Hello! My name is Maya Schlessel.  I am currently a Culinary Science student at The Ohio State University.  Throughout my life, I have struggled with weight issues.  I have been ridiculed and bullied for my weight for as long as I can remember.  I let my weight become who I was.  It consumed every aspect of my life.  Finally, after my freshman year of college I realized I could not continue to allow others opinions to control me.  I decided I was going to change my life to please myself and no one else.  I began my first step in my lifestyle change by figuring out how to feel more comfortable in my skin.  In order to do this, I wanted to change myself physically and mentally.  I started by exercising regularly and eating healthier.  Preparing these new healthy meals allowed me to stumble across my unknown love for cooking.  Cooking gives me a sense of creativity and freedom I have yet to find in any other aspect of my life.  I am creating this blog to share my passion with as many people as possible.  My goal is to make meals using locally grown, natural, and real ingredients.  I specialize in creating delicious meals that are also healthy, with a few decadent recipes here and there.  I hope that you all will enjoy my recipes, along with any healthy lifestyle and cooking tips that have helped me on my journey!

A couple of things you’ll notice with all of my meals: I will never tell you how much salt or spice you need in a dish!  I believe in lightly salting so that is what I do for my meals.  I LOVE spicy food so my meals will generally have a kick to them.  I think seasoning your food allows you to be creative and truly make your dishes your own so I want to leave that up to you!  Also, I am a leftovers fanatic.  I love to take a dish and re-purpose it for multiple meals throughout the week.  So you’ll definitely be seeing previous meals being transformed into new and exciting dishes! 🙂