The Peskytarian.

Peskytarian was a nickname that was given to me by my parents while I was living at home after graduating college. My dad always shows his love through food and also fancies himself a bit of a chef. He was so excited to tell me that he saved me potatoes he roasted, unbeknownst to me, in bacon fat. His response was : but there wasn’t any actual bacon in it, I thought it was vegetarian! After explaining to him that I preferred not to eat meat except fish AGAIN, he replied “you're just a pesky-tarian”.

My journey with food has been quite the ride. I always had a sensitive stomach and thought I was lactose intolerant growing up. It was suspected that I had a gluten allergy my senior year of high school and eliminating gluten completely from my diet helped all of my symptoms to disappear. While I felt great, I also found myself 3 hours away from home at a huge party school who’s nightlife was beer and pizza centric. As you can guess I fell into a 4 year rollercoaster of trying to keep myself healthy and enjoying college life, and I was not good at balancing. This was also 12-ish years ago and gluten free/veg options were not nearly what they are today. After college, I was vegan for about 2 years for health reasons in an effort to drop the weight I had gained in college. I found it difficult for me to stay completely vegan and gluten free while my parents did the food shopping. At that point I added fish back in to my diet and haven’t looked back. One thing I will say is that I certainly felt the best when I was eating vegan and gluten free, which is why my current lifestyle focuses mostly on vegan or vegetarian options with occasional fish dishes.

Fast forward to today. I am married to a man who loves meat and loves gluten, which could potentially make cooking for the two of us hard. I searched the internet for enough options that could appease us but came up short. This blog was created to help people realize that this does not have to be as difficult as it seems to cook for your family while staying within your dietary preferences and restrictions. I work full time as a Nurse Practitioner in the hospital and am always trying to come up with new recipes that will keep me interested ( and prevent constantly ordering out) that are also quick to make and taste just as good reheated later in the week. Just to note, I don’t count calories so I do not include them in the recipes but if enough people are interested I can certainly try to figure that out! Many of these recipes are variations of others in order to fit what I needed to make them work for me, and credit will be given when that is the case. I will also add links to products I love and use both in the kitchen and in my daily life. Please reach out if you have any requests for recipes or just to say hi!