Victoria has been a food blogger since 2015, focusing her blog on living a passionate and adventurous life with whole food, plant based meals and mindful eating. Victoria began her cooking journey as a young girl, when she was given free reign in the kitchen each weekend to make breakfast for family and friends. She decided to become a pharmacist at the age of 14, following the footsteps of her beloved father. It wasn’t until she actually got to pharmacy school that she started to recognize that the science and art of creating delicious food was an awful lot like being a kitchen chemist.
“I look to recipes for inspiration, but I tend to have the most culinary success, when I work with what I have on hand, to create something unexpected and delicious. Often, a meal comes from inspiration from my travels around the world….Mexico, Italy, Cambodia, Spain and beyond.”
After suffering from chronic pericarditis, fatigue and joint pain for over a year, she was diagnosed with Chronic Lyme Disease in January 2016, and her cooking has since been focused mostly on seafood and plant-based, healing and gluten free foods as a part of her Lyme treatment. She is currently working with NAMI SW Washington to form a Lyme Disease Collaborative to educate the public, including the healthcare community, about Chronic Lyme Disease. Other goals of the collaboration are to dispel myths, advocate and provide resources for obtaining diagnosis and care. You can read more about Victoria’s Lyme journey here.
A licensed pharmacist for 21 years, her last stint was working in the Big Pharma industry which led her to spend 10 years working undercover on behalf of the Federal Government and to become a whistleblower in a major lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson. After the investigation, she retired her white jacket but has continued her work as a mental health pharmacist and advocate volunteering with NAMI. She keeps herself busy doing medication counseling and management, answering questions, making recommendations, and administering specialized DNA testing for the improved medication customization of her beloved clients.
When she is not developing recipes, writing for her blog or helping out at NAMI, Victoria can be found pouring over the latest scientific research on food and health, traveling to faraway places, working in her garden, rocking various yoga poses, shopping at farmers markets, throwing cookbook-themed dinner parties, volunteering on medical missions to Uganda, exploring the Columbia River on her stand up paddle board, and hiking the mountains of the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two dogs.