Monday night I felt like a little kid on Christmas Eve, both excited and nervous, like I was anxiously anticipating what Santa would bring me. Would my expectations be met? Would I get those super, awesome, limited edition rollerblades and be mindblown?! I was meeting my interns for the first time the next morning…this is the first time I have ever taken on interns and I honestly did not know what to expect!

Guess what? Santa (or should I say Dr. Sarah Woodruff, my Kinect-Ed partner from the University of Windsor) gave me some super, awesome, limited edition interns and I was mindblown. Sara Santarossa and Trish Dubé are young superstars in the food and nutrition industry…we need more people like them!! I could feel their passion as we talked about the importance of working with youth, family dinners, and the importance of positive body image.

WOW I thought, this is sooooooo cool! I couldn’t contain my excitement! After gushing about them to Ron, I had to call Sarah and tell her how wonderful I think the girls are!!

Quickly I learned that the girls were both very different in terms of their life experience! Making this such an awesome learning environment for the three of us!

Sara comes from a family with a vegan lifestyle…and get this, they are Italian! OK, I am intrigued. This gives us a wonderful challenge of modifying all of my recipes so that they can be enjoyed by vegans too! Sara really enjoys being in the kitchen and typically does not use a recipe. For lunch on our first day, she made African Thai Stew, following the recipe in Dinner Survival. Afterwards, I asked what she thought about our cookbook – I was happy to hear that even though she had never used one of our cookbooks, she picked up on how we lay out our instructions/ingredients (reading left to right!), and she thought this was sooooo much simpler than other formats she had seen!

Continue reading The Vegan and The Kitchen Newbee AKA My Interns →