Savouring the seasons

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This article was published 05/04/2020 (1479 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Kirsten Buck’s road to health and nutrition was more a circle than a straight line.

At 32, Buck is a certified holistic nutritionist with a popular blog, Buck Naked Kitchen, and more than 83,000 followers on Instagram, where she posts beautifully styled photos of the colourful dishes she dreams up in the tiny, plant-and-sunlight-filled galley kitchen in her Winnipeg apartment.

Now she can add “author” to her list of accomplishments; her debut cookbook, Buck Naked Kitchen, comes out today via Penguin Random House.

Buck grew up in a Cree family in The Pas, and her mother made the most of a short growing season, always planting a garden. Her grandfather, meanwhile, taught her about the importance of living off the land as well as eating seasonally and sustainably.

“He very much lived that hunter-gatherer lifestyle, living and working from the trapline,” Buck says over the phone. “Eating at their house, we ate mostly carrots and potatoes and wild meat and rice. To come back to it way later in life it was like, ‘Oh man, they were doing good.’”

Food has always been a defining part of Buck’s life — but not always in a positive way. She developed a binge-eating disorder in childhood and struggled with her weight, “which went into not feeling self-worth or self-confidence, which was really damaging, especially at such a young age,” she says.

By the time she moved to Winnipeg after high school, disordered eating had become her normal, as she writes in Buck Naked Kitchen’s revealing foreword. (The title may be a play on her name, but it’s also a nod to how open she is.)

In her late 20s, after years of yo-yo dieting and excessive exercise in an attempt to take control of her life, Buck discovered the Whole30 program — the wildly popular, 30-day gluten-free, sugar-free, alcohol-free and dairy-free diet co-created by sports nutritionist Melissa Urban, who wrote the foreword to Buck Naked Kitchen — which set her on her path to nutrition. The program didn’t just give her nutritional building blocks; it ignited something in her. She quit her job as a hairstylist, sold her Winnipeg condo, and enrolled at the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition in Ottawa.

“I packed up my two-door car and drove out there to live for a year to learn more about food and myself and how food affects the body,” she says. “I didn’t know a lot about holistic nutrition; the philosophy is that health is a combination of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. It’s not just, you know, food and working out. I really thought that’s what it was all about when I started in my whole journey to where I am today. Eating whole foods is important, but there are many other factors that come into play when it comes to overall well-being.”

After nutrition school, she started to follow a more holistic lifestyle.

“I noticed I was sleeping better, my skin cleared up,” she says. “I had suffered from chronic eczema since I was a year old, and it’s the first time in my life that I saw it go away without steroid medication. I started losing weight without trying, just by balancing my body through food and light movement.

“Going to school helped transform my relationship with food, but it also helped me become my most authentic self.”

And that’s where her journey came full circle. “I realized that so much of the way I started eating after nutrition school — I eliminated wheat and gluten — was almost like I started following my own ancestral lineage,” she says. “This is how my ancestors ate, in a way.”

Cooking and creating dishes was sustaining for Buck in ways beyond nutrition. “I found this passion I didn’t know I had. It was a creative thing, too. Like, ‘This is what I have available to me, this is what I can make with it.’”

Buck Naked Kitchen, the blog, was born in 2016; and now, it’s a book that she says celebrates her approach to cooking.

“It is kind of an extension of my blog in that it’s really personal; I really poured my heart into it,” she says. “It’s filled with nourishing, whole-food recipes I make all the time at home. All the ingredients can be found in any grocery store or the farmers market. It proved to myself, if not to others, that eating well can be easy, affordable and sustainable.”

Living in Winnipeg influenced not only the recipes — yes, there’s a recipe for chicken tenders and honey-dill dip — but the way Buck Naked Kitchen is structured. Buck found she had all these moody shots of winter dishes — bison cottage pie, Thanksgiving turkey burgers, apple cider-chorizo brussels sprouts — and bright shots of summer dishes — a berry galette, strawberry-basil balsamic bruschetta, chimichurri shrimp, a killer-looking guac — that defied the usual breakfast-lunch-dinner cookbook format. And so, she divided it into summer and winter, as well as breakfast, on-the-go and basics.

About half the recipes are Whole30 compliant or can be modified to be, but there are also recipes that include gluten-free grains, natural sugars and legumes.

A cookbook has been a dream of Buck’s, and she’s feeling a swirl of emotions about it finally being out in public.

“If I’m being honest, there was a lot of fear about putting out a cookbook, because it’s such a personal, vulnerable project to put into the world,” she says. “My family had a lot to do with the book and they helped me so much.

“It’s just such a scary but exciting thing, and I’m grateful I got the chance to share so many recipes that are close to my family and my heart.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti