My Story

I have been cooking since I was twelve. I went to culinary school after my youngest left for college. And in 2020, at an age when most people have stopped changing anything, I changed how I eat — and it changed my health more than anything a doctor had ever prescribed me.

Miso and cornbread

My mother was Japanese — an outstanding cook, a gardener and an artist. My father was from North Carolina, and his mother cooked the kind of Southern food you never forget. So I grew up somewhere between miso and cornbread, and I have never really left.

We lived in California, Alaska, the Carolinas, Germany, Japan and finally Texas. Every one of those places is still in the way I cook. It is why you will find Haitian black bean sauce, Japanese sesame cabbage and Award Winning nachos all in the same recipe index — I have never seen a reason to pick one cuisine.

Culinary school at fifty

In 2008, once my youngest child had started college, I enrolled at the Culinary School of Fort Worth. I graduated with honours in December 2009 and was named Texas Chefs Association Student of the Year. Eleven years later the same association named me Chef of the Year.

That same year I read The Blue Zones by Dan Buettner, about the places in the world where people reliably live to a hundred. It planted something. In 2017 I became a chef for the Fort Worth Blue Zones Project, running plant-based cooking demonstrations across the city.

Twenty-one days that changed everything

By May 2020 I was already eating 90 to 95 percent plant-based. And my cholesterol was still creeping up, and so was my weight. It was frustrating, because I thought I was doing everything right.

So I set myself a challenge: twenty-one days of whole food, plant-based, no oil at all, and ninety minutes of exercise a day. I wanted to know what would actually happen.

• My total cholesterol dropped 41 points, from 211 to 170.
• I lost over twenty pounds, and then the rest of the weight I had been carrying.
• My blood pressure went from 140/90 to 120/60.
• I walk five miles a day now, and I am not tired at the end of it.

That was five years ago. I have cooked this way ever since, and I have never once felt like I was on a diet — because the food is genuinely good. That is the whole point. If it were not delicious I would not have lasted a month.

What I do now

I teach. In person and online, in group classes and one to one, and through a private twelve-week program where I work with people on their own goals — setting up a kitchen, learning to cook again, and moving more. I have written seven e-books. I run retreats. And I go live in my kitchen so you can watch the whole thing happen and ask me questions while I cook.

Where I serve

• American Culinary Federation — member
• Texas Chefs Association — Board member, Fort Worth Chapter
• Fort Worth Japanese Society — Board of Directors
• Blue Zones Project Fort Worth — project chef

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Come cook with me

I am in the kitchen most weeks, and everything I make ends up somewhere you can follow along:

Watch me cook on YouTube  •  Get the recipes by email  •  Browse every recipe