OMG Another food blog?

Really? ANOTHER FOOD BLOG?!

You started this during a PANDEMIC?!

Are you NUTS?

Yes to all of the above, but hear me out.

This isn’t just a food blog. This isn’t another skinny white lady telling you how to be “healthy”. There will be recipes, there will be nutrition advice, there will be time saving meal-prep tips, there will be cooking. There will also be video demos and invited guests. Most of all what there will also be is acceptance, fun, posts with my dog, and adult language because, well, we are sometimes adults here.

Lemme take you back:

I originally came up with the Blog idea a long time ago but really got serious about it during a sleep-deprived tech rehearsal for a production I was in (which is totally the best time to start a NEW thing) It’s also the inspiration behind the name… Actresses Who Cook. There are a lot of us in the business that have a knack for cooking. When you think about it, that makes sense because it’s another way to be creative, and you gotta eat, right?

I was on a wellness and fitness journey of my own and totally into meal-prepping. I have always loved cooking and trying new recipes so the two seemed like a natural thing to start writing about. I was also really into those home meal kits (I still am but more on that in another post). I noticed that a lot of my fellow actors, singers, and dancers, were going out to eat all the time during lunch breaks, sustaining on fast food and caffeine. I absolutely loathed fast food and loved cooking and would let everyone know about it (yeah, it was pretty annoying). I also became known as the “snack queen” as I always had a large orange lunch box (more like a portable cooler) loaded with snacks. LOADED. Like, I could feed a group of hungry kindergartners on a trip to the Miami Zoo with that thing. Everyone knew Mama (me. I’m Mama) had food to spare for a poor starving artist. I often overheard conversations about how they had no time to cook, hated cooking, didn’t know how to cook, and they were too BROKE to grocery shop. With my fellow actors, I started noticing that many of these comments weren’t complaints so much as statements of desire to learn to do these things and having no where to start. A seed was planted in my noggin and I started writing down everything I learned over the years. Then I started writing down all my recipes. I started an Instagram account and posted about my fitness progress and my food (and my dog. Lots of pics of my dog) but I started to see that there was an interest in what I was doing. I was getting messages asking me for my advice, recipes, or how to get started. It occurred to me that perhaps all people in our industry needed was just someone to just straight up tell them what to do. So I started including tips in my social media posts.

I took a break to deal with some deeply personal, very stressful things, (death, divorce, job loss, stuff like that) and in that time, I took all my stress out on food. In a kind of screwed up way. I had to start back at square one. But, as sad as that was for a while, I was better off for that break. It gave me much needed insight into what I should really be doing and the motivation to finally DO it.

I discovered that I was an even bigger nerd about food than I imagined I could be. Not just the cooking and eating of it and how nutrition played a part in fitness, but I wanted to know how ingredients work together, and how I could start maximizing the nutritional value of food to fuel my body for the day and do it on a budget (again, starving artist, people!) I also became obsessed with learning how to take one recipe and make it vegan, veggie, and gluten free friendly to accommodate all kinds of dietary lifestyles and issues.

Then my focus shifted again when I finally decided to start pursuing my NASM (National Academy of Sports Medicine) nutrition certification. At the same time, I became engrossed in the body-positive movement and my entire way of thinking was altered. I realized that I was perpetuating this problem we have with our body image issues, under the guise of “Wellness”. I was feeding into the gross idea that morality was tied into how “healthy” we were. While I definitely want to help people learn how to plan, shop, cook, and fuel their bodies for their goals… I didn’t want my work to become about “weight loss”. But, I didn’t know how to do that so I started reading everything about food and listening to every podcast, and doing all the research on body positivity and ingredients and cooking. I stumbled across an amazing cookbook called “Thug Kitchen” (the authors are changing the name of the books so I won't link to it at the moment, but it is available on Amazon; I will link to it once the name change has completed so you can purchase it in it's new form) and that’s were my slogan was born (read: borrowed from).

Eat like you give a fuck!

I want you to learn to have fun with food again... How to plan for your busy schedules, limited budgets, limited cooking skills, and hopefully, learn to love cooking and form a new relationship with food without feeling overwhelmed and definitely without GUILT.

Shame and guilt are things that should NEVER be associated with food. Ever. Food is GOOD. All food. You should enjoy the process of preparing and eating your food, without a little demon whispering on your shoulder, dammit.

My motto, born from a Facebook conversation with a dear friend about a shitty apple she forced herself to eat is: Sad food is bad food.

I think that message is especially important NOW, during this pandemic and during an uncertain economic era, when people are dealing with monetary restrictions, food insecurity, body image issues, and a helluva lot of stress.

So there ya have it. That’s my long-winded post about why I started this blog and why now. I’m new at this. I’m learning new things and expanding my skills every damn day. I’m doing my best with my own body image issues, as a human woman in a world where our worth is often attached to our looks. I hope you find my blog a safe and fun place to get started on YOUR journey and find joy in food again. I’ve got a shit ton of ideas for this site – probably too many to actually execute skillfully all at once – but fuck it, let’s go for it see what happens!