Publisher: The Colorful Kitchen - Vegan & Gluten-Free Recipe Blog

Hi! I’m Ilene. Welcome to my kitchen! About the Blog Thanks for visiting The Colorful Kitchen! On this blog you’ll find recipes for 100% plant-based goodness. Every colorful dish is vegan, gluten-free and made without processed sugar. It’s food for a happy mind, body and planet! About Me I’m a Holistic Health Coach based in New York City. I studied at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and before that I studied Textile Design at RISD. I make and photograph (and eat!) all of the recipes you see on the site! I’m crazy about all things veggie, but I haven’t always felt this way. My journey to a plant-based whole food diet has been eight years in the making and I’m still happily learning new things everyday. My diet is 100% vegan, 99% gluten-free and 95(ish)% processed sugar-free, but I know that the way I eat isn’t necessarily for everyone. I’m a firm believer in listening to your body and making food choices based on what’s right for you, but I also truly believe that everyone can benefit from incorporating more plant-based dishes into their diet. People often ask me why and how I eat the way that I do, so I would like to share a little about how my diet got to be where it is now. As a child I was an extremely picky eater and like many children, my favorite foods were white bread, french fries and chicken nuggets. I found the taste of all fruits beyond bananas to be too intense and there was no way I was getting anywhere near a green vegetable. At age 9, after seeing a live lobster cooked in a pot of boiling water, I fully realized the connection between meat and animals and I immediately decided to become a vegetarian. My parents were supportive but had no idea what to feed me, so I subsisted on a diet of grilled cheese sandwiches and microwavable veggie burgers until my pediatrician told my parents I was malnourished and needed to eat meat. I experimented with vegetarianism off and on until it finally stuck during my freshman year of college. I was still very much uninterested in most fruits and vegetables and my diet was heavy in dairy and processed foods but slowly I started to become curious about some of the foods I had avoided my whole life. Believe it or not, at age 19 I tried olives and tomatoes for the first time and oranges and peaches at age 20! I should mention that I used to have a lot of allergies. In addition to having asthma, I was diagnosed as allergic to grass, trees, dogs, cats, pollen and dust to name a few. I had been on a steady stream of prescription shots and allergy medications since age 7 but somehow I still managed to be constantly coughing, sneezing and suffering from sinus problems. At age 21 I finally decided to be proactive about my health and see if there was something I could do to alleviate my never-ending symptoms. I had heard about the Macrobiotic diet working as a mysterious cure-all for everything from headaches to cancer so I did a little research and decided to give it a try. Macrobiotics center around eating unprocessed whole grains, cooked vegetables, and legumes and I felt completely overwhelmed looking at macrobiotic recipes. I had never heard of quinoa or millet before and certainly never cooked with kale or chard. My first few days following the Macrobiotic diet were a little rough but by day 4 I began to experience a sense of clarity and lightness I had never felt before. I noticed another huge difference in the way that I felt, for the first time in my life my stomach didn’t hurt after I ate. I had grown so accustomed to feeling sick after every meal that I never realized that it wasn’t normal to have daily stomach aches. After a month of macrobiotics my allergies completely disappeared (I soon discovered this was linked to cutting out dairy) and I went off all my medications. I followed a strict macrobiotic diet for six months and while I felt better than I ever had before, it seemed that something was missing. I began to experiment with raw foodism and was amazed by how energized all the fruits, vegetables, sprouts and nuts made me feel. I spent a summer eating 95% raw foods but when it turned into Fall I began to crave cooked grains and tofu. At this point I decided to listen to my body eat the foods that felt right to me. After a year of eating this way I discovered that I’m intolerant to gluten. Now my diet consists of plenty of fruit, raw and cooked vegetables, nuts, cooked and sprouted legumes and whole grains, and I couldn’t be happier!