Hi everyone! And hopefully everyone includes more than just my mom.
I’m Sammie Levin, HC’s Health Editor and a junior at the University of Michigan. Welcome to Collegiette Eats, a blog featuring my daily eats to give you ideas for healthy, easy-to-cook meals to prepare for yourself amid your crazy college life.
As someone who is passionate about food and nutrition, I’m really excited about writing this blog. I’m hesitant to use the word “foodie” to describe myself since it’s so overused—all you have to do to be considered a foodie these days is take a picture of your dessert and throw a Lo-Fi filter on it for all of Instagram to see. But I just looked up “foodie” in a thesaurus and I’m not a fan of any of the synonyms, so we’ll go with foodie. I haven’t eaten a food I don’t like (and I’ve tried just about everything). I’ve had a nondiscriminatory palate from the start: as a toddler, I was known to eat the onions and feta cheese out of my mom’s Greek salad. My love of food has led me to develop an enthusiasm for all food-related activities (whether it’s eating it, cooking it, smelling it, looking at pictures of it or just playing with it).
Me, extremely excited to eat Japanese food
Me, extremely excited to eat Mexican food
My senior year of high school, I got into cooking and loved trying new recipes online. I started following a few healthy food blogs and liked how the bloggers posted pictures and descriptions of their meals so I could get ideas for my own meals. Once college started, though, I was unable to keep cooking. Freshman year I lived in a dorm, and sophomore year I lived in my sorority house, so I didn’t have access to a kitchen either year. And I started eating less healthy—and by less, I mean a lot less. The dining hall dessert table always called my name (and who was I to turn it down?), I didn’t monitor my portion sizes and late-night snacking became a habit.
Unfortunately, I’m not one of those girls who can eat whatever she wants and not gain an ounce, so I paid the price for letting my healthy eating habits slip for two years. Now that I live in an off-campus apartment and have my own kitchen, I’ve been trying to get back on track. I already feel so much better after just two months of preparing my own food, so I’m inspired to help other collegiettes out there who may be struggling to eat healthy just as I was, or who just need some good meal ideas that don’t take 20 ingredients and a degree from a culinary school to make. And obviously, I take taste into consideration when I’m making my meals (duh, it’s the most important part)—I can assure you that you won’t just be seeing a bowl of lettuce on here.
So, keep checking back in to Collegiette Eats for regular posts about my daily eats! Let’s get cookin’.