Tell us a little about yourself.

I am a mother to a baby girl (7 months) and step mum to two daughters (12 and 14) I also own a business and juggle between family life and the business which to be honest is an ongoing challenge!

Tell us about your business The Organic Cook, why you started it, and what it’s about?

I started it after helping a sick dying parent, and realised a personal chef service is what a lot of people need to help them at different stages of life.

I was also inspired by the holistic chef movement happening in New York and America and had previously cooked in a vegan café and restaurant when I lived in Toronto, and was trying to figure out what to do with my life. The past 13 years  has all been an ongoing journey of food,  health, and formal study in order to get me to this point. And I’m still evolving. I also did a lot of self study and tried fasting, macrobiotics, vegetarianism and was also a vegan for two years.

Now,  I mostly follow the Weston A Price eating and nutritional model, and am mainly concerned with nourishment rather than fasting and detoxing. My clients mostly need nourishment, particularly those trying to conceive and improve their fertility

At the Organic Cook we do a lot of specialised food as medicine based cooking, but also work for busy professional individuals and families who desperately need healthy organic meals. I have also done quite a bit of teaching but am now so busy with the personal chef service and private clients that, I don’t have time to continue teaching for the moment.

What are some of the things you value most in life?

My beautiful family and friends, working with such interesting clients, my gift for cooking and nourishing others, yoga and stillness, and living by the beach.

What is your favourite quote

This one comes to mind from buddha

‘Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.’

What are your tips to staying happy and healthy?

Practicing mindfulness meditation has always been something that keeps me emotionally in the present and therefor happy and healthy. I am an advocate that you arewhat you eat, so home-cooking is the basis for everything I do in my family life and work life in order to keep healthy. It’s the simplest thing we can do but unfortunately it’s becoming a lost art form in modern society!

Do you find time to nurture yourself? What does this involve?

At the moment with a small baby, hectic family life and busy business the answer is no.  I’m working on reclaiming it from the persistence of my partner but food is all I can manage right now, and walking, and when necessary acupuncture helps with my frayed nerves!  I’m well aware you can’t have everything you want at one time and so am in a cycle of life that is sometimes overwhelming but it will shift again as life does…

What does healthy eating mean for you?

It is the template for everything I do, after cooking for 13 years I understand the level of nourishment ones needs to be healthy and to also help prevent onset of disease.

What are five of your kitchen pantry essentials?

Oh, this is difficult to narrow down to five!

Homemade chicken broth, tamari, biodynamic brown rice, coconut oil, ghee.

What do you indulge in?

Baking healthy desserts and making ice cream from scratch for summer. And I love art, music and cinema.

What do you and your family like to do on the weekend?

We go to the organic markets in Frenchs forest every Sunday and we also love to go for a walk at the beach, and I sometimes take my older daughters to a yoga class.

Would you like to share one of your favourite healthy recipes?

Here is a special little soup I created for a client who needed nourishment  and recovery foods for a long stint in hospital. Pulling in all my food  as medicine notes and experience cooking for different medical  conditions, I came up with this little gem that the family also enjoys.

*** Note for this recipe it helps to have chicken broth already premade, I make mine well in advance and freeze in portions and freeze for later use. ***

Nourishing Chicken Soup with Fresh Shitake Mushrooms, Broccoli and Corn

Ingredients

800g organic chicken breasts
8 fresh shiitake mushrooms, sliced finely
1 teaspoon fresh ginger grated
1 lemongrass stick
1 fresh lime, juiced
1 litre home made chicken broth
300g organic broccoli, cut into florets
1 fresh corn husked
2 tablespoons tamari
Method

In a large pot add hot water and the lemongrass stick, infuse for 5  minutes, add the organic chicken breasts and poach for approx 12-15  minutes, checking at 12 minutes and making sure the thick part of the  breast is cooked through.

Once done drain the chicken and lemongrass into a spider/sieve and reserve the water for use later.

Leave the chicken to cool slightly then when not to hot to handle start to  shred into manageable pieces, the chicken should be very moist, that’s  why overcooking is not advised you need to check at 12 minutes when  poaching.

Using the same cooking pot add the chicken broth and  start to gently simmer, add the fresh shitake mushrooms and ginger and  cook for 3 minutes until shitakes are softening. Add the corn cobs,  fresh lime and tamari, taste and adjust for your palate. Simmer for a  further 5 minutes, lastly add the shredded chicken and the raw broccoli  and cook for a further 5 minutes. The add some of the reserved poaching  chicken water to get the right consistency.

Enjoy by itself or with some biodynamic brown rice

Nutritional note about shiitake mushrooms – They are 6000 years old and have been  used in asian countries as food as medicine for centuries, they are also sustainable as they are forest farmed, although you will hard pressed  finding certified organic ones in Australia. Used frequently for cancer  patients to boost immunity. Shiitake mushrooms contain all 3 b vitamins  (b2, 5 and 6) vitamin d and maganese, and are a good source of dietary  fibre. They are very soft to handle and to retain all there  phytonutrient properties make sure you don’t over cook them. We like to  add them to soups and also gently fry in coconut oil for stir fries and  fantastic with scrambled eggs!

You can connect with the gorgeous Belinda here:

www.theorganiccook.com.au

Facebook

Tell us a little about yourself.

I am a single mum by choice and have 1 daughter Betsy and she is 11 months old. I had Betsy in my late forties with assistance from an IVF clinic in Sydney and in Greece. She is my only child and had I have started the journey into motherhood earlier, I would have had more children. I run my own business called A Balanced Life and provide conception coaching and counselling to adults.

What is a conception coach?

Conception coaching is an idea that I turned into a reality in the last 12 months. It wasn’t until after I had my baby that I started to think about adding a service to help others who are in assisted reproductive/fertility programs and decided to add conception coaching to my business. I had been in and out of these programs for 4 years and what I found was there were a lot of services out there for preconception care for the body, Such as naturopaths, acupuncturists, massage, herbalists to name a few, but no one was looking after the emotional and thinking processes for anyone in the programs.

Being in the assisted reproductive/fertility program such as IVF was a lonely process. I had stopped telling people I knew that I was undergoing treatments to have a baby. Most were too opinionated and judgemental, some tried to talk me out of it and most of all I didn’t want to keep reliving the grief and loss by telling people when a round of treatments had not been successful. I was lucky that I had a couple of friends who had been through the programs before me and they were supportive and understood how I was feeling.

My beliefs and values about being a woman, a mother, starting a family later in life, being single, being judged by everyone including my family and society at large was all being tested, turned upside down and inside out.

I had not been through an experience like this before and felt I needed a qualified therapist that could understand it all and had been through the same or similar experience as me who could help me to understand what was happening and how to make sense of it for me. When you are in these programs, you feel out of control most of the time as your life is dictated by blood tests, taking artificial hormones, having internal scans, begin prodded and poked every other day. I felt, and so did many others, that they had given over their bodies and lives to the process of IVF and normality of their lives had faded away.

I spoke to many women who I had met in previous years (from swim classes, to mothers groups, and acquaintances I had met along the way) that had also been in the various programs like I had. I asked many of them how they felt going through these programs and who they had to help them emotionally and psychologically along the way. I was surprised to learn we had the same or similar experience and some had seen counsellors and felt they were not helpful at all. Mostly because they couldn’t assist them in a way they needed. So I decided that as I was a degree trained counsellor and coach I would start offering conception coaching to help others navigate their way on their journey too. I came up the name of conception coaching myself, as I had not heard of it before. I then started to develop how I could take my own experience and help others that were also in these programs.

What do you enjoy about your work as a Life/Conception Coach and Counsellor?

I have always loved people’s stories and each story is unique and interesting. I really enjoy working with people and helping them get back to what is important to them, that being; work life balance, relationships and living congruently with their values and beliefs. My conception coaching is so full of hope for a future and bringing acceptance and balance back into the lives of the parents to be is such an honour to work with them on their journey.

What does healthy eating mean for you?

Healthy eating is paramount in my home. Having good quality produce that is organic and pasture fed meat and fish feeds my families body, mind and spirit. We need our body and brain function to work optimally in this busy world and when it is healthy it works much better for us.

What are 5 of your kitchen pantry essentials?

Organic Coconut oil

Organic olive oil

Organic Quinoa

Himalayan pink salt

Good quality nuts and seeds

What do you indulge in?

Good quality food

Beautiful hand made teas from Ovvio

Chocolate coated macadamias from Byron Bay Coffee Company

A nourishing face cream

What are some of the things you value most in life?

Family, health, loving supportive friends, living in a vibrant city, being free to live life to the fullest and grab any opportunity that is available to me.

What is your favourite quote?

I have 2 if I can share both with you.

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about & that was the beginning of fairies. J.M. Barrie

And

And the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Anais Nin

Do you find time to nurture yourself? What does this involve?

I don’t have a lot of time these days with a small baby. I grab a few minutes each day to breathe deeply and quieten my mind with meditation. I love to cook and this helps to relax me. I take long baths and get a good night sleep most of the time.

What are your tips to staying happy and healthy?

I believe that good health encompasses, mind body and spirit. I can target all 3 with good healthy food as I am nourishing myself from the inside out. I go for walks each day with the baby and the dog. I laugh a lot and find a positive in all my challenges. I am grateful every day and don’t take myself too seriously.

What do you and Betsy like to do on the weekend?

We love to walk in Centennial Park and go to the duck pond and feed the ducks.

We play with her toys and our dog Maudie

Visit friends

Go for long walks

Would you like to share one of your favourite healthy recipes?

Slow cooked leg of lamb in a cast iron pot.

Ingredients, all organic

A leg of pasture fed lamb

Coconut oil

2 lemons cut in half

2 bay leaves

4 large ripe tomatoes, heirloom if possible, chop into small pieces. Or use 1 can of organic chopped or crushed tomatoes.

2 tablespoons of Ovvio Grecian Herb & Spice Blend

Home made stock

Handful of black olives

Salt and pepper

Method:

Brown off the lamb in the cast iron pot with a few tablespoons of coconut oil on the stove. Takes about 10 minutes.

Add tomatoes, lemons, bay leaves, and olives and cover the lamb about 2/3^rd with the stock.

Add salt and pepper to taste. I sometimes put in whole pepper and then take them out when serving.

Cover with the lid and put into the oven on 120 C for up to 6 hours. I have many times cooked it for 12 to 18 hours on 90 C. The liquid can be spooned over the meat every few hours. Sometimes I add in sweet potato to the mix too.

I serve with vegetables; either roasted or steamed and if you like to add quinoa, serve it on the side or under the lamb.

Email:  Vanessa@abalancedlife.net.au

Website: www.abalancedlife.net.au

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Balanced-Life/168993066499834

Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/vanessa-roworth/1b/a26/999

Twitter: @balanced_life

My own experience, or observation, is that the most persistent, recurring and intense themes have become the most meaningful and life changing. For me, motherhood is one of those themes, and my journey through motherhood has been deeply entwined with another theme, that of wellbeing.

Through a lifetime of positive and negative experiences, I naturally tend to highlight the positive aspects of each, or at least be able to see the good in every bad situation. One of my darkest periods so far was desperately wanting a child at 29yrs of age, but being unable to conceive for 4 years. Although a deeply painful time in my life, the experience awakened my awareness of my connection to the earth, of its abundance, its healing capacity and its direct relationship to my sense of wellbeing. For more than a moment during that period, my husband and I were staring down the barrel of IVF, but not before we decided to try a holistic path first, where food became our drug and natural living delivered us closer to our miracle wish.

More than a decade later, I experience a sense of relief and deep peace as I pass my knowledge, passions, beliefs and practices on to my kids. I feel completely happy and satisfied knowing I am doing my best for them when I share with them not only survival tools to cope with life, tips to create balance and so on, but my constantly evolving knowledge of the best nutrition lessons available. Of course, this is driven by my sheer love for them, and my dream is that it will be through them, and all children, that real and urgent change can slowly begin. My darling 6yr old has already expressed that she’s considering a future career in nutrition! This is as much a compliment as it is cute and funny to me, but I digress …

I also deeply care about my kid’s friends, my own friends, my community, the stranger in the street, our families, and our world. I always wish for their best health and experiences in life. If I actually could have one wish granted, it would simply be that everyone join in the journey to a healthy & happy life. I, for one, know how good these moments feel.

So a big hearty welcome to this blog, my blog, where amongst other things, I plan to share my knowledge in the areas of health and nutrition, lifestyle, family & parenting, and our environment. 

So you’re going to hear a lot about food ‘n mood, cleanses and cleansers, superfoods, wholefoods, clean foods, no-no foods, clean living, sustainable living, raising happy kids, friendship, sadness, depression, breastfeeding, motherhood, good fats, bad fats, kale, quinoa, coconuts, meditation, beauty, breathing,…and perhaps even a bit of fashion will be thrown in! I can’t wait to hear about your dreams, your themes, and your own twists and turns.

So if you’re interested in optimal, lifelong health for you and your family, and you care about our planet, if you’re interested in a joyful life, a fruitful life, a full life, then let’s get started.

Have a beautiful day,

Bren x