This cookbook is a collaboration of two very close friends who recognized the crucial need for a whole foods cooking resource for the millions suffering from hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s. As two members of their creative team say, “If it doesn’t exist, create it.” So Lisa and Jill created it.
First and foremost, Lisa and Jill are dear friends. Second, they’re colleagues with a deep respect for each other’s work. Third, in addition to being insatiably interested in the healing power of whole foods nutrition, Lisa and Jill are farm huggers. They have a deep passion and respect for time-honored, sustainable farming practices and the way that food was meant to be grown and prepared.
Fourth, they’ve both suffered from Hashimoto’s.
Jill spent many idyllic summers on her grandparents’ ranch in the rolling hills of the Ozarks. In addition to raising cattle, they had fruit trees, a massive garden, and a root cellar filled to the brim with her grandmother’s canned fruits and vegetables. She was (mostly) raised on food they grew, butchered, canned, and froze.
Lisa didn’t grow up on a farm and had never seen a vegetable or fruit growing in its natural habitat until she worked in an organic garden during graduate school. It was then that she forged a deeper relationship with food, learning more about the importance of what happens behind the scenes to get it from field to plate. As a nutritionist, Lisa began to believe wholeheartedly that it’s in everyone’s best interest to know and care about nutrition from the ground up.
Jill and Lisa met in 2006 in Kansas City. Jill had just returned to her home state of Missouri after graduating from nutrition school in New York and Lisa was recently back to the City of Fountains after graduating from Bastyr University in Seattle with her Master of Science in Nutrition (MSN).
Jill began seeking out organizations in the area that supported local and sustainable agriculture and within a week, ended up at a meeting at Lisa’s house, enjoying the bounty of summer with Kansas City’s only organization that connected city residents to real, locally-grown food.
The group worked to educate the community about the importance of a local and sustainable food system, chronicled their findings in an online magazine, and eventually had a veritable “handbook” of local foods available in the area. Their efforts were a raging success and their group gave a standing-room-only presentation at Kansas City’s annual Eat Local & Organic Expo and received an exhilarating round of applause for their efforts.
This was the start of Jill’s focus on writing as an important component of her coaching practice, which ultimately lead to the creation of The Essential Thyroid Cookbook.
Lisa has always had a deep passion and natural tendency towards being a “culinary translator” and what inspired her the most about their efforts was the opportunity to curate and create recipes featuring local foods. And now, with this cookbook, she is helping the Hashimoto’s community translate healthy, thyroid-supportive recipes to their plates.
No matter what your health status, Lisa and Jill believe that food that’s produced in a time-honored fashion and manner that is respectful to the earth is more health- and energy-giving than foods produced in a manner that goes against nature. Their views are the foundation upon which The Essential Thyroid Cookbook was created.
