About

Well, I'm so excited to be sharing my little repertoire of recipes with you!  Here's a little about me...first off, I get side-tracked easily, so my apologies in advance!  I will do my best to stay on track here...🙃...Secondly, my son just taught me how to do emojis on my laptop, so prepare for a super emoji-packed post! {You're all like, "YES, we totally hadn't met our quota for emojis yet today!  Also, FYI, you're already side-tracked"...} Dang it!  Ok here goes...

My name is Lise-Anne Michel (it's French, pronounced "Leez"-Anne "Michelle".  Also rhymes with "Please"-Anne if that's helpful 🤷🏻‍♀️ (that's my husband's nickname for me, especially when he wants something, lol 😂).  Yes I am fluent in French, although I rarely speak it.  I have 5 beautiful children {😱 what?!?...you have 5 kids?!?  Uh-huh, I do}...and a super supportive husband who is eager and more than willing to follow a plant based diet the majority of the time (except occasionally when he goes out to eat at a restaurant, maybe once a month).  Having a supportive husband is super-de-duper helpful and makes this food journey a whole lot easier, so quick shout out to my stellar other half!  Thanks Babe! 😘

Moving right along...

Luckily for me, I was blessed to have grown up with a knowledge of the healing power of food 🥕🥒🥗🍇🥑🍎, thanks to my awesome Mama...(love you mom!!! 👩😚🤗), and have turned to it often as a form of medicine.  One of these times was when our oldest son, at the age of 6, lost his hearing.  My first instinct at the time was to cut dairy out of his diet, and after 2 months of this experiment, a second hearing test reassured us that his hearing was back to normal.  An allergy test then confirmed that he indeed did have a milk allergy, an allergy which we've since learned 3 out of our 5 kids share with him.  Even those in our family who don't have "confirmed" milk allergies (or simply weren't tested), feel so much better eating a dairy-free diet.  We've found we have less skin irritation, congestion, and we all feel less bloated, and an overall increase in energy.

Over the course of my last few pregnancies and births since then, my own health has deteriorated.  As a result, I now have a little collection of medical conditions, the more serious and most recent of which have greatly affected my quality of life, with symptoms like brain fog, inflammation, chronic fatigue, nerve pain in my neck & spine, confusion, blood pooling in my legs, tendonitis, bursitis...and the list goes on.  Things came to a bit of a halt for me in March of 2017 when I collapsed on the front lawn of my kids school as I was picking them up at the end of the day.  This was my first of several neck-down paralysis attacks.  I was transported by ambulance to the hospital that afternoon, and ended up staying for a month and a half.  By the end of my hospital stay I had collected a few more official diagnoses; POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), Conversion Disorder, Lupus, Raynauds...and yet no medical professional could offer me any kind of solution other than immunosuppressive steroids.

Emoji time to lighten the mood...🤡...or creep you out, depending on your opinion of clowns...

So with the onset of my ever increasing health struggles, and after delving some more into the research behind it all, it wasn't hard for me to make the decision to transition completely to a plant based lifestyle, free of refined sugars, oils (most of the time), with a focus on whole foods.  So I've been eating relatively dairy-free since my son's initial hearing loss in 2012, and completely plant based since March of 2017, after my first paralysis attack.

In short, it's been a fantastic change for our family, and we definitely don't plan to go back!  A year later, I can honestly say that the way I eat has made and continues to make a huge impact on my quality of life.  I'm still not symptom free, I still have highs and lows, but the lows are getting higher all the time.  I'm no longer confined to a wheelchair, and my walker is officially tucked away in the storage room, which to me, is nothing short of a miracle.  Food really has made all the difference in my life, and the longer I eat this way, the more in tune I am with my body and what it needs.  I was able to wean off of the massive amounts of prednisone I was on, as well as anxiety medication and anti-inflammatories.  So ya, I guess that sums up my testimony of plant based eating.

Hmm...what else shall I tell you??? 🤔...I love language and writing...I used to have purple hair...and dreadlocks a few years before that (I like to express myself through my hair I guess)...we used to have a Doberman named Rambo and I miss him a lot...now the only pet we have is my sourdough starter "Surly"(learn more about her by clicking the link)...I am a stay at home mom, and I also work from home as a pattern designer, writing knitting, crochet, and sewing patterns, which I've been doing for almost a decade.  So if I'm not in the kitchen or playing with my kids, you can bet your boots I'm in my craft room crafting up a storm.  If you're into crafting and / or are curious about what I do in that realm, check out my pattern website:

picknknit.com

If you're into plant based cooking though, you're already in the right place!  Yay!  Speaking of...I'm loving this little space for my recipes, and I've got lots more to post, so please be patient with me as I slowly type them up from the collection of recipe cards and random scraps of paper I've jotted things down on in my kitchen.  I find keeping this Blog is a form of therapy for me, so thank you for being a part of that.  It represents the story of my journey back to health, expressed through the food I eat, which truly has become my medicine.  I've been coming up with my own recipes for years now, plant based and otherwise, and sharing them here and there where I can, but I've never had a space set apart specifically for them.  My hope is that Elle Veganista will become that space.

So here's what you can expect from this Blog...I'm going to post some of my "Oldie Goldie" recipes that I've known and loved for years, adapted to our new plant based lifestyle of course...and I'll also be posting some fun, new fresh ideas as I come up with them.  And...because I feed a family of 7 {here's a visual, in case it hasn't quite sunk in...👩🏻👨🏻👦🏻👦🏻👧🏻👦🏻👶🏼}, I try to keep the recipes as quick and simple as possible, with ordinary, everyday ingredients you'd find in your pantry.  I really hope you enjoy the recipes as much as I love creating them!

xoxo ~ Lise-Anne {Elle Veganista}