I'm Heidi – This site celebrates cooking and aims to help you incorporate the power of lots of vegetables and whole foods into your daily meals. The recipes you'll find here are vegetarian often vegan and written with the home cook in mind. This site has been my online "home base" for almost twenty years. It was originally built on the premise that once you own over 100 cookbooks (raise your hand!) it's time to stop buying and start cooking. This site chronicles a cookbook collection one (vegetarian) recipe at a time. But there's more to the story now that we're a few decades into it here's a little background on me and the site…
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
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 Naturally Nourished Ali Miller RD | 2022-09-29 13:00:17 |  593 Views |
Roasted cashew nuts with turmeric
I'm Heidi – This site celebrates cooking and aims to help you incorporate the power of lots of vegetables and whole foods into your daily meals. The recipes you'll find here are vegetarian often vegan and written with the home cook in mind. Learn more about me and the site
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I’ve had some fascinating emails come into my inbox over the past decade. One example came in 2015 from Erica Sonnenburg which led to this article shortly thereafter. Erica and her husband Justin Sonnenburg are researchers at Stanford where they study the collection of bacteria that live in our guts. It’s called the microbiota. Her name sounded familiar because the Sonnenburgs were both Ph.D.’s in Michael Pollan’s May 2013 article Some of My Best Friends are Germs. Her note went on to say that they often cook recipes from 101 cookbooks because many of them have the hallmarks of “good microbiota foods.” This immediately made me feel good but it also raised a lot of questions that have been bouncing around in my head ever since. In broad terms I get it. You want to encourage nourish and support your internal bacterial community. The good bacteria. And there are some general “best practices” in life that help. But for me the really well-researched details get increasingly fuzzy beyond that. I immediately wanted to know from her what recipes exactly and why? How exactly do I befriend and support my microbiota? How much does food impact it and what are the other important factors? Best drinks – beer? tea? wine? smoothies? In short I wanted to know what things I was doing in my daily life to support (or harm) my unique friendly bacteria so that I could do more to support my microbiota. Erica told me about the book they were working on – The Good Gut. It proves the importance of the gut microbiota and documents their research and findings. They have done a lot of work to understand the role of diet in this domain and what they have found is that a diet rich in dietary fiber (plant matter) helps keep the microbiota happy. Also because different microbes feed on different things diversity in your diet is key. In general you are looking for a wide variety of beans whole grains seeds and vegetables. And you want to consume foods that are rich in accessible carbohydrates for the microbiota. It's a fascinating read that goes way beyond diet advice they do direct research into what makes your microbiota happy and have some amazing findings based on good science.
