Welcome to Cook & Crumbs
I’m so happy you’re here!
My name is Taryn Yudaken, and I’m a foodie, a professional writer, and a traveler at heart. I’m also obsessed with nutrition, and currently becoming a certified nutritionist.
I was born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, and have since lived in Maine, Japan, Washington D.C. and California.
I spent a large chunk of my twenties battling Lyme Disease, and came out the other side grateful, happy and healthier than ever.
You can read more about me below, but first, let’s talk logistics…
Cook & Crumbs Mission Statement:
Cook & Crumbs is a food blog providing delicious American and South African recipes that focus on whole food ingredients.
About Cook & Crumbs
This is the best place to learn more about Cook & Crumbs: how to navigate around here, and who created this blog in the first place.
First and foremost, Cook & Crumbs is a blog about cooking and baking with whole ingredients.
Because of my upbringing in South Africa, you’ll find not only traditional American recipes here, but many uniquely South African recipes, too – like South African Chicken Stew.
If your desire is simply to find a delicious meal, you’re in the right place.
Cook & Crumbs recipes are designed to be healthy AND delicious.
I am a comfort food cook – for decades I have been making food that is warm, indulgent, and makes you feel good when you eat it. That means my recipes taste great, but to make you feel good they also focus on quality whole ingredients.
A Note On Special Diets:
Though you may see words like dairy-free and plant-based here and there, Cook & Crumbs follows more of a flexitarian approach: all whole foods are allowed. Yes, we love fruits and veggies, but we also eat chicken, meat, legumes, eggs and dairy.
You may notice some of my recipes are intentionally dairy-free. I find I can eat a little dairy without too many digestive issues, but not a lot. And my family is almost all lactose-intolerant and dairy-free. So cheese is on the menu, but not too often.
I hope this helps the many people who visit Cook & Crumbs who also don’t eat dairy!
Some of my best recipes (like this dairy-free pumpkin pie) are so good without dairy – and still completely whole – that a dairy sub doesn’t even need to be mentioned.
My Kitchen Philosophy
I love cooking almost as much as I love eating, and my recipes will reflect a deep love of good flavors so that eating healthy tastes delicious.
In the Cook & Crumbs recipe index, you’ll find simple and easy recipes like grown-up Applesauce (which is more flavorful than you’d imagine), staples like Butternut Squash Soup, and useful everyday recipes like Balsamic Vinaigrette.
Many of my recipes are from the heart of South Africa, my truest homeland. These are dishes that are not often found on the average American food blog, yet they are bursting with spices and flavors you might be surprised to learn are already in your pantry.
Dishes that are nostalgic to me may be new to you, and some are so good they deserve to be your new favorites, like Sweet and Sour Lamb (aka Denningvleis) and South African Rusks.
My biggest focus at Cook & Crumbs is preparing meals and snacks that are so delicious you wouldn’t think they are designed especially for health. You’ll find treats like these Lemon Almond Flour Muffins (sweetened with dates); quick, yummy breakfasts like Chia Seed Greek Yogurt; and lots of smoothies that taste like dessert, like this Mint Chocolate Chip Smoothie or Banana Date Smoothie.
How Cook & Crumbs Can Help You
My goal at Cook & Crumbs is to provide recipes that teach you how to make delicious food in a healthy way using whole ingredients.
I believe many people are suffering because they are trying to fuel their bodies with ultra-processed and/or highly sugary foods.
Here, you won’t find any recipes using ingredients with fillers, preservatives, gums and emulsifiers, etc. These products are unrecognizable to our cells, which still function exactly as they did in our prehistoric ancestors.
And like our ancestors, we should be eating things that come from the Earth. Plants. Animals. Everything in its whole or minimally-processed form. That’s about all our cells can really use to function well.
As you follow my recipes, rest assured that my aim here is to provide naturally whole food. This means that the ingredients are very likely to be completely in their whole form, and there isn’t much investigating you need to do – just cook, eat and enjoy!
How To Use This Site:
Recipes
Cook & Crumbs is designed to be a simple and easy-to-use food blog. In the main menu under All Recipes, you will find these categories:
When you click on any of these, you will be taken to a page with a list of recipes that fall under that category.
Blog
The blog is a place where I share posts and reviews related to health and wellness. You’ll find articles here such as 15 Ways To Eat Healthier and How To Make Juice Without A Juicer.
Under Reviews, you’ll find my reviews of products related to health, wellness, and anything in the kitchen. There are kitchen product reviews like the Breville Juicer Review or Almond Cow Review, but there are also reviews for anything related to health, like a book review of the new health book “Good Energy” by Casey Means.
Q&A
Another unique feature of Cook & Crumbs is the Q&A forum page, which can also be found on the main menu. Q&A is a place for members of the community, subscribers and nonsubscribers alike, to ask questions about anything related to cooking, baking, health and wellness.
Q&A is an interactive forum where anyone can post a question, and anyone can comment an answer. Community is very important to me, and I hope to foster the Cook & Crumbs community for many years to come.
From Africa to Maine, From Lyme Disease to Healthy
A Little Bit More About Taryn…
I grew up in a house with parents who were always cooking and throwing big dinners. Guests could be heard raving about various dishes each time they walked out the door.
My dad got his culinary start as a chef for the South African Navy, while my mom has been a strict vegetarian for over thirty years (long before it was popular) and has inspired countless of my own recipes.
Due to apartheid and the resulting high crime rates in South Africa, my parents moved our family to Maine, U.S.A. when I was thirteen. I struggled with culture shock and tried to fit in by partying hard and all but dropping out of school. All the things you hope your teenager never does, I did.
After high school, I ran off to Japan where I was on my own for the first time—at least, when it came to cooking.
I loved many things about the Japanese way of eating (including onigiri, seaweed-wrapped rice triangles filled with salmon). But I often found myself calling my parents to ask for nostalgic recipes I could learn to cook in my new home.
At the same time, my body was changing rapidly from a very negative experience with birth control. I didn’t fit into my clothes, I spent many moody days depressed and in tears, and I once ate a massive (Costco-sized) chocolate sheet cake all by myself.
Then I met an American personal trainer, who handed me a Suzanne Somers book called Eat Great, Lose Weight.
While I did want to lose the new extra weight, I was floored, impressed and shocked to read the information behind Suzanne’s ideas.
I know it seems basic, but I had never really thought about the foods that went into my body and how they worked (or didn’t work) with every organ. The chemical reactions in my system interested me. Learning that eating high sugar foods would make my pancreas secrete insulin interested me.
And so began my fascination with food and health.
What started as an interest became a life-saving mission as my twenties rolled by and I moved back to Maine. I was incredibly sick, and had no idea why. Neither did the doctors. It was hard to explain to them how I felt myself slipping away. I was exhausted all the time; felt like I had a cold all the time, and one sip of wine would send the room spinning.
In one of the moments when I pushed myself to find some happiness (and find myself), I decided to get a few new ear piercings one day. By that evening, my ear had swollen into what looked like a giant tomato. By later in the night, the right side of my face was paralyzed.
Days turned into weeks and my doctor tested me for everything and found no explanation. I had Bell’s Palsy, and she guessed it was from my massive ear infection crushing a nerve in my neck. I saw neurologist and an ENT who couldn’t figure it out either.
For the time being, I had to tape my eye shut at night because I couldn’t close it. I stayed away from public places because I was so embarrassed at the reactions I got when I smiled without remembering what I looked like. I was deeply afraid that my life would never be the same.
My life never really was the same, but after a month or so the Bell’s Palsy began to fade. I cried so hard with joy to have my regular face back. The experience changed the way I view beauty, and the the way I now understand those who aren’t as lucky, those who don’t recover or those who are born in a shape that the world doesn’t perceive as “normal.”
I was relieved, but still felt extremely sick with no explanation of why. I frequently had infections from my bladder to my eyes, and it was my eye doctor who urged me to see a Lyme Disease specialist. I told her I’d already been tested for Lyme and everything else under the sun, but every time I saw her she pushed a little harder.
Even though a “western blot” test had showed negative for Lyme, I was fed up with no answers. I remember the moment I was driving around feeling like my body was garbage wasting away. I pulled over in a random field and just stood outside. I decided right then that I’d just find a specialist and pay out of pocket and try anything I could to get better.
Lo and behold, when I found a specialist I immediately tested positive for Lyme Disease.
I took antibiotics for many months and saw an improvement, but I’d been sick for years. Antibiotics work better on Lyme the sooner you take them.
So I had to clean myself up from the bottom up. Antibiotics did some heavy lifting, but the rest of my healing came from my lifestyle. It was a whole new lesson in what food goes in and what it does. If I ate crappy, I felt crappy.
I realized more than ever that whatever I consumed was going to have a real effect—whether it was good or bad was up to me.
All I could do was try my best to take care of myself. I exercised and meditated regularly, slept 9 hours each night, and tossed out all caffeine, alcohol, toxic cleaning items and beauty products with names I couldn’t pronounce.
During this time, I continued visiting various doctors, physical therapists, acupuncturists and other healers and was told more than once to cut out gluten.
I tried every diet under the sun, from gluten-free to ketogenic to carnivore to vegan. What I learned most of all was to practice moderation, but to err on the side of giant salads packed with veggies. The more processed food was, the worse I felt eating it.
While teaching myself about nutrition, I was getting two degrees at the University of Southern Maine: one in Media and Communications, and one in Gender Studies. I had an interest in media and journalism, and decided to double major when I stumbled upon a feminist perspectives class. It was there that I found a new language that explained the world—and my own life-in a way that I needed to understand.
I combined my love of all things natural with equality in my years at the university newspaper The Free Press, and in my senior thesis, published in Penn State Berks Undergraduate Journal of Service Learning and Community-Based Research.
I began my career as a freelance writer often tackling the subject of food. I wrote for Current Publishing, Inc. magazines (now merged with Sun Journal) and wrote articles about health – like this one on strokes – for Maine Senior Guide.
Writing was what I loved to do, but to pay the bills I worked in the restaurant industry. I’ve done everything from serving and bartending in the front of the house to office managing in the back, but I always found myself pausing with a curious eye at the line cooks prepping and the chefs by the stove.
I love cooking, and it’s always been a natural talent of mine. I also love eating, and I love eating really good food. So it only made sense when I moved from Washington D.C. to California to write restaurant reviews for Monterey County Now. I spent a handful of years as the Weekly’s in-house food critic, and yet it was a strange job for me.
Obviously, it’s an awesome gig to get paid to eat. But it was a time when I was so rigid about only eating healthy foods. If I ate animal products, they had to be organic, pasture-raised and local. Processed foods and sugar were the devil to me. There were many restaurant visits where I balked a little at eating all the factory-farm meat and sugary desserts. And don’t even get me started on seed oils.
Man, I really had to loosen up a little bit.
At that time I was as recovered from Lyme Disease as I’d ever be. I had always maintained my healthy lifestyle, and was feeling great. Having Lyme somewhere in my body was not a reason to be so strict with my diet that I couldn’t indulge once or twice a week. I remember my editor once saying that even though I struggled internally with eating whatever a restaurant served me, it would make a great cover story one day.
And so, being food critic really helped me learn to let go, and gave me a level of peace around food that I still have to this day.
When the pandemic hit the restaurant section closed for a bit, and I decided to leave it be. I’m still happy to be on the contributor list, but my life is pretty full and busy at home these days. The rare times I go out, I eat whatever I feel like—but mostly what I feel like is on the healthier side anyway. My fridge and pantry’s ingredients are pretty much all clean, organic and not overly-processed. And the things that aren’t are reserved for convenience snacks and special treats, and that is perfectly fine with me.
Starting this blog was a decision to spend more time with my background and my passion, both good food AND health. I have strong views on the big ag industry, but I don’t believe that me promoting extremism is the answer. I’ve learned that people, including myself, just don’t like that!
If you can buy organic food, especially at farmer’s markets, then do. If you can do some research on the meat you buy (look up the brands, etc.) and source from local, regenerative and/or organic farms, then do.
Here my recipes will be focused on whole food, so the ingredients will naturally be healthier and minimally processed.
Health a big deal to me, and I’m currently becoming a certified nutritionist.
I’m a big believer that everyone is doing the best they can with the resources they have.
I know that as I’ve grown into a healthy and happy person, my resources have grown along with me. I hope Cook & Crumbs can be a resource to you, if not for interesting health tidbits, then for delicious food! I’m always open to tips, suggestions and hearing from you about your own story.
Please see my contact page if you’d like to get in touch.
What’s Next? Join the Community!
Thank you for taking the time to read my story. I’m so glad you’re here, and I’d love to get to know you!
Come say hello on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest and X.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel for the latest videos and tutorials.
Get free recipes delivered straight to your inbox by subscribing
