- by Guest Contributor Sarah Felder. I grew up in a food-loving Italian family. My mother cooked homemade meals almost every day. I’m sure it’s how I came to slowly love cooking. Believe me, I had my unhealthy young and single days. But now as a mother of a two- and four-year-old, I’ve discovered a new passion for and fun with cooking like never before. One simple way to eat better is to find local, organically-grown foods. We spend time visiting local farms when they’re open, but the summertime can [...]

I have come to my last installment in my four-part series on learning how to cook vegan dishes. For my final lesson, Vicki Chelf, local vegan chef and author of the book Vicki’s Vegan Kitchen:  Learning to Cook with Sanity, Compassion, and Taste visited my kitchen. She basically approved of the set-up but suggested eliminating some of the clutter. This led me to ponder: Why do kitchens become repositories for mail? (But then I realized I had improved dramatically from my first apartment in Manhattan, where I used one of my kitchen [...]

As many readers of This Week in Sarasota know, I am the mother of a toddler, and I started on this virgin vegan journey in an effort to instill healthy eating habits in my daughter Daphne right from the start. Those of us who have been pregnant know that prenatal eating is a highly regulated affair. Obviously, you give up alcohol and sushi; but strangely enough, even seemingly harmless lunchmeat is taboo. At one of the most joyous times in a woman’s life, she must also be extremely vigilant about [...]

As a mother of a toddler and a practicing yogi, I have been thinking a lot lately about my family’s diet. First of all, you should know that not only am I a virgin vegan, but I am also a stranger to the kitchen. I know how to work our Keurig coffee maker, toast bread, make tuna salad and peanut butter and jelly, and that’s about the extent of it. I think my kitchen phobia stems from a combination of an intense desire to be a feminist who wouldn’t be [...]