Hi there! I’m Vered DeLeeuw, a blogger, a foodie, a wife, and a mom. I’m so excited that you found my healthy recipes blog!
In case you’re wondering who I am, what made me start this blog and why you should try my recipes, here is some information about me.
My education
I have an LL.M. (Master of Laws) degree from Tel Aviv University, which looks very nice on my home office wall but doesn’t really serve me in my daily life or when writing this blog. 🙄
When I realized that my passion was nutrition and not law, I started taking nutrition classes. In June 2019, I completed a 6-month certificate program and earned a Nutrition and Healthy Living Certificate from Cornell University.
I also completed the course “Evidence-based Optimal Nutrition: The Quest for Proof” and received a Certificate of Completion from the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Media mentions of my work
Healthy Recipes Blog was named by Spoon University as their number one pick for college-friendly food blogs:
Vered DeLeeuw’s recipe index houses a massive collection of recipes, and almost all of them support clean eating while using kitchen staples. With its wide array of choices and handy tool to scale down recipes, Healthy Recipes has become our go-to site for finding fun, tasty ways to use up those last bits of food in the bag.
My work has been mentioned in several other major media outlets. Here’s a link to my media page.
My weird name
My name reflects the two very different cultures that I come from. “Vered” (pronounced Veh-Red, emphasis on the first syllable) means “Rose” in Hebrew. “DeLeeuw” (pronounced Deh-Ley-Uw, emphasis on the middle syllable) means “The Lion” in Dutch. Growing up in Jerusalem and frequently visiting Holland, I was greatly influenced by my two very different grandmothers.
Grandma Chava (“Eve” in Hebrew) cooked authentic Israeli and Jewish food. Her food was well-seasoned and very flavorful. Dishes like these spicy meatballs are inspired by her amazing style of cooking.
Grandma Miep (her name is the Dutch equivalent of “Mary”) was a dignified, coiffed and dainty European lady. Her cooking was a bit bland, but she more than made up for it with her wonderfully buttery baked goods. This recipe for keto shortbread cookies is inspired by her wonderful baking.
I moved to the United States with my husband, who is a high-tech executive and a math geek (check out his geometry blog!), in 1999. We live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have two daughters. The oldest is a sophomore at Harvard, and her sister is a high-school senior. Soon we’ll be empty nesters! 😮
How Healthy Recipes was born
I started this blog in 2011, after my husband was instructed by his physician to go on a low-carb diet.
It wasn’t easy at first. I had to change my cooking pretty drastically. I focused on proteins (meat, seafood, eggs and aged cheeses), healthy fats, non-starchy vegetables, and low-sugar fruit, supplemented with the occasional low carb dessert.
We’ve been eating a low-carb, mostly grain-free and paleo diet for the past six years. It became my mission to develop delicious and healthy recipes and to tweak old favorites and make them healthier (these almond flour biscuits are a good example).
This blog is not just about low carb, but also about tasty and healthy recipes
It’s really important to my husband and me to eat well. We are both foodies. Having eaten at top restaurants all over the world, we will not settle for mediocre healthy recipes. We need our food to taste good! (Follow me on Instagram to see the awesome meals we enjoy out of the house).
It’s also important for us to eat not just low-carb foods but also whole foods and minimize processed junk. We want to feed our bodies the way nature has intended. Not the processed junk that has taken over the supermarket aisles, but simple, healthy, home-cooked meals.
For my husband and me, healthy low carb eating is not a fad or a passing trend. It’s not a temporary diet. For us, it’s a way of life that we’ve been living for the past six years. So we need to make it sustainable, which means tasty!
Blogging turned from a hobby into my full-time job
When I started cooking healthy recipes, I documented them in this blog, as a way to keep all my recipes organized. To this day, I still cook from my blog – it’s so convenient!
But it didn’t stay hidden for long. Gradually, I realized that people were finding my recipes and responding to them. I started receiving emails from grateful readers. So I turned this blog from a hobby into my full-time job.
This is the best job I’ve ever had! I love creating recipes and photographing them. I love how this blog has taught me so much. Not just about healthy eating, but also about running a blog, taking food photos, and shooting and editing videos.
How to reach me
Here’s my recipe index, and here are my media mentions. I am humbled to have been featured on so many wonderful websites!
The legal terms for using this website are here, and the website’s privacy policy is here. Please read both before using my recipes. They contain important information and disclaimers.
If you need to reach me, please email HealthyRecipesBlog@gmail.com. I read all my emails and do my best to respond, although sometimes the volume of emails is so high that I can’t respond to each and every one of them. I apologize for that.
Thank you so much for visiting, and bon appétit!
