Nicole Keshishian Modic likes to eat and celebrates meals on daily basis. The founding father of the favored Instagram account and blog KaleJunkie is now sharing her ardour for wholesome meals selections and her journey to meals freedom in her first ever cookbook, Like to Eat.
“As Armenians, we’re a tradition that does in reality like to eat. Rising up, I feel all of us have particular recollections across the desk of coming along with copious quantities of meals and every thing beneath the solar. Now we have the perfect delicacies,” described Keshishian Modic in a latest interview with the Armenian Weekly from her residence close to San Francisco, California. “However for a few years, I misplaced that like to eat due to my consuming dysfunction, and after I reclaimed that and healed my relationship with meals, I noticed that all of us deserve to like to eat and discover pleasure in cooking with scrumptious recipes.”
Certainly, Keshishian Modic’s relationship with meals was not all the time vibrant. She has bravely written about her lengthy and lonely battle with compulsive consuming dysfunction and has now devoted her profession to serving to others re-evaluate their consuming habits with more healthy options.
Keshishian Modic grew up in Southern California, the place she began attending a neighborhood Ok-12 Armenian faculty in her sophomore yr. Although it was initially thrilling to be surrounded by friends from her personal tradition, she in the end felt ostracized from the well-established friendships and cliques on-campus. So she discovered consolation in meals—cafeteria meals—and started to achieve weight. She felt pressured to begin weight-reduction plan and realized she may manipulate her bodily look to achieve acceptance. Overwhelmed with the stress of attempting to slot in and be excellent, she turned to meals to manage, participating in persistent cycles of binge consuming and purging all through her undergraduate years at New York College, in regulation faculty at UCLA and whereas representing a few of California’s most prestigious regulation companies.
“All these years, I had this consuming dysfunction that no one knew about. I desperately needed to be wholesome. I needed to heal. I needed to have a wholesome relationship with meals. However I didn’t know the way to get there,” recalled Keshishian Modic of her 15-year battle. “Each time I’d attempt to make more healthy meals selections, I’d discover myself the subsequent day binging and never having management over what I ate. I by no means thought therapeutic was potential.”
These behaviors wreaked havoc on her physique and her psychological state till her husband Greg caught her one night time mid-binge with a loaf of bread. Her secret had been uncovered to the particular person she liked probably the most, and whereas she felt embarrassed, Keshishian Modic says the susceptible second together with her loving and supportive accomplice set her on the highway to restoration. “Openness and honesty carried me by,” she mentioned.
Keshishian Modic instantly began remedy, practiced yoga religiously and finally left regulation. She additionally found the idea of intuitive consuming, a conscious method that subtracts strict guidelines on meals and as an alternative teaches one to answer inside starvation cues by answering the query, “What does my physique want on this very second to really feel good?” The meals philosophy is the muse of her Instagram account KaleJunkie, which she launched whereas on maternity go away in 2016.
Since then, she has been churning out sensible recipes and meal prep ideas for wholesome dwelling in addition to time-saving kitchen hacks, all within the type of bite-sized reels and candy and savory images for her 654-thousand fellow foodies and followers. Then, on the peak of the pandemic, Keshishian Modic considered one other thought. “I need to attain extra individuals. I need to present those who wholesome consuming doesn’t need to be sophisticated. It could style nice. It doesn’t need to be costly,” she defined of her imaginative and prescient behind Love to Eat, an inspiring providing of 75 unique recipes, together with a peppering of some acquainted favorites from her Armenian upbringing.
“I grew up all the time very happy with my Armenian heritage,” shared Keshishian Modic, the daughter of an Armenian immigrant from Lebanon. “My dad got here to this nation with nothing, labored exhausting to achieve his enterprise ventures and gave me and my sister a greater life than he had rising up,” she proudly said of her father Armen. “My sturdy work ethic undoubtedly comes from him. He’s my hero in life.”
Keshishian Modic has loved placing a daring spin on Armenian and Center Jap meals, presenting variations of Armenian potato salad, her grandmother’s eech and her father’s tabouleh. “My dad would take a look at this salad and say, ‘Nee-cole, that’s NOT tabouleh. We don’t put cauliflower in tabouleh,’” she wrote of KaleJunkie’s grain-free riff on the favored salad, which additionally is available in a (you guessed it) kale version and a quinoa model in Like to Eat.
Her favourite recipe in Like to Eat occurs to be her personal interpretation of her mom’s dolma with bell peppers. “You’ll be able to nonetheless make Armenian meals that all of us grew up with utilizing avocado oil as an alternative of canola oil, and no one will ever know the distinction,” she assures. Of all of the nutritious components in her pantry, tahini needs to be the star. The versatile substitute for nut butter has been utilized in dozens of KaleJunkie recipes like tahini date coffee smoothie, spicy tofu tahini noodles and the viral and “life-changing” tahini chocolate chip cookies. “I grew up with [tahini]. It was all the time in our home. I really like its distinctive style, particularly in baked items. It’s for extra than simply hummus!”
An avid Dealer Joe’s buyer, Keshishian Modic has made a behavior out of cranking up the flavour and the dietary worth of the grocery retailer chain’s standard seasonal snacks. “Let’s make it higher. It’s simply what I do!” she exclaims earlier than introducing her vegan and nut-free iteration of cinnamon roll drizzled granola. “No shade to TJ’s. It’s one in every of my favourite locations to buy, however generally they only miss the mark,” she asserts in her bookmark-worthy video for her copycat Dealer Joe’s caramel espresso cashews with none synthetic and questionable components.
Along with these nutritious reinventions, Keshishian Modic believes in training a zero-waste life-style. For instance, she blends fibrous, vitamin-rich watermelon rinds and freezes them into smoothie cubes. She additionally reaches for the ice dice tray to salvage and freeze unused coconut milk (from the can) and resuscitate wilted spinach and herbs, like parsley, for future use in smoothies, soups and different meals. A lot of her recipes comprise oat flour or almond flour over white flour; avocado oil or coconut oil over their inflammatory and commonplace counterpart canola oil; and coconut sugar as an alternative of white sugar, which is very addictive. None of those modifications will sacrifice style or taste, claims Keshishian Modic, underscoring that no meals is off-limits, together with a slice of cake, a glass of wine and a bowl of pasta. “When you permit your self to benefit from the meals that your physique really desires (it doesn’t matter what the components are), you take pleasure in it guilt-free, which is more healthy than excessive deprivation,” she wrote in November 2020. For Keshishian Modic, it’s simply all about steadiness and understanding what makes you are feeling your finest.
Whereas she’s generally known as KaleJunkie on social media, at residence, she’s merely mama. Keshishian Modic loves cooking with and for her rising boys Gavyn and Hunter, though she admits they’d a lot somewhat desire tacos or home made pizza on an English muffin for dinner. “They’re the hardest critics, however they’re additionally good meals testers,” she laughed whereas demonstrating her sons’ indicators of approval with their thumbs. Her face lights up when she talks about her household. “That’s the explanation why I do every thing that I do…for my boys to see that mother is hardworking…to see a robust, working mother, who isn’t excellent, however simply tries her finest.”
Keshishian Modic hopes her respect for balanced consuming and entire meals in addition to her soulful method to wellness in Like to Eat will resonate with readers and function a useful information and a supply of consolation. “I’m grateful for the battle and the journey,” mentioned the first-time creator, who will likely be turning 42 subsequent month. “After we are going by exhausting occasions in life, we don’t see all of these issues come again years later and form who we’re. I’m who I’m due to the issues I’ve gone by, a number of the painful occasions in my life. I’m actually grateful.”
Leeza Arakelian is the assistant editor of the Armenian Weekly. She is a graduate of UCLA and Emerson Faculty. Leeza has written and produced for native and community tv information together with Boston 25 and Al Jazeera America.
