Hey there! Welcome to our website, Food Heaven Made Easy with Wendy and Jess. If you’re new to the site, that’s Wendy on the left and Jess on the right. We are both Registered Dietitians with Master’s degrees in nutrition. That’s where the MS, RDs come from at the end of our name.
The simplest way to describe us is BFFs who love to eat, cook and nerd out about anything nutrition related (and in that order). We like to change our hairstyles a lot, too (check out our YouTube page for living proof). In short, Food Heaven Made Easy started in 2011 as a creative outlet for two friends to spread the word about nutrition and healthy eating. Here is a pic from our very first episode:
We met in 2008 through a mutual friend at a potluck. At that time, Jess was going back to school for her masters in nutrition, and a couple of years later, Wendy decided she wanted to pursue the same passion. Lots of organic chemistry, biochem, micro biology and nutritional biochemistry ensued.
While in grad school, we worked together facilitating cooking and nutrition workshops for the New York City Department of Health. We taught families how to shop healthfully on a budget and use culturally relevant foods to make tasty and nutritionally balanced meals. We found that community members were very receptive to us, and came back every week eager for more information.
When the farmer’s market season ended the conversation arose of how we could keep this going and reach a larger audience. In winter of 2010, we went to the Dominican Republic for a month-long “brainstorming retreat” to come up with ideas for creating something amazing that involved nutrition education and online media. But really, all we ended up doing was laying on the beach all day and taking selfies. Here’s one:
It literally wasn’t until our last night in DR that we actually focused enough to have an official “meeting” about how we could bring our ideas to life.We decided that filming videos and putting them out into internet-land would be the best way to reach a larger audience.
Flash forward six months and we were filming our very first episode. We’ll never forget that day, because after 10 hours of filming in Jess’ hot Brooklyn apartment, we realized that we didn’t have the mic turned on! 5 hours of footage. No audio. It was at that point that we knew we could either call it quits or dust ourselves off and try again. We chose the latter. Here’s the pic of us at our official launch party in June of 2011:
What started out with just a couple of viewers (specifically Jess’ Mom and Dad and Wendy’s Mami and Papi) has morphed an amazing YouTube community following of over 40,000 subbies. Throughout the years, our site has evolved, but our basic philosophy has remained the same: healthy eating should delicious, cost-effective, and (most importantly) easy. We want to help people live their best lives possible, and bring the fun back into food and wellness.
If you take a look through our recipes, you may notice that they are all plant-based. It’s true: we are both vegetarians. This doesn’t mean that vegetarianism is the only way to eat healthy (however research shows that plant-based diets have countless health benefits). Whether you are vegetarian, flexitarian, vegan or a meat eater, our passion is to show you that vegetables can be breathtakingly delicious – so long as you cook them with a little TLC. We have an archive of 5 years worth of delicious recipes here. Make sure you check out our 5-Ingredient Low Carb Zucchini Lasagna and our Veggie Chili recipe. Both were crowd favorites.
These days, we live on separate coasts (Jess returned to her hometown of Cali and Wendy remains in the boogie down Bronx). Our videos are not as frequent, but we continue to bring our readers healthy recipes every week and up-to-date nutrition information they can trust. We also co-host the Food Heaven Podcast, a healthy living podcast which is released every Wednesday. In 2017, we released our very first cookbook, the 28-Day Plant-Powered Health Reboot, which was a number 1 new release on Amazon for vegetarian cooking (!!). Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get exclusive updates on when we launch our first episode and other food heaven haps. We’ll even throw in a free copy of our smoothie ebook too, just because you rock for reading this far.
We hope that you’ll join us in leaving this world a little better than how we found it, one meal at a time. (Ps. If you want that delish smoothie recipe in the pic below, you can find it here.)
Thank you so much and we’ll catch you soon!
xo,
Wendy and Jess
