Veg of Interest for February 2010
Heather Nicholds
Victoria, BC Canada
www.HealthyVeganRecipes.net
Heather is currently studying to be a Registered Holistic Nutritionist. She shares her knowledge and love of vegan cooking on her website where she shows how to create delicious, nutritious vegan meals.
Mama Veg: Tell us a little about yourself and how you became a vegan? 
Heather: I became a vegan when I learned about the environmental impact of the meat, dairy and egg industry. I also took this ethic to the plant side of my diet and buy organically grown produce, grains beans etc, and I try to buy locally grown whenever I can. The health aspect of both of these cemented things for me. I feel good about eating food that is free from chemicals and poisons, and try to eat things that have been produced on as small a scale as possible in a sustainable way so that I get actual nutrients from my food!
Mama Veg: What is the most challenging part of your lifestyle?
Heather: I sometimes have a hard time stepping back to the beginning and explaining why I do certain things, especially with my parents.
Mama Veg: How have you used your website to promote vegetarian issues?
Heather: My website is focused mainly on the health aspect of vegan diets, but I try to keep things in a positive light. There are plenty of sites out there exposing the negatives, which is crucial to understanding why we need to change our ways, and I want to give people a positive energy to motivate them in the right direction. Since the environmental impact is a main motivating factor to me, it pops up in my weekend blogs pretty often.
Mama Veg: How do you fulfill your creative desires?
Heather: I find that my creativity came into my cooking a lot more when I became a vegan. I was never good at cooking meat, and eliminating that crutch on the plate that is relied on so heavily really opened my eyes to the fun of cooking in the plant kingdom!
Mama Veg: How does your business fulfill a need/want in the vegetarian community?
Heather: I am posting video recipes every week night to help support those people who are transitioning to a healthy vegan diet, or people who have gotten stuck in a rut with their cooking. They're posted on my website as a way to give ideas and show how easy it is to make healthy vegan meals!
I'm also making collections of recipes every month to go more in depth on a certain topic – cookies and soups so far, with more to come!
Mama Veg: What is you favorite meal?
Heather: My favorite meal these days is what I call a raw stir fry. It's made up of 3 vegetables (sometimes marinated, like mushrooms) and a green (usually massaged kale) with a delicious asian miso dressing. Sometimes I have this over a cooked grain like quinoa, or just as is. In the winter, I often cook the vegetables.
Mama Veg: What are some of your must-have vegetarian products?
Heather: Coconut oil is a must-have for baking... also works as a moisturizer. Flax seeds or flaxseed oil are the best source of omega-3 fatty acids, and spirulina powder makes it into my smoothie at lunch for its amazing nutritional benefits.
(Photos courtesy of Heather Nicholds)
Thanks to Heather for participating in my little interview and for making it easier for anyone interested in learning to eat a plant-based diet to do so successfully. I wish you much success.
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