I love everything about Puneeta Varma. She is a foodie, blogger, world traveler, activist, and a game changer. Puneeta left her high powered marketing job to become a stay at home mom. That changed soon and today she blogs about food, family and brings a global vision and palate to cuisine which I love and admire about her. Puneeta talks about food like a purist with different layers of taste which I admire. When you get two foodies talking about food, umami happens.

Puneeta,  a pleasure, and honor to have a food blogger on my blog. Please tell my readers about yourself and your blog? What is your story?

I am a writer and mom of two based in Toronto. My blog MapleandMarigold.com is my love letter to India and Canada. Maple represents Canada and our life here, while marigold with its color and significance in Indian traditions represents my roots and heritage in India. I grew up in India and as a result of my dad’s career in the Indian army, we moved homes and cities frequently. That life of a nomad continued even after marriage. Shortly after my husband and I got together, we decided to move to Dubai. What started off as an adventure to explore living life outside of India saw us moving across the world from Delhi to the Middle East to Toronto then Calgary, and finally a few years ago back to Toronto. It’s been a lifetime of moving and Canada finally feels like home. We just may be here to stay.

On the way, we have had two kids, both of whom had their first plane rides when they were just a few weeks old. Today, at 13 and 8, they’ve accumulated more flying miles than many adults I know. People who knew me before the kids came along are shocked that I traded in my beloved and totally high-stress marketing career to be a stay-at-home mom. That didn’t last long when I started blogging and it opened the door to a brand new journey. Blogging helped me have flexibility and be around more for my kids. Through my writing and connecting with readers around the world, MapleandMarigold.com has opened my eyes and provided me with immense creative energy and entrepreneurial challenges.

Did blogging change you? How?

When I started writing my focus was on family, food, and wellness all with a multicultural flair. My life was about sharing ways to make life healthy, happy and delicious and that was reflected in my writing and on social media. Over the years through research and food writing I have become more invested in raising awareness of how important good food and nourishment was for us, our communities and the planet. My blogging journey has evolved the way I think and talk about food, and it has helped me understand how important it is to our very existence.

What is your opinion on good food? What is it?

Good food is about what tastes good and is good for us. But Jerry, food is about more than just flavor and nutrition, right?! It has to be.

Good food tastes good, yes, but it has to also be good for us and our community. It has to always be about more than just us.  Somewhere along the line, in this time of misinformation and overconsumption, we are making choices that are harmful to us and the planet. This became my motivation to start a new initiative, NourishbyNumbers.com. This is a social movement where people come together to demand change in the way we grow, raise, talk about and consume our food. Check out the hashtag #1000waystoNourish to follow along.

How important is homecooked food and eating meals together as a family to you?

On a scale of 1to 10, maybe a 24? I believe the heart of the family beats in the kitchen and making a homecooked meal for your family while it may be an old-fashioned concept, is so important. At the same time, I am not a fan of spending long hours in front of the stove– if there’s a shortcut I’ll find it and since I’m a blogger, I’ll even share it! Sunday evening meal prep, meal planning, grocery shopping with the meal plan in mind, those are all tips that work for my family and help us spend time together at the dinner table.

What is your favorite weeknight meal?

DIY Food. Sounds crazy I know but it’s the one way I know my kids feel some control over what they are eating, and at the same time are making choices that I am happy with. Let me explain!

DIY food is assembling your own dinner, choosing the condiments, how much, what flavor, soup or rice, etc. Think tacos or rice bowls (pho is popular with us). My kitchen is a little bit complicated and runs between food sensitivities, general pickiness and my need to have a side of green chilies with EVERYTHING, DIY works perfectly even on a crazy weeknight. Vietnamese style pho with tofu, rice noodles, bokchoy and crunchy peanuts is a good example, where I cook and cut up everything and the kids take it out to the table and pick and choose.  For tacos I make chicken and red beans, the kids chop the vegetables and lay it out.

Help me understand three ingredients you consciously avoid or eliminate even when the recipe calls for it?

I avoid wheat, dairy, and soy in my cooking as much as possible. I avoid the wheat for my own wellbeing, and I have found good-enough replacements for dairy and soy in most dishes to manage my kids’ allergies. Having said that, I do believe that the nutrition in a bowl of yogurt and the comfort I find a cup of milk at the end of a long day – those are just irreplaceable.

What three ingredients you love using in your recipes?

My cooking is real-world food. Even though I am a blogger, my food isn’t always Instagram-worthy or even pretty. In fact, if brown food was a category, I would probably ace it. I use real ingredients with herbs and spices that render big flavor. You’ll often find me chopping ginger, working with turmeric and coconut milk in my kitchen.

You do not like a particular dish at your favorite restaurant, what will you do?

I will micro-analyze it to death. My husband is quite used to seeing me chew slowly and work my way around trying to guess what exactly it is that I don’t like about the dish. If there is something actually wrong with the dish – burnt milk in the curry base, too much salt, undercooked, etc, I will mention it to the waiter. Staff at restaurants though have a hard enough job as it is and I don’t want to make it harder for them but if that cream in butter chicken is burnt, it has been left on the stove far too long and it deserves to be sent back!

What’s the one superpower wish you had?

Remove all the plastic in the world. When I was little, I used to dream about waving my hand and magically removing all the garbage on the planet. Sadly, magic doesn’t work, we have to actually work together to make it happen.

How important is food faith finance and family in your life?

My family is the most important to me and along with faith. Faith that we can all do better and be better in our lives. We have only a few years to have an impact and influence change and wouldn’t it be amazing if we just worked together for the good for all people?

The post Puneeta Varma: Maple & Marigold appeared first on Four Columns of a Balanced Life.

Aditi is a vegan blogger from Chicago. When I ask her to tell me something that nobody knows about here she replies “Something nobody knows about me is that I was a dancer for 15 years. I did Indian classical dancing, specifically a dance called “Bharatanatyam.” I graduated from my dance academy in 2014, and for the graduation ceremony, I wore traditional Bharatanatyam clothing and performed all the dances I had learned by myself in front of family, friends, and other guests. I performed to live music, and the performance was 4-5 hours long. Most people would think you’d get tired after dancing for that much time, but I was so energized, I was ready to go again as soon as I finished! Another interesting tidbit about me is that I was a debater in high school. That’s what inspired me to become a social advocate, and I hope to one day sit in Congress or as the surgeon general. I may even run for president, but that’s not totally decided yet.”

Aditi, how are things at school? What are you studying and why?

I’m currently a chemical engineering major, but I’ll be switching to neuroscience. I love chemistry, which is why I chose chemical engineering, but I soon realized (after taking a variety of classes during my first year), that I’m also very interested in biology, biochemistry, psychology, and sociology. I love the hard sciences because they require a lot of critical thinking and understanding, which I’m good at. Psych and soc expose me to people’s everyday behaviors and how a society functions, which has really opened up my mind and made me think more about the world we live in and the ideologies people hold so dear. As a result, I knew the way to bring these subjects together was through neuroscience. I also am very fascinated by the brain. It’s kind of amazing how a 3-pound sponge is behind our every thought, movement, and action. I want to study it a lot more, and so I knew neuroscience was for me. While I think chemical engineering is interesting, I’m not really that into math, so I decided to leave it.

Besides that, school is going great. I recently founded and preside over “Veggie Might,” which is a vegan, animal welfare organization. We’ve already had 13 members join in the first week. I’m also part of a neuroscience lab, and I volunteer at a soup kitchen. I also run my healthy and vegan food blog and cook whenever I can.

What are your future plans and goals?

I plan to attend medical school after graduating from college. Ever since I was young, it’s been my goal to be a doctor. At that time, it seemed like that was a long way away, but I’ll be there in just three short years. I hope to become a surgeon, either in neurology or cardiology. I also am really interested in politics, particularly, social justice. Therefore, I want to be a physician that advocates for her patients. I want to sit on the FDA board or nutritional board of the United States to make sure there’s an objective voice helping make decisions about what drugs are safe for Americans and what dietary guidelines should be like. Many Americans are also uninsured, and I want to be in Congress and push for legislation that provides insurance to those people. Hopefully, by the time I’m a doctor, our healthcare system will be better, but it doesn’t look like this issue is going away any time soon.

Is your healthy and vegan food blog just a hobby or something more serious? What do you get out of writing cooking blogs?

I started blogging when I saw how unhealthy everyone in my dorm is. Most college students gain a lot of weight in their first year because they don’t have their parents to cook for them. They eat whatever is put in front of them, and cafeterias in dorms serve really unhealthy food. I wouldn’t eat in my dorm’s cafeteria for this reason, and so I came up with ways to make tasty and healthy food out of my dorm room. I’d talk to people about this, and they’d ask me how I did it. I soon realized blogging was a great way to reach a wider audience. I could help more college students this way with a vegan food blog.

I’ve always loved writing. In high school, I was the editor in chief of the newspaper. I also write creative short stories because I have a really rampant imagination, and my mind is always making up strange characters and putting them in all sorts of situations. For me, writing is an outlet. I use it to jot down all my ideas, passions, and express myself. It’s not to make me money or anything; the healthy eating blog is a passion and a hobby.

What does women empowerment mean to you and this generation?

Women empowerment is helping women understand they can do anything. It isn’t a man’s world, and honestly, it never was. Unfortunately, centuries of culture perpetuated terrible things about women, like how they’re weak, too emotional, etc. Empowerment is about helping women achieve everything they want in life.

I want all women to stand up and say what’s on their minds. I want them to go into male-dominated professions. I want them to not be afraid to show their bodies and love themselves. I also want women to feel safe at night. I want them to get better medical care. I want women to be able to control their own reproductive rights without congressman who has no business telling them what they should and shouldn’t do in their bodies.

I used to think America was this amazing nation where everyone was equal. As I grew up, I realized how naive I had been. Women, everywhere, still have a very big fight ahead of them to be respected and treated as equals, and this is why women empowerment is so important. Because when one woman does something she isn’t supposed to, it inspires another to do something too. And that’s what leads to real change. This generation doesn’t have the same fight as the older generation, but we still must keep demanding more respect and more equality from our leaders. We can’t just stop because it has gotten better.

Help me understanding something challenging you went through. What did you learn from it and how did you overcome it?

When I was a senior in high school, I applied for BS/MD programs when applying for college. These are programs that automatically let you into medical school following college graduation. You don’t need to apply to medical school or take the MCAT. Basically, anyone who wants to be a doctor applied to these programs, which makes them very competitive. I was accepted to only one program and rejected from 19 others. I didn’t go to the one I was accepted to because it was expensive, and it was in Florida, which is far from where I lived.

It was really hard seeing my friends get into this program and go to great schools. I felt left out, but most of all, I felt like I wasn’t good enough to be a doctor. That summer, my best friend (who was a pretty toxic person) and I had a falling out, and we stopped being friends. As a result, all my other friends stopped talking to me too. They chose her over me. It was a summer of a lot of pain for me.

Though I had faced so many rejections, I decided to make college a fresh start. I wasn’t going to my top choice or even second choice school, but my dream to be a doctor still burned within me. I knew, no matter what, I would make it there. I didn’t care how long it took me, just as long as I got to that finish line. I decided I’d make the best out of this school.

And I have. I have my own club. I work at a lab with great people, and I may even get into a published paper this summer. I love volunteering at the soup kitchen where I get to feed people with food I made. I love my blog. My professors are great, and they help me whenever I need it. I have people in my life that support me with whatever I do (they know who they are, so I’m not going to name them here). In short, those rejections helped me realize that I don’t need those programs. I don’t need toxic friends in my life who are overly competitive, judgmental, and rude. I am a determined and dedicated person, and that’s all I need to get me to my goals.

How important food, faith, family, and finance play in your life?

Well, food plays a huge role in my life. I’m vegan, which has helped me appreciate the beauty of cooking and delicious fruits, vegetables, and grains. It’s honestly amazing what you can do with simple ingredients like, let’s say, almonds. You can make milk, ice cream, yogurt, or flour out of them. When I’m older (and have a backyard), I want to grow my own plants and cook with fresh food. Faith plays a role in my life too. I’m a devout Hindu, and it’s important to me to preserve my culture and religion. I hope to pass this on to my children one day. Perhaps the most important people in my life are my family. I was raised by a single mom, so it’s just me, my mom, my sister, and our dog in our house. We’re a small bunch, but I’ve met no one more loving and stronger than my mother. She has raised me and my sister while working multiple jobs, and she’s made us into independent, motivated women. She’s made sure to teach us that we don’t need to rely on anyone, and instilled in us the importance of studying, hard work, and dedication. Because of her, I’m everything I am today, and I want to pass those qualities onto my kids one day. Finance is also important in my life. I like to only spend when I need something. It’s important to me to have the least amount of debt possible, which is why I’m studying in scholarship.

Talk to me about your city. Why should we visit it and name me some good restaurants?

I’m from Chicago, and we have some great places to eat there. My favorite has to be the Chicago Diner. It’s an all-vegan diner, with the best peanut butter, chocolate milkshakes, and French toast. I also love True Life Kitchen, but that place is not all vegan. Some great vegan places are Handlebar, Ground Control, Urban Kitchen, and The Chicago House of Za (a totally vegan pizza place!). Chicago is also known for Portillo’s, which I’ve only had once or twice due to their lack of vegan food. However, I’ve heard their chocolate cake is to die for.

Chicago also has the beautiful Lake Michigan and Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, and The Field Museum. It’s a lot of fun to visit the city in the summer. I love going there often, usually to try a new vegan place.

If you were chosen to go to Mars. What three things would you take with you?

If I was going to Mars, I’d take a camera for sure because I want to take pictures of what I’m seeing and then bring it back to Earth for people to see (and it would make great memories!). I’d also take a few small baggies to collect substances I find on the planet. This would probably help scientists figure out whether Mars will make a habitable planet one day since I’m pretty sure people will go through Earth’s resources and need a place to live. Finally, I’d take plant seeds. A lot of evidence shows that Mars’s surface is good for farming, so I’d start my own garden so that I don’t run out of food while I’m there.

Tell me a good engineering joke?

I don’t know if it’s good, but:

Newton asked, “How do you write the number 4 in between the number 5?”

Medical students said: “that’s a joke.”

Science students said: “impossible.”

Management students said: “not found on the internet”

Engineering students said: “F(iv)e.”

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