About me

I am creative, a recovering perfectionist, and a health nut 90% of the time (a girl has got to have french fries now and then!). I love to cook and have the added challenge of making it as healthy as possible for my well being. I do love to craft as well and you can read about my creations but here, it's all about FOOD!

Q: Why did you start this blog?
A: To share and document recipes that are tasty, healthy, and gluten free. In January 2008 for two weeks, I eliminated food that could cause allergies or were just unhealthy: caffeine, alcohol, gluten, dairy, soy, and meat. I did this as a way of starting the new year fresh and guess what? I realized my body hated gluten. After incorporating it back in, I immediately felt awful and my belly bloated terribly. I've been in and out of denial but I've had some health scares recently which has been a reality check. I'm awake now and am committed to following a clean, healthy, and gluten free diet! I keep all the other types of food I listed to a minimum. By the way, you can still find yummy recipes here even if you aren't following a gluten free diet. In fact, I don't think you'll notice except with the baked goods.

Q: Why "koala"?
A: My actual pseudonym is "koala brains" which came to be in 1998 when I married my husband and I changed my last name. Every time Word spell checked my documents, it wanted to correct the spelling of my name to koala brains (Kaori = koala, according to Microsoft). It cracked me up so I never made it "add" to the dictionary because I wanted to see the suggested correction. The name has always stuck. For this food blog, I thought it would be kinda gross to mention "brains" so I dropped it.

Q: What are your interests besides cooking?
A: I enjoy sewing, jewelry making, and any other crafts that interest me, reading, blogging (of course!), and am in the process of learning how to garden. I am also health and environmentally conscious. Granted, I'm not as far along with my earth friendly ways as many people but I'm on my way. I'm very concerned about the long term effects of the chemicals in our food, personal products, cleaning products, in the air, in water, and pretty much everywhere, so my mission in life is to minimize them as much as possible.

Welcome to my blog where I document my healthy food adventure!