The Optimal Kitchen
I am a certified nutritional consultant and natural chef focused on helping clients discover not only which foods are best for them, but how to shop for them and prepare restaurant quality meals that are both affordable and easy to prepare. Anyone can tell you what you should or should not eat, but without the skills and know-how to prepare healthy meals, changing your nutrition lifestyle will be impossible. My focus is on whole, natural and when possible organic foods that come from sustainable and ethical sources.
Heather Todd Bailey, CNC
My story begins in the mid 1990’s, when I lived on the Caribbean island of Vieques working as a chef, embarking on what would be a life full of culinary adventures. In 1999 my husband and I moved to Cape Cod where we purchased an antique home and opened the Island House Bed and Breakfast in East Orleans. In 2001 I decided to return to my roots in education, however my ties to the culinary world never severed, as I remained a food and wine writer for various local publications and on-line sites.
However in the spring of 2006 I realized my passion has always been about food, but I wanted to go in a new direction,using both my skills as a professional chef and an educator. My decision to become a Nutritional Consultant was based on this fact,and combined my two loves and strengths, as well as address a real need in today’s cultural habits. Chronic degenerative diseases, whose roots are found in poor diet, having been growing exponentially in recent decades. There are the obvious candidates like Obesity, Diabetes and Cardiovascular Disease, but what we eat also affects mood disorders, various cancers, allergies and a myriad of other illness.
As a working mother, I am very much in tune with the difficulties of preparing wholesome meals for the entire family to enjoy. As a professional chef, I know a lot of tricks to make feeding yourself or your family, whole, nutritious, and most importantly, delicious meals, easy and affordable. There is not a person in this world, who coming home after a busy work day, would not find it much easier to simply open up a can or put some frozen meal in the microwave, than to start cooking a meal from scratch. The goal of the Optimal Kitchen is to empower clients to make healthy choices when it comes to feeding themselves and their friends and family and actually enjoy doing it!
I was the Nutrition Coordinator for Head Start here on Cape Cod, where I worked with young children and families to help them develop a love of healthy foods that will stay with them for life. I returned to the private sector where my focus has been on trying to help change the face of municipal nutrition for adults and children of all ages through volunteer and consulting initiatives with local schools and Councils on Aging.
Education
1993 BA in English Literature from Colgate University, Hamilton, NY
2006 Nutritional Consultant Certification,The Global College of Natural Medicine, Santa Cruz, CA
GOOD HEALTH STARTS WITH GOOD FOOD