Intuitive cooking came into my life out of necessity

Before I became a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, I spent my childhood and adolescence struggling with food sensitivities that could be crippling.

This led me to have significant anxiety around dining out because I never knew if something I ordered was 100% safe or if it would leave me feeling terrible a few hours later.

As a result, the only way I could reliably feed myself anxiety-free was to cook for myself.

Cooking was so important to me that I actually moved dorms halfway through my freshman year at MIT so I could have access to a kitchen.

During college, I realized that trying to follow a recipe every night wasn’t going to work. Recipes seemed like simply another place where an arithmetic error could just ruin my day.

As I spent more time in the kitchen and my skills and confidence grew, cooking morphed from simply a means of survival to a wonderful creative expression, and an hour or two spent in the kitchen became my escape.

Cooking recipe-free allowed me to use what I had on hand, whatever organic meat or produce was on sale, or came in my local CSA box. Saving me time and money.

If your options are going hungry, biking 30 minutes in a blizzard, or figuring out how to use what you have left in your mini-fridge to make a delicious meal, it’s amazing what you’ll be able to come up with, provided you have the basic skills to make it happen!

If I hadn’t been for intuitive cooking, I wouldn’t have been able to graduate from MIT in three years. I can say that with certainty.

Cooking intuitively allowed to find joy, protect my health, and my sanity during the most difficult period of my life.

The JOY that cooking can provide, is what I want to share with you in Intuitive Cooking School.

Here is what I have learned on my intuitive cooking journey.

Relying on recipes is the main reason people struggle with cooking.

Think about it. When you don’t cook regularly and decide to try a new recipe, you have to take a long list of ingredients to the store.

Then you wander around the aisles looking for everything you need, which is stressful and can easily take 45 minutes.

What do you do if you can’t find something you need? Ugh. You have to make an extra stop.

When you get everything home, there is a decent chance you already had an open box of cornstarch or some ground cumin at the back of your pantry. But you aren’t exactly sure how old those were anyway, so you throw them away.

Now you’re wasting food.

You struggle through the recipe, which takes a lot of time because you’re continually re-reading and making sure you’re doing everything correctly.

When you’re done, the recipe may or may not have turned out well. Shockingly few recipes are adequately tested.

If it doesn’t turn out well, can you fix it? Or are you just left eating a mediocre meal?

What if everyone in your family doesn’t like it? Do you have to make two different recipes or more?

Cooking from a recipe also means you probably made too much food and will be stuck with leftovers that no one wants—more food waste.

And don’t forget the rest of those carrots and the other half of the onion you didn’t use. If you cook from recipes, you probably don’t have a plan to use up everything you purchased for the original recipe.

Waste galore.

Every one of these things adds stress and frustration to the cooking process, not to mention a ton of time, effort, and money.

No wonder you don’t do this very often.

The secret to building a cooking habit is learning to cook without recipes. 

This may sound like a magic trick, but it isn’t as hard as you think.

Imagine the freedom. You make your weekly shopping trip at your own convenience, stroll through the produce and butcher sections, and decide what to cook for the week based on what looks good.

You choose three main courses, then imagine what flavors and side dishes sound like they would go well with them. This comes pretty naturally to you since you cook so often and have experience with many ingredients.

You know how to cook pretty much everything in the produce aisle, so you just have to decide what ingredients you need to create the dishes you’re imagining. You also know exactly where to find everything.

Buying the correct amount of food is intuitive since you know the eating habits of your household. That reminds you, you really loved that squash dish last week, so you need to buy extra today.

You have all the basics at home, so you’ve picked up everything and are out of the store in under 20 minutes.

Each evening you decide what you are “in the mood for” based on what you’ve purchased, and you have the knife and cooking skills you need to assemble it without much stress.

When the food is getting close to finished, you taste and decide it’s a bit flat. You adjust the seasonings and add a few herbs until it sings. You make a mental note of this for next time.

Because you’re not frantically following a recipe, most of the cleanup is done before the food is finished cooking.

So after you eat, you just need to rinse the pans and put the dirty plates in the dishwasher. It takes less than 10 minutes.

There are just enough leftovers for lunch tomorrow since that’s what you planned for.

And when you treat yourself to a nice restaurant meal on Friday night, you’ve earned it.

Removing the burden of following a recipe frees you from all the stress, frustration, and waste that come from not having an intuitive sense in the kitchen.

it is the JOY that can be found from cooking intuitively

Anyone can learn to cook without recipes.

A common misconception is that cooking is a natural talent. But nobody is born a chef, everyone who knows how to cook was taught by someone along the way, and everyone can learn to cook with practice.

It’s not that you either can or can’t cook. It’s that you do or don’t cook.

The first step is to stop thinking about cooking as a single skill. Instead, think of it as a series of habits and skills that make it easy for you to get home-cooked meals on the table.

This means you can break cooking down into more manageable tasks and tackle them one at a time. Because cooking skills build on each other, you also need to learn them in the right order.

Learning a bunch of habits may sound like more work, but it is actually MUCH easier than starting each day with a crazy new recipe.

And once you have it down, you’re set for life.

Since I know how essential cooking is to a happy and healthy life, I created an online course to teach you how to cook without recipes in just six weeks.

Intuitive Cooking School will systematically teach you the habits and skills you need to cook without recipes so you can become an intuitive cook in a fraction of the time.

It will walk you through each step and transform you from being someone who struggles through a recipe to someone with total confidence in the kitchen.

At the end of the course, you’ll be able to come home from work, open the fridge and whip up something healthy and delicious without much effort.

You’ll intuitively know what to make, how much to cook, and how to make it taste good.

Unlike most cooking classes that simply teach you techniques (though you’ll learn those too), Intuitive Cooking School is focused on building the fundamental habits needed to make cooking a natural part of your day. Most importantly, you will learn how to cultivate JOY in the kitchen.  

I deconstruct the processes of shopping, meal planning, flavor pairing, cooking, and cleanup into basic principles that you’ll understand forever. This way, you won’t have to rely on recipes ever again.

Intuitive Cooking School ensures that you learn and practice each skill at the right time and in the right order, removing all guesswork from the habit-building process.

When you enroll in Intuitive Cooking School each week, you’ll have access to 3-5 easy, fun lessons in your online portal.

You will spend about 30 minutes watching, and then you can move into the meal guides and simple assignments. Assignments will be posted publicly to allow your classmates to help keep you accountable and on track! You can also attend weekly live Q&A sessions with me, where I can personally help you with any difficulties you may be having. 

Intuitive Cooking School ensures that you’ll use your mind and your kitchen because that’s how habits form.

The lessons and assignments start small, then gradually turn you into a master home cook by the end of the program.

This unique approach will systematically eliminate the anxiety you feel around shopping, cooking, and cleaning and give you complete kitchen confidence.

The quality of time you spend in the kitchen is just the start of how learning to cook without recipes will change your life.

Health is central to the Intuitive Cooking School philosophy.

Although I have come to enjoy cooking for its own sake, eating real food that is properly-prepared while avoiding processed foods and food sensitivities is still my top motivation for cooking.

It’s simply impossible to regularly make the best food decisions unless you can cook and prepare real food. Intuitive Cooking School will support you on this mission and help you follow the first foundation of Nutritional Therapy: A properly-prepared, nutritionally-dense, whole-food-diet.  

My background as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner allows me to teach you how to make food that will not only taste great but will make you feel great as well! 

Cooking saves you money.

One of the unexpected bonuses I got when I started cooking intuitively as a college student was how much money I saved!

Restaurants are seriously expensive, and I had nearly spent all of my poor boyfriend’s (now husband’s) life savings at the point on lunches together at Clover or Sweet Green and taco deliveries on the weekends. He always insisted on paying if we ate together… and we were (and still are) madly in love, so we ate together a-lot…

Not having to rely on overpriced, unsatisfying pre-prepared or take-out meals saved me hundreds of dollars a month, which I was able to re-direct towards supporting my health in other ways.

I also stopped throwing out as much food since learning to cook without recipes took the guess work out of my grocery shopping. The total savings was huge.

Cooking allows you to care for yourself and those you love. 

I genuinely believe that there is nothing more nourishing than a meal made with love.  

• Intuitive cooking enabled me to overcome the crippling hormonal imbalances that were holding me back from my life.

• Intuitive cooking has allowed me to grow beautiful, healthy babies while maintaining my own health in the process.

I know I would have never been able to provide the level of nutrition that my body needs to thrive if I were forced to rely on restaurant or pre-prepared food, or even recipes exclusively.  

Cooking Intuitively makes it so much easier to follow healing or elimination diets such as AIP, GAPS, Paleo, Plant-Based, Carnivore, you name it!  

No more hours wasted trying to find a decent recipe that fits into whatever food restrictions you may need to follow. Intuitive Cooking gives you the skills to make delicious meals easily, even from a small selection of ingredients.

In Intuitive Cooking School, You’ll…

• Gain access to weekly video lessons that take you through each of the habits you need to cook without recipes

• Learn to streamline your shopping process to save time and money

• Learn basic cooking techniques like chopping, sautéing, and roasting

• Develop your flavor intuition to know how to “season to taste” and “fix” a dish that isn’t working for you

• Develop your cooking intuition, so you know what it means to cook “until done.”

• Learn how to construct healthy, delicious meals from almost anything

• Learn how to “use up” everything in your fridge in delicious and creative ways

• Save money by avoiding restaurants and packaged foods and reducing waste.

• Impress friends and dates with your fancy new kitchen skills

• Join a community of new cooks and share tips and adventures

• Express your creative side in a time-effective manner. Because everyone needs to eat!

The hardest part of learning to cook is getting started. Join today, and let Intuitive Cooking School guide you step-by-step through the process of learning to cook without recipes.