About

If you had two girls, under the age of two, and your husband, a fighter pilot, was flying cover during a war in Iraq, would you be thinking about converting your diet to organic, whole foods? I wasn’t. My life had enough stress without another distraction. But, that’s what happened in 2003.

Two years earlier, after the birth of my second daughter, I began having daily migraines. I was 25. As migraines often are, they were both baffling and debilitating. They started with the birth of my first daughter, but were infrequent and not as severe. I often had to lie down in a quiet dark room, which was almost impossible with toddlers to care for.

I was taking several medications to manage the pain just to get through the day. They continued, though, four or more a week. After two years of struggle, my neurologist suggested adding yet another daily medication to my prescription regimen, a treatment that wasn’t working anyway. I kindly rejected her suggestion and drove home thinking: There must be another way.

The same day I saw my neurologist, a tiny newsletter article caught my eye while going through the mail. It was about the benefits of organic foods. I knew migraines could be related to diet, so I wondered if changing to organic foods might help. I was at the end of my rope and willing to try something different.

Relief
At the time, I was eating lots of vegetables to lose the last 10 pounds of baby weight. I replaced my lettuce with organic. It was my first step. I picked lettuce because it was the food I ate the most of. Within a week I noticed a significant difference. The frequency of my migraines decreased, and it was now easier to care of my kids. I didn’t need any more encouragement. I next switched all produce to organic with the intent of increasing the amount of pure and untreated food in my diet and decreasing my pesticide intake. As I dug deeper and learned more, I continued making changes to my pantry and refrigerator. Over the next year and a half, I converted my family’s diet to whole, unprocessed, organic ingredients.

Not Yet Delicious . . .
As I began using organic, unprocessed ingredients, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I had a hard time finding recipes that were equivalent in flavor to what we were accustomed to. Nevertheless, I avoided such ingredients as white sugar, white flour, and partially hydrogenated anything. Recipes using whole grains were especially challenging. We weren’t ready to leave the world of paninis, pasta, and pizza, but just substituting ingredients didn’t exactly work out. As my husband likes to say, we ate some terrible pancakes during the transition. This was disheartening because I had grown up with a great love for cooking that I inherited from the women of my family.

Rich Family Heritage
I’m blessed and grateful to be a part of a line of wonderful cooks going back generations in Louisiana.

My great-grandmother, Ellis Hawsey, was an incredible cook who taught herself how to bake pies that she sold at a Baton Rouge country club to bring in extra money during the Depression. Because she was blessed to live 100 years, I had the privilege of spending time with her when I was a child.

My Grandma Brice is the daughter of my great-grandmother. A remarkable Cajun cook and the wife of a Baptist minister, she’s had the opportunity to cook for hundreds (maybe thousands) of church functions.

And finally there’s Mom, Grandma’s daughter. She is an amazingly creative cook, teacher, and one of the top caterers in the country. I watched her build her company, The Festive Kitchen, which also has gourmet-to-go shops that regularly get top reviews.

The Festive Kitchen began almost 20 years ago and as it grew, I grew with it, starting in the kitchen, baking and cooking, and later as a teen progressing to the wait staff. As Mom grew a multi-million-dollar business from the ground up, I worked everything from small luncheons to large, lavish, tented weddings.

From this rich, generational heritage I discovered the bedrock value of simple, delicious recipes paired with creativity and boldness in presentation. There is no doubt in my mind that Mom’s tenacity to create with integrity was that seed planted deep in me necessary to navigate this new world of organic.

I also decided that if we were going to eat organic dishes they were going to taste every bit as delicious as the ones I used before.

Deliciously Organic
Over time, I shared with my friends and family how I overcame my health problems. And then I told others. Many were earnestly interested in learning more or in making changes to their own diets. I continued to tell my story, share my adapted recipes, and give encouragement.

Observing all this, my husband asked me to consider writing a cookbook, and finally the lightbulb snapped on. What I was learning and collecting was a cookbook to be shared with others where the recipes used unprocessed, organic ingredients. From that moment, I couldn’t stay out of  the kitchen and began writing the cookbook Deliciously Organic.

With the encouragement of friends, I began teaching cooking classes out of my home. Within a year of teaching those classes, I was overwhelmed with requests for information and recipes. So I started this cooking blog, Deliciously Organic, as an interactive and efficient avenue to teach and dispense advice and recipes on a much wider scale. Two years after starting the blog my book, Deliciously Organic released January of 2011.

Through organic, unprocessed food our family of four was able to overcome: severe asthma, eczema, IBS, and migraines. No drugs. Just good, natural, real food. Then three years ago, I had an amalgam filling removed and unfortunately the doctor didn’t take the proper precautions during the extraction. As a result, my thyroid absorbed many of the heavy metals and months later I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease. The disease ravaged my body with hives. Once again, the doctors didn’t have any answers and in fact, they told me there wasn’t anything they could do. I once again turned to nutrition and began a grain-free diet rich in healthy fats, meats, and vegetables to begin the healing process. I’m happy to say the disease isn’t controlling me anymore and my blood work is looking better by the day. One day, I hope to announce that the disease has been defeated. I’m not too far away from that joyful day.

I’m thrilled you’re reading this blog and hope my recipes will find a home in your kitchen. I also hope you’ll discover, as I have, that eating food direct from the source of our earth uninterrupted by fewer chemicals and less processing is not only perfectly doable and beneficial but also perfectly delicious! And don’t be surprised when your friends and the whole family (including the kids) say, a I can’t believe this is organic. It’s delicious!

Carrie Vitt

Photo taken by Kelly Trimble of Kelly Kate Photography