, genius where she got together with her bunch of her friends.
I think one was her sister and then other friends so it was like five of them.
They would come together once a week and cook like each family would cook a meal.
So like each woman would cook one of their specialties or meals and then they would share
it.
They would batch it and then each person went home with five meals.
Yeah.
And I was brilliant, you know.
And so like you freeze it or you know some of them you wouldn't freeze because you were
going to use them.
So I was just like that is such a good idea and how much fun is that, you know.
And then you also get the community aspect because I do think a lot of people, especially
ever since COVID I think it's really different with people eating alone people.
I think we're alone near in general with the phone, even though it is a connection tool,
it's service or shallow connections.
It's not a real connection.
A lot of it is hard.
So I think if you ate nothing but chia seeds and you know never had red dyeing them before
day, but you were all alone and never had real connections, I think it's just a stressful
of life is having a cookie out of a container and yeah.
I think we were losing, we need to have more of a balance and remember what really like
the human experience is about.
And I do think being human we need to consume food, we're organic, you know, we need to eat
to sustain ourselves and I think all this technological advances, I don't be necessarily
making our lives necessarily better all of the time.
And I use the microwave as a perfect example.
I used to cook with a convection oven.
So I come, I'm a latch key kid.
I would come home.
I wasn't allowed to use the stove but I was allowed to use this oven.
And I would make my French bread, Stofar pizza.
Remember that?
I love that.
Remember those?
They're fantastic.
Remember that they were so good, so good.
And I would watch it, I would wait until the bubble of the cheese would like, I had this
very specific and I could watch it through the window.
My parents threw that away on a microwave.
Ah, from the bottom.
It's just like a Costco for my area.
And we put the pizza in it and it's horrible.
It's a soggy, and my mother was like, yeah, we're done in 30 seconds instead of 20 minutes.
I'm like, but we're just eating crap faster.
It's better.
And I was like, I want my convection oven back and she's like, no, we have this new thing.
We're using this thing.
And we did, we tried to microwave a bunch of things and I was always microwaving and never
quite, it was too hot somewhere and frozen somewhere else.
And I actually have this huge, just taste for the microwave.
Me too.
You didn't heat stuff in my oven.
Like I'm throwing on my oven.
Unless it's like, me too.
I just degrees in the sun.
Yeah.
If need to do something quickly, I will use my oven and it's funny how I know a lot of
people like air fryer's now.
So I'm, you know, my sister-in-law loves hers.
But I think that we, we're making choices.
And if we understand we're making choices, then we can kind of be okay with that.
If I'm going to make a choice to eat out, okay, I'm eating out.
You know, you don't have to beat yourself up or villainize it.
But if you're only eating out and you're not feeling well, well, you can put two and two
together.
Yeah.
And also, there's seasons, there's times and seasons.
My sister-in-law has baseball practice with her kids after school.
And is she going to be making homemade meals from scratch every day?
No.
Should she stress out unbelievably about it?
No, there'll be another season.
Yeah.
It's a change again.
And I, but it's important to not get into whatever your ruts are to staunchly, you know,
when that you kind of go and benefit from everything.
Yes, it's, we have a supermarket, it's super convenient.
We can get whatever we want there.
You know, even if it's eight dollar blueberry, sometimes great.
Yeah, sometimes you need it that quick.
But I think when we're trying to follow all of the rules about all things, it becomes so
overwhelming, it's uninspiring to do anything.
Yeah, it's also, it's just overwhelming.
And I always go by like an 80-20 rule with myself personally.
It's like 80% of the time.
I eat really well, right?
So like, yeah, I may have like things like yogurt and blueberries for lunch, like I'm
doing right now.
But then, you know, this weekend, I'm going to have like a greasy bagel sandwich from the
local bagel place.
I'm not, I don't, I eat stuff like that all the time, you know?
And so as long as I'm not doing that every day, I would feel like shit if I did that every
day.
Absolutely.
You know, but just once on the weekend, enjoying something like that, of course, yeah.
So it's like 80% of the time, I'm, you know, watching what I eat and I try to be really
intentional, but that other 20% of the time, I'm just, I'm just going to do whatever I want.
Am I going to drink alcohol?
Maybe sometimes.
I know it's not good for me, but it's fun sometimes, you know?
And so that's what I, that's what I really try to do.
And when I notice myself being little too nitpicky, I try to, you know, I try to talk myself
out of it because I, I do get there.
I geek out about it.
And sometimes I'm like, oh my God, yeah, I can't spend my time doing, doing this.
You know, like you said, when you talked about the person who's lonely, who might eat healthy
all the time, but they're probably going to die early, I think, there was like a study
done.
And I think it's a being lonely and having a really lonely lifestyle is equivalent to smoking
like a pack of cigarettes a day or something like that.
I can't remember the exact statistics, so don't like quote me on that, but it might even
been worse like two packs a day or a pack and a half or something.
And I was like, wow, that's, that's powerful.
Really?
When you think about it, well, I had, I had recently I've had two friends.
One went through her husband passed away.
She was with a gentleman dating him and they recently broke up.
So she's now by herself, her children are out of the house.
They are scattered all over the country.
And I always try to make sure that at least, you know, once a week or every other week
we're doing a lunch or a dinner or something getting together, like I can't imagine sitting
at home.
I have no problem.
I'm an only child.
I have no problem with physically being alone.
And I think being in our own company is very important and it should not be alone in our
own company.
But I think to not being around others too much is a problem as well.
Definitely.
And then I have another friend who went through a divorce and, you know, how different her
life changed from having this whole family dynamic to now, this empty house for three days
a week and four days a week she has the kids, but she doesn't have, you know, like, there's,
you know, trying to accomplish everything and be with everybody and do those important
things.
I think there's so much to do now that we can get overwhelmed by it.
But if we remember, hey, check it on your friends, check it on your family members, make
sure people aren't eating alone all the time, make sure you're having your fruits, make
sure you're having your vegetables.
You don't have some protein, but calm down with the protein, stop putting cottage cheese
into everything.
People have glit, you know, all of a sudden it was like dairy was evil for about 10 years
until we got this protein crisis.
And now there's that's out of hand.
And everything.
Yes, out of hand.
Stop it.
There's like candy with protein in it now.
Stop it.
Yeah, stop it is right.
Like it's crazy.
Because you can have too much protein and give yourself kidney stones.
Yeah, you can.
You can have, I tell people that all the time, I'm, I was vegan for a long time and I'm vegetarian
now.
And so for the longest time, they were like, oh, how do you get protein?
I'm like, you do realize this protein in vegetables, right?
You know, there's protein in everything almost.
But yeah, you can have too much protein.
Now I do emphasize that as you get older, you do not absorb or process the protein as
efficiently and you do need more protein as you get older, which can be difficult because
you're not really as hungry as you used to be when you're getting older.
So there are, I feel like there are some dietary challenges.
I know I face them when I was going through menopause and that's why I'm not vegan.
I'm vegetarian because you know, eating a lot of beans, tofu and tempeh, you know, you
know, I have to have something else, you know.
So like I did start adding some dairy back into my diet at that point, but not a lot of
cheese because I don't know, the cheese just, yeah, so the cheese just didn't agree with me.
But yeah, so I would like to like kind of switch over.
I feel like I could talk about this forever.
I know.
I'm going to keep doing this.
I want you to share your book, like you wrote a book.
So I'm really curious about it if you could share the title and tell me about it.
So it's called my love language is food, okay?
Because I did not have food, you know, the way people think of an Italian family having
food with grandmas and moms and everyone in the kitchen, all this stuff.
I didn't have that lifestyle growing up, but it really doesn't matter what your lifestyle
is growing up.
I was perpetually on diets.
I ate a lot of pizza and McDonald's and Chinese food, you know, came into cooking for myself
and it was learning to cook what I wanted the way I wanted and getting good at cooking
that actually made me feel really independent, really free and that I could satisfy myself
in a very fundamental way.
Yeah.
And it's in that, that the like the book kind of came into fruition where I wanted to everyone's
always asking me for my recipes.
I really do enjoy cooking.
Now, there's some days where like I don't want to cook.
Yeah.
Just because you love cooking doesn't mean every minute of the day you want to be doing it.
But I try to, I'm a cookbook fan.
I have tons of cookbooks.
I've used cookbooks to learn to cook since I didn't grow up with it.
So I wanted to put out a book that I would like.
Yeah.
So I have 128 recipes in there and it covers everything from breakfast through desserts
and alcoholic drinks and non-alcoholic drinks because I'm a party girl.
I like to throw parties and that's like hummingbird food.
I'm looking at my hummingbird feeder.
I make hummingbird food cheaply at home just throwing up.
Feet your hindbirds.
But I wanted to make sure that there wasn't a lot of reek heats because a lot of the cookbooks
I have, it's food that photographs beautifully.
So there's always a crazy salad.
There's always these very typical meals.
Yeah, you're right about that.
They're beautiful.
You know, and everyone has their different take on it.
But I do have a Caesar salad in here because I do think my Caesar salad dressing is really
to die for.
And I feel like that's probably the only one that you know, you're like, oh, I have a Caesar
salad in my other cookbooks.
But I tried to make sure that I had a good mix of quick food, food that the oven does
most of the work.
I felt that you could whip up and take out, like leave the house with really the way my
life uses the food in the kitchen.
Yeah.
And so like I have a chia seed pudding that you make once you add a little bit more milk
to it than you add some mango puree, a little bit of mango and some blackberries.
And you can take it on the car with you.
Yeah.
An hour from now or two and a half hours from now.
And I make breakfast for dinner a lot.
So I have four different types of ex-benadict because I would love that.
I would love that.
But I do use a packaged holiday sauce because I was probably going to have to be forced
to make holiday sauce every time I wanted it.
I would probably not make it.
Yeah, me either.
Yeah.
So I, the book is probably, if you would say like what are the flavors in there?
I really try to have Mediterranean diet the way it's an omnivore.
So we have a lot of fish.
We have meat protein, but a ton of vegetables.
Yeah.
And the way I cook in my real life is I buy peppers, I buy onions, I buy cabbage, whatever.
So even as you see, the recipes is like, oh, you're using cabbage again, you're using peppers
again, yeah, it's like, they're in the fridge.
What's growing them all week long?
We're cutting them and putting them in.
Cabbage is great.
Cabbage lasts forever in your fridge.
It's good for you.
It tastes so good when you cook it.
The longer you cook it, the sweeter it gets.
I, I'll add cabbage soups as just to like thicken it up and it, I swear to God, it adds
so much nutrition for you.
First of all, and your kids aren't, they're not going to taste that.
Like it almost melts into, like you shred it and throw it in the soup, almost melts and
it adds so much, oh, not so good.
I can go on about cabbage.
Yeah.
So, and I feel like there's a lot of cabbage in here.
I have a lot of peppers in here.
I'm an Italian.
But I do have, um, few vegetarian dishes, a few gluten free dishes because I've been through
that round.
I went through several times.
I, you know, went gluten free several times.
And so I tried, like I, once I went back to eating everything, I would take the best of
what that was.
Yeah.
Um, because I remember the first time I went vegetarian, I hated mock, mock chicken, mock,
tofu, mock meatloaf.
Yeah.
I'm not happy with this at all.
That was the shortest it.
But when I was like, oh, I really like butternut squash, how do I make butternut squash the
star of the dish?
Mm-hmm.
Well, then vegetarian, it was like no one missed the meat at that point.
Yeah.
There's some really good vegetarian dishes.
I don't mind the mock stuff at all, but I know what you're talking about.
Some of it, some of it can be really disgusting.
Like it doesn't taste really good.
But it's just the process does everything else.
It is.
It's very, I tell people that all the time.
I'm like, you could be vegan and be really unhealthy, like really unhealthy.
If you're eating like all that fake meat stuff, um, it's some of it's really process full
of chemicals.
So like, yeah, like Oreos of vegan.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's, it's, it's not, it's the way, it's just the way you eat.
And I, and I would go as far to say that labels, like my nutrition teacher, the culinary
nutrition school I went to, she used to always say this and I love it.
She would say labels are for cans, not people.
And I make me, don't feel like you have to stick like you, if you're vegan, don't feel like
you have to just have some kind of a strict diet.
Like, or if you're keto, you know, you don't always have to be like so strict with yourself.
Like you could be vegan most of the time.
And then you know what, if you want to eat fish, eat the fish, like just do what you want,
your body.
Don't, don't let anybody else like dictate what you're eating, you know, if you're vegetarian,
most of the time, that's fine.
But like I say I'm vegetarian, right?
But I will eat fish.
I will sometimes very rarely because I don't, I don't, I don't feel like it's really hard
to get like healthy fish.
Good fish.
Yeah.
So I, I won't eat it a lot, but every once in a while I crave it actually and I feel
like if I'm craving it, maybe I should just have it, you know, and so I do, I allow
myself to have it.
And I don't feel like I have to like, you know, like, you know, have some kind of a full disclosure
moment with everybody and be like, I had fish today.
I'm technically not a vegetarian anymore.
I have to change my label.
Well, you know, so I feel like just do what you want with your eating.
If you want to eat meat, eat the meat and try to find the best possible, healthiest
version of that that you can, you know, when you get it, when you get a chance to do
that, you know.
And I do think we do love a label, you know, is the society.
I know we love a label and that's why everybody's, what kind of food is in here?
Yeah.
It's like, it's not, and then when I say Mediterranean, they think, Oh, okay, it must taste like
this.
And it's like, no, because I have Asian flavors in there.
You know, I have a lot.
So I will say that it's a lot of vegetables.
It's a lot of tasty food, but I do touch everything.
I have stank dishes, chicken dishes, fish dishes, you know, yeah.
Well, the title, I feel like the title says that your love languages food.
So like I, I feel like the title says that and I love, you know, I grew up in the best
way possible.
Like I grew up like, like you said, like a big Italian family, my mother always cooking.
My father had a garden on the side of the house.
We were like the freaks of the neighborhood on Long Island.
We had a garden the size of our house on the side.
Right?
So everyone else has concrete your managing to grow zucchini out of it.
Yes.
We, I used to like do, I used to call it the walk of death down the road.
My parents would give me a paper bag full of zucchini and I would go to all my friends
house and they all hated me.
They hated me.
So I used to be like, Oh, here I go again.
Like, where comes Tina with the zucchini?
But my mom can't everything.
So I grew up on like, in the healthiest way possible.
But I have to tell you, even though I, I knew all this and I grew up this way when I was a single
mom with three kids, I was feeding them pop tarts in the morning.
You know what I mean?
Like, there were days where I, I couldn't do that, you know, it was impossible.
So when I talk about this, I don't want to seem like I'm on some kind of high horse.
Like you have to do this.
You have to, like you said, there are seasons and that my season when I was raising my kids
by myself was convenience and what I could afford and the best that I could do, you know,
that's absolutely.
And that's why I was saying like, don't freak out too much.
And if you're, if you're saying to yourself, I am really too busy.
I can't do that.
I can't go to the supermarket on top of it.
I can't do, you know, if you could identify, this is a season, what changes.
Like maybe it's a sport, like so, okay, hockey season, we're not going to do whatever.
Okay.
So for those four months, you're going to be way more lean in on yourself, but you're going
to get back into the routine, but then changing it when you have a little bit more time.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And I think that this way, we don't, we're not boring ourselves to death.
We're not, I am a huge proponent of, you know, if I'm making steak this week next week,
we're not having steak the same way.
You know, it might be with the roasted garlic topping this week.
It might be steak tips next week.
It might just be, you know, like it might be with the balsamic glaze, like, or, you know,
it's just plain steak with some material seasoning or something, you know, but I'm, I try
not to let, and this is where I have a kind of sometimes an all or nothing thinking, like,
we're if I'm having a bad day and I'm eating junk, I'll just eat junk for the rest of the
day and then I'll go get a nice screen because I'm like, well, the day is ruined.
Oh, yeah.
I definitely do that.
Absolutely.
I do that.
And then I try to tell myself, well, just because you started a love it with something,
you can still, you know, make the day okay.
Yeah.
You don't have to go down, you know, in a blaze of glory of, you know, Cheetos.
So much fun doing that sometimes though.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
But I do, I do use food as an emotional piece.
Like I'm a big mood eater.
You know, so and I think you can probably tell that in my book where, you know, I'm going
to be in the mood for something and it's like, what's the best thing to meet that craving?
And then I try to talk about the fact that we need to be, you can't outsource your health
or your happiness.
So if you will start from that standpoint, understand that you're an experiment of one,
whatever works for you is great.
Yeah.
And then I try to talk about, like, is this, that's the thing about the protein.
We're not in 1920s, you know, India or Africa or something where, yeah, they're not getting
any protein there and people are dying of malnutrition.
Yeah.
We probably have too much food and still not enough nutrition.
Yeah.
That is, that's 100% true now, right now.
Right.
So how do I just, and my whole thing is stop counting protein, stop counting carbs.
Why do you count your fiber?
Yeah, fibers, you're 100% right about that.
I wrote a blog post a year ago and I called it fibers, the new block because yes, we do not
get in a fiber and I get in a fiber because, because I'm vegetarian, I eat a lot of beans
and a lot of lentils and I actually, I like it.
I enjoy it.
So like, if you don't like those things, yeah, it's hard, but there's so many things that
have natural fiber in it.
And I'm a huge proponent of, so I have a, this is a really funny story.
So my, my friend, you know, I give her my cookbook and she, whenever I'm away, she stays at my
house and watches my cat, those stories in love, right?
So that's not a whole way.
So I recently went away and, but I will make her food so that she doesn't have to go
out to the store a bunch of times and I'll make her a nice, right?
And I've made her recently a lentil kale stew out of the smitten kitchen cookbook.
Okay.
But in my book, when I wrote my book, when I started five years ago, I have a section called
a love letter to broccoli, Robbie, because I don't, broccoli, Robbie is a nutritious
powerhouse that nobody talks about.
Yeah, I love it.
We throw kale and everything.
No one's ever mentioned broccoli, Robbie has the nutritional profile of kale.
And I think it tastes a million times better than kale.
Yeah, it does taste better than kale, yeah, right?
Personally, and it's just better than broccoli to me personally, all the way to you like
broccoli.
But I love broccoli, Robbie, I eat broccoli, Robbie for breakfast sometimes with a close
bread, right?
That's how much I love it.
And I crave it.
But so I wrote a love letter to it because if you prepare it properly, it's going to be delicious.
If you don't prepare it properly, it's going to be gross.
That can be very better.
So I go through that, but in that love letter, I say, if we're friends, I'll never feed
you kale, but I will feed you broccoli, Robbie.
Yeah.
And to me recently, you feed me kale.
Yeah.
Like, are we not friends?
That's so big.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Because when I wrote the cookbook, I had no use for kale, but then I bought the sweet and
kitchen cookbook and I make that dish because the lentils are so good.
And she comes to use kale, but she makes it and it's delicious, right?
So if we come from the aspect, and what I would love to instill in the book, and I couldn't
print enough of my writing, it was either talk about who I was as a person, I put the recipes
and people just want the recipes, right?
Yeah.
I was really to print the book.
It cost a certain amount of money.
But I wanted people to know that you could do this for yourself.
You can be self-sufficient and independent.
You know, restaurant because to make your favorite dish, I have, I really am a big fan of
tuna, a couple of tuna dishes in here that aren't too dieful.
I don't need to go to a restaurant, spend $150 on tuna, not what I feel like tuna.
What are my house?
You know, it's delicious and it's good for me.
And I wanted to give people a lot of value because I'm not on a food network and they're
like, why should I buy this cookbook?
But anyone who is eaten for any reason at open houses when I'm doing food for places, everyone
always wants one recipe.
Yeah.
I know that they're really good recipes.
They fit into a real person's lifestyle.
I'm not, you know, when people are...
That's important.
Yeah.
When people are commenting like, yeah, that's great.
You cook for a living.
Someone else chops your vegetables.
Someone else does the food shopping.
Someone else.
And then it loses the appeal that, oh, we watched that on television.
No, no, no.
Incorporated into your life.
And I hope that I did that.
I did get a woman wrote me an email saying usually cookbooks are really full of
complicated over-the-top meals and you're just felt like I can really just keep this in
my kitchen.
Yeah.
I embrace cookbooks like that.
I don't really want to...
I don't really want to learn like a whole new profession.
I just want to be good and I want to quick and I went into my house.
Yeah.
So I have to share like broccoli...
So what'd you call it broccoli?
What'd you call it?
Robby.
Robby, okay.
And then my Italian family, it was broccoli ob.
So the broccoli ob, that's it.
And so we had a dish where it was you would saute the broccoli ob in olive oil with shithons
of garlic and just like salt and pepper and then you eat it over pasta and you put pine
nuts on top.
Okay.
Yeah.
So good.
I do it with...I saute it and I do red pepper flakes.
That would be the only thing.
Now I...
I...
I cut it, plunge it in cold water, ice water.
Clean it and then that ice water takes out a little bit of the bitterness and I steam it,
take it out and then I saute it really, really lowly.
You're not frying it, you're sauteing it.
Yeah.
In olive oil, salt, pepper and red pepper flakes and then I can put that in the fridge and
then use it later.
Yeah.
It's self as a side dish or I take peppers, not pepper, sausage.
Mm-hmm.
I mean sausage, cut it up, put pasta, the broccoli, ravi and olive oil over the top of the
plate.
Oh, I bet that's good.
Pine nuts.
Yeah, pine nuts is definitely something more so from my mother and law's families.
I don't know what region in Italy that's from but there was actually a dish that was
just like pine nuts and raisins and garlic sauteed in olive oil over pasta.
And it sounds really strange but it's very surprisingly delicious.
Yeah.
Yeah, but so where can people find you in your book, obviously?
So I'm on Instagram, under stars at night publishing.
I also have a radio show called Lisa and Robin on the mic so those are my two handles on Instagram.
I also have Facebook for the radio show and personally, although I don't check it that
much.
And then you can find the book at Amazon.
Sometimes it will say it sold out but it's, it will be quick again if you put in an order
saying let me know when it comes up, they'll usually print another five or ten.
Oh yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, and then I do have a QR code I could share if you want to put it on the end of
like the show notes.
That would be great if you email that to me.
Yeah, the QR code is easy because it goes directly to the distributor and you don't have
to wait because it's a print on demand book.
Oh, perfect.
Yeah, so send me that and I'll put that in the show notes for people so they can grab it.
I want to thank you again for coming on and sharing everything.
It was a lot of fun like geeking out with you about food.
Thank you so much.
I was great conversation.
Yeah, and I hope it inspires people to maybe eat more real food and be like creative
about having fun with it.
Yes.
Feel free to reach DM me on Instagram or my email address is stars at night publishing
at gmail.com.
Okay.
Everyone to communicate about food.
I'm here for the conversation and I have this conversation everywhere in real life.
I'm happy to have it.
Great.
All those links will be in the show notes so you can connect.
Thank you again for coming on the show.
I appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Where is stop now?
They keep changing it.
Where is it?
Oh, wait, it's under more maybe.
Done.
Where is it?
Wait.
So, on mine is a little blue box.
Oh, stop.
I got it.
It's at the top.
Oh, my God.
I feel like I record upon this every week.
