Recipes and culinary inspiration
Translating principles of healthy and sustainable eating to your plate, one dish at a time.
Healthy Hedonism: Cooking & Eating the PK Way
As a scientist, I spend a lot of time thinking about how diet impacts our health and environment. I also love hanging out in the kitchen: I grew up cooking, baking, and gardening and spent years working in restaurants and catering. My mission? To bring together my passions for food, health, and sustainability to help you translate principles of sound nutrition and green eating to your plate through my science-based and food-loving philosophy of Healthy Hedonism. Forget boring vegetarian dishes and complete denial: there’s a better way to live and eat (and chocolate and martinis are definitely involved). Here at Cooking & Eating the PK Way you’ll find recipes to help you lose weight, prevent disease, and live longer. But pleasure—that’s the “hedonism” part of the equation—is always at the center of the plate. After all, it doesn’t matter how good for you something is: if it’s not tasty, you’re not eating it—and neither am I.
Cooking is both science and art.
I grew up fiddling about in my mom’s kitchen and spent around ten years working in the restaurant industry, including two as the main cook in a vegetarian café. I love cooking! Today, one of the ways I share my passions for the science of nutrition and sustainable eating is through helping people learn to prepare food and drink in ways that promote health and protect the planet. And you don’t have to be an expert chef, at all. On my blog, you will learn basic cooking techniques as well as fancier recipes—and you are always encouraged to adapt these dishes and make them your own to fit your lifestyle and palate.
Do note that there are more than three hundred recipes and articles on nutrition and health currently on my blog, so you might want to use the search bar to find exactly what you’re looking for—and don’t forget to check out my Food & Drink gallery for inspiring photos of some of my favorite dishes, including soups and salads, cocktails and appetizers, main dishes and desserts. The recipes below are mostly vegetarian, and some dishes feature sustainably caught seafood. They are organized by cuisine, in no particular order (and you might note that “Mediterranean” is included as a category, though do remember that is a broad region that spans several countries). Remember that this is only a small sample of plant based, globally inspired dishes, which are highlighted here simply to introduce you to Cooking & Eating the PK Way–and to get your mouth watering. At the bottom of the list are a few of my cocktails—I love shaking things up! And I’m concluding with a few sweet treats, because indulging every now and again is definitely part of the PK Way.
Translating nutrition science to your plate.
Scientists have understood the importance of diet in health and wellbeing for millennia in the Eastern world, but it’s taken the Western world a long time to catch on despite Hippocrates’ famous words to “let food be thy medicine” (c. 431 BC). Nutrition also gets a lot of bad press: “single study sensationalism” touting the findings from one experiment lacks the context of the broader scientific base; anti-science sentiments foment distrust in meaningful dietary recommendations; and most food bloggers doling out advice lack evidence to support their anecdotal claims. This makes it awfully difficult for people like you to wade through busy newsfeeds and hyped-up headlines to get to science-based, actionable steps to improve health and prevent disease. And, in a worst-case scenario, people lose faith in the scientific process, throw their hands up in the air, and order three pizzas.
Don’t do that. (Well, at least, not often.)
Instead, I encourage you to open your mind and explore your palate through Cooking & Eating the PK Way. I challenge you to reconsider what you think you know about “healthy food” and learn how incredible meals based on principles of sound nutrition science and sustainability can be. I promise you will be educated, if not entertained. (Food and science aren’t always funny. I try.) You may even salivate. My deepest hope is that you will be inspired to get into the kitchen and start your own culinary journey towards better health. And if cooking’s just not in the cards, then at the very least you’ll learn more about what to eat when you go to a restaurant or order take out.
From farm to fork and far beyond, what you eat matters.
plant-based & globally inspired
Culinary Inspiration from Around the World