About Me

Hi. My name is Amy Jo. Nice to meet you.

ABOUT ME:
I live in Utah with the two loves of my life:

My husband (who I have been crushing on since 7th grade) is a Family Medicine resident and I am a stay at home mom. I have a bachelors degree in theatre and speech education, but for now I am perfectly content taking care of my little sweetie, Stella. 

I am obsessed with Shakespeare and I play the French horn and piano… I know, I am nerd. We all have a hidden nerdy side, don’t we? 


I am addicted to Cocoa Krispies, Indian Food, Goodreads, and gummy bears/worms. 


I hate eggplant, pencils without erasers, mopping, and walnuts in brownies. 

ABOUT MY COOKING:

I am not sure how or when I learned to cook. My mother taught me a lot and I remember trying to make churros with my brother when we were little and mom was taking a nap. They were a disaster. We tried frying them outside on the grill because we were afraid it would make the house smell like oil, but we didn’t know what we were doing.

But I think I started really experimenting in college. My first semester of college I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, which is basically an auto-immune disease in the large intestine, or colon. Confused about why I suddenly had this disease, I started tweaking my diet to see if eating differently helped. I took gluten, milk,eggs, shell fish, nuts, and anything with lots of roughage out of my diet. I started experimenting with cooking so that my food would still taste yummy. I slowly added most things back into my diet and realized that things felt no different when I restricted my diet and when I ate normally. I still “flared-up” and went into remission over and over whether or not I was eating dairy and gluten or not. (I have been tested since and found out that I do not have celiac, nor am I lactose intolerant.)


The one thing that has helped me to feel good and stay in remission is limiting animal based foods. Over the last few years I have gradually become mostly vegetarian with a focus on whole foods. After reading an excerpt on ulcerative colitis from one of my husbands medical school text books, I really committed to eating mostly vegetarian meals. Here is what the book said:

Among patients with ulcerative colitis, meat intake per se more than triples the rate of relapse. Consumption of the highest, compared with the lowest, intake of red meat and processed meat increases the rate of relapse more than 5-fold. Conversely, a pilot study restricting animal protein and other dietary sources of sulfur resulted in a complete absence of IBD relapse, compared with an expected relapse rate of 22% to 26% with medication alone.

Now, I am feeling great and my explorations in the kitchen made a lasting impression. When I first got married ( over7 years ago!), I started documenting my recipes on this blog. It has turned into a hobby that I love. You can really see the improvement from the start of the blog back in 2008 to now. I am embarrassed of the rocky start I had in blogging and photography, but I had no idea I would grow to love this little website like I do. So, don’t look back too far. 🙂


My latest philosophy on this blog is to cook healthy main meals with very little added sugars, fats, processed and refined foods, and meat. However, I believe in desserts and indulging once in a while, too. When it comes to desserts, I believe in just using the good stuff, like real butter, chocolate, cream cheese, sugar, cream. I just try not to make treats too often. 


I am also obsessed with making sugar cookies and decorating them with royal icing. So throughout this blog you will see all sorts of sugar cookie creations. 


Well, that’s me in a nut shell.

Enjoy!