ABOUT
Balancing healthier eating with maintaining a Hawaii lifestyle.
Hi food lovers! I’m Kat and I am grateful for the opportunity to show you my favorite recipes that take local Hawaii comfort foods and make them a little lighter so they can be enjoyed more often and with less guilt.
There was a great love of food over many generations. This initially sparked my interest in learning how to cook. It’s always been expensive to live in Hawaii and many families have two working parents. With this, I learned how to cook from scratch as well as using shelf-stable items such as Hamburger Helper, instant mashed potatoes, and other canned foods to put meals together to save money.
I moved from The Big Island, Hawaii Island, to Oahu for college. After college and law school, I worked as a lawyer. As I got better at lawyering I had more work and less time to cook. Stress eating was a regular occurrence for me, and it was hard to encourage my son to eat healthy when I wasn’t doing it myself. During this time, I had numerous family members getting sick with all types of diseases: diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis, kidney failure (End State Renal Disease), cancer, among others. With this I took a break from practicing law.
Not practicing law gave me the time to return to the kitchen. It reminded me how much I enjoyed cooking and creating recipes from whatever I found on sale at the grocery store, the warehouse stores, and my pantry. I realized how I could help others by writing down and sharing all these recipes. I discovered while cooking healthier meals for my father while he was recovering from a fractured leg bone that there were many foods he had not tried before because he didn’t know how to cook it. All of this culminated into this food blog and my desire to help those that want to cook lighter but don’t know how and to gradually reduce their sugar, salt and fat intake for a more sustainable long-term change to their eating habits.
This blog and the science of healthy food is a continual work in progress as is much in life. There is so much more to learn. I hope you join our family on this journey to stick with healthier food choices while treating ourselves to the nostalgic foods of old Hawaii and the delicious modern takes on Hawaii favorites.
Purpose
Making your favorite Hawaii dishes healthier little steps at a time to encourage better eating habits while keeping your favorite dishes around.
Ideas and Comments
Looking for a recipe from your childhood to enjoy with less fat, sugar, or calories? Want an easy recipe that will help you use up your pantry stock? Let me know!
