She Spills the Beans features boldly-flavored vegetarian recipes with a special focus on fresh ideas for legumes.
Beans by Popular Demand
When we were making a cross-country move in 2003, some of the friends we’d shared tables with asked me to start writing down my recipes, and She Spills the Beans was born.
Its roots, though, go as far back as I do. As a child, I habitually ate my vegetables first and then had to be told to eat my meat.
Bean Sprouts
In 1990 I read Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet For a Small Planet. Realizing I cared deeply about the ethics of food and how dietary changes could contribute to a better world, I went vegetarian that year.
My mom was especially accommodating of this shift, and we started, together, on teaching me to cook with legumes. It altered our dining-out habits, too, and my first encounter with Indian food was a revelation that has shifted everything that followed.
I had to learn to use bold flavors that skillfully.
As a vegetarian at NYU in the early 1990s, it was necessary to cook for myself, and I discovered that reading cookbooks like novels and haunting the city’s range of food stores and Greenmarkets was more compelling than the curriculum for which I’d enrolled.
I spent a lot of afternoons at the grocery stores in Little India, studying ingredients and returning to my minuscule, poorly-ventilated galley kitchen to make something that left the whole suite redolent of cumin or asafetida.
Bean Blossoms
My first food job was as a cheesemonger at Fresh Fields, a specialty grocer soon bought by Whole Foods Market. I started reading everything I could about food and about how food connects with everything, and cooking my way through Yamuna Devi’s enormous Lord Krishna’s Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking.
That summer job became five years, followed by a three-year internship at A Giant Midwestern Cereal Company while getting a degree in food marketing, followed by my early-career dream job as a marketing analyst at California’s stone fruit marketing order.
In California I started this blog, which was eventually featured in the Fresno Bee.
Beans, Indeterminate
In 2004, I developed myalgic encephalomyelitis. By the end of 2007, I was bedridden.
I stopped following food for a while when I became completely disabled, because it took years to heal the heartbreak of being unable to participate in a world I loved so well.
I did eventually turn back to my omnivorous food reading, but for a dozen years I couldn’t sit or stand enough to cook at all.
In 2019, some changes to my regimen unexpectedly gave me a little more stamina. With the tiny bit of margin I developed, I re-launched this blog.
My intent, for as long as I can, is to spread the belief I’ve held since I was a small child: Vegetables are worth eating first.
I write recipes to make that so.