Annette Derovanessian had it all. She was a successful corporate accountant living in Manhattan Beach with her husband and family. But something wasn’t right.
She barely slept at night, and when she did, she found herself dreaming of spreadsheets and budgets and strategic plans. She frequently experienced heart palpitations. She was always exhausted.
“I had a demanding and very stressful job,” Derovanessian recalled. “I was just getting sick all the time. Back then, I thought, ‘This is normal. I am a human being. I get sick.’”
She’d put on a few extra pounds. She didn’t eat terribly, but she did manage to sneak in a pastry pretty much every day. Eating was mainly about convenience. She didn’t have time to cook much. She remembers her mother, Louise Marterossian, questioning her purchase of lemon juice at Costco.
“Don’t buy this,” her mom said. “Just juice from lemons.”
“Oh mom, that’s too complicated,” she replied. “This is more convenient.”
As her health problems persisted, Derovanessian knew she had to make some changes. She began by taking up yoga. She went to a local studio, Yoga Loft. After each class, she felt such a good glow that it felt only natural to eat more obviously healthy things. She started drinking a lot more water and making her own juices. And she started cooking almost every day, adding more nutritious foods to her diet.
“It took me a year and a half, really, for this health journey to have a full effect,” Derovanessian said. “But after adding all these superfoods, like kale and spinach, and learning about turmeric and just transforming the way I ate, I saw increased energy. I was not getting sick…I thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing. All this just by changing the way I ate.’”
In 2017, she encountered a book, Dr. Mark Hyman’s “The Blood Sugar Solution,” and tried his ten-day food detox plan. It was the final straw. She turned 50 that year and felt the best she’d felt her entire life.
“I felt reborn,” she said. “I have to say I feel more energetic and alive today than when I was in my 30s. I started adding even more vegetables to my meals and making them tasty by adding herbs such as dill, tarragon, cilantro…and spices like cayenne pepper, cinnamon, and ginger.”
Derovanessian felt such a happiness and radiance beaming from inside out. She had taken control of every morsel of food that entered her body, and done so by combining her mother’s and her grandmother’s recipes and adding the healthy components she’d learned on her own health journey.
It occurred to her that she needed to share what she’d discovered. She knew a lot of people were in the same convenience trap she’d been caught in; a cookbook could be a roadmap out, towards better health for entire families.
Thus was born “Annette’s Kitchen: Family Food Made Fun and Healthy,” a lush, playful, and deeply helpful cookbook that combines her family’s generations-old Armenian dishes with new recipes and science-based nutrition knowledge Derovanessian has picked up along the way — including a health coach training program she took from the cutting-edge Institute for Integrative Nutrition, whose teachers include Hyman, Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Walter Willet from Harvard, and Deepak Chopra.
The recipes in “Annette’s Kitchen,” she promises, can change your life.
“Really healthy eating leaves you so satisfied that you don’t feel hungry,” Derovanessian said. “You don’t have those cravings. Oh my gosh, back in the days when I worked as an accountant, I told myself I didn’t have time to cook. And I was always really, really hungry, and irritated, and had feelings of anxiety at times. Whatever I ate did not satisfy me. People think it’s because, ‘Oh, I have a high metabolism.’ No, not really. If you eat nutritious food, your body gets what it wants and you are not going to be hungry.”
Her book is a testament that health food is hearty food. It includes breakfast dishes, such as blueberry pancakes, eggs with asparagus and tomatoes, and herb frittatas (as well as a selection of juices and smoothies); appetizers such as fava beans, spinach pie, and chicken satay with peanut sauce; a rich selection of soups, including Russian dumpling soup, butternut squash soup, and kale and white bean soup (and of course borscht); a few dozen salads, such as quinoa beet, pineapple cabbage, and salmon dill salad; side dishes like cilantro saffron rice and spaghetti squash casserole; and wide array of main dishes, including chicken piccata, grilled baby lamb chops with mint sauce, stuffed grape leaves and yogurt-curry chicken stew. There are spice and nut blends, food pairings, and health tips.
Most helpfully, every single recipe includes extensive notes—on the science behind its ingredients, possible substitutions, pairing ideas, and miscellaneous thoughts on the dishes and how to serve and eat them. The idea is to make the recipes your own.
“I used to think you had to measure everything and follow recipes exactly to make food,” Derovanessian said. “But you know, you can spread your wings and try everything. Put tarragon in your food and see how that tastes. Put in your spices and just experiment with a lot of herbs. We all have different tastes and preferences, and there’s nothing wrong with experimenting and finding for yourself what is good.”
Everything is made from scratch, and nothing is at all complicated. This is a fundamental insight of “Annette’s Kitchen,” and of its author’s life. These days, she takes lemons and makes juice. Not at all reluctantly, she has now come to a conclusion: her mother knew best all along.
“She’s very proud,” Derovanessian said, laughing. “She loves it.”
For sample recipes, or to contact Annette Derovanessian about her cooking classes or health coaching, see MindfulEatingHealthyLiving.com. “Annette’s Kitchen” is available at (pages: a bookstore} or at Amazon.
