Hi! I’m Chef Jessica Catalano.
I create healthy carnivore recipes, teach the ins and outs of creating medical cannabis edibles at home, show you how to eat with the seasons & combine ancestral foods full of prana, and believe that every single one of us has the right to heal our bodies the way nature intended us to. I believe animals are food and plants are medicine.
My goal is to help you create a better quality of life with a meat-based diet and yoga. Cannabis when balanced with nutrient dense animal foods and a yogic healthy lifestyle can help promote a longer and more fulfilling life. In fact, I’ve dedicated my whole entire career to helping people heal with cannabis the last 15 years and have been teaching the benefits of plants as medicine.
It’s All About Your Body and Your Choice.
This entire website is devoted to showing you the best information, simple tips, easy tricks, and effective hacks for at home ancestral medical cannabis edibles. I want you to feel better, become healthier, and consume nutritious food more consciously—all by incorporating carnivore foods and cannabis into your life. I also want to show you what a daily yoga practice will bring to the table wellness wise in your life. More importantly, I want you to love the body you are within.
Recipes You Can Expect to Find Here
I have always been about teaching the food history, strain lineage, strain pairings, medicinal properties of strains, and flavor profiles of food and cannabis together. I have also dedicated the last 15 years to teaching not only traditional cannabis cuisine but also raw cannabis cuisine.
My dishes focus on health-conscious, carnivore, animal-based, and ancestral foods while still maintaining strain and culturally significant recipes. All previous traditional cannabis recipes will still be in the archives, in case you feel the need to have a cheat day. But let’s be clear, traditional is never a bad thing, in moderation!
Carnivore Diet, Carnivore Recipes
When I moved to Colorado in December of 2007, I was quickly introduced to the raw food lifestyle. Immediately, I began to eat a raw (75% raw) whole foods diet as I felt a magnetic pull towards the raw food movement. I enjoyed raw organs, meats and game meats, brains, raw milk, raw cheese and other raw dairy products, raw eggs, raw seeds and nuts, raw fruit and vegetables, and cooked my meat or game meats blue rare or rare. I ate this way starting in January 2008 and experienced vibrant health, but not quite perfect health.
I ate many living foods and even included many raw food cannabis recipes in my 2012 book, The Ganja Kitchen Revolution. I also created many raw cannabis recipes for magazines, websites, interviews, the news, TV, documentaries, dinner events, and private events. Little did I know the journey that was about to unfold.
In September 2015, I went plant-based pescatarian after the birth of my daughter Mary Jane as my periods became more painful and I thought that diet was the solution. In 2017, I found out I had endometriosis and needed surgery – at last an answer I was searching for. After the procedure, my doctor suggested a plant-based diet to help bring down inflammation in my body.
I went on birth control to suppress my period and suspend the endometriosis – a total game changer! It stopped all my associated painful moon symptoms; however, I was still experiencing widespread inflammation in other parts of my body. I was puzzled. But my doctor said that it would take time to heal. From September 2017 to 2022, I stopped eating fish and tried every plant-based diet under the sun on a quest to bring down the inflammation and calm my body down: keto, paleo, low carb, high carb, vegetarian, raw vegetarian, high carb vegan, raw vegan, master cleanse, gluten-free, fruitarian, and 80/10/10.
Right before the Pandemic hit, I was floored by a flu virus that was a little ruffian. My immune system response went haywire, and I developed chronic urticaria (hives). I was advised to give it some time to see if my immune system could clear the issue. It didn’t. So, I had the option of trying an extremely intense medication called Prednisone or going to an allergist. I chose the latter! I found out I had 8 allergies that I was not aware of. Some of which I developed after being pregnant (a common affliction that happens after women have children). Of course, I cut out all of the allergens, yet the hives remained.
At this point I was very flustered but still believed diet was the cure, not Prednisone. In late 2022, I got extremely sick with the flu, and I realized the plant-based diet paradigm was no longer working for me as I hit a wall 8 years later. I started experimenting with eating eggs from my chickens. And let me give you an idea of how nutrient dense our eggs are – our chickens are pastured AND meat-fed. I felt myself gaining more energy with a better sense of well-being with every egg.
While I was in Yoga school working on my 200 RYT training I thought back to my raw and mostly animal-based, ancestral diet I did for 7 years starting in 2008. Whole foods and animal-based foods that came from nature not man, is what provided health – not man-made vegan burgers. 2023 marked the year of the hog as pork re-entered the table once again in our household. We decided as a family to go on an animal-based diet, Dr. Saladino style.
Knowing my endometriosis was suspended with birth control, I felt confident that this was the final answer to stopping the lingering inflammation in my body. Going onto an animal-based diet changed my life forever. It was as if a light switch was flipped on, and my body came alive- full of life and vigor. Both my health and performance in Marital Arts skyrocketed! I physically felt high even though I had not consumed any cannabis. But the hives still lingered and were worse when I ate a lot of whole raw fruits.
However, I felt as though the inflammation in my body was slowly improving with the addition of pastured pork. The hog that we sourced was pasture-raised, and pasture-finished pork from a farmer, Farmer George, who is 10 minutes from our very own micro farm. I joked to people that our family went from vegetarians to porktarians.
Then, I started another 40-day juice fast (I do these twice a year) to flood my system with biophotons and living foods and give my body a chance to take a break. When it was done, I felt amazing! I resumed eating meat and started the Carnivore diet as I was very inspired by all the results. Little did I know, oxalate dumping was a thing, juice was full of oxalates, and it halted my first try on the carnivore diet before I could even give it a chance.
I stopped my allergy medication, stopped all caffeine, and had the worst 12 days of my life. This was worse than detox, this was a healing crisis! And I was covered in hives. I kept thinking to myself that no diet should make you feel this bad, especially if it supposed to be a good reset for your body. For every one of those twelve days I meditated in easy pose on why I was having chronic urticaria and how I could fix it. Then I had an epiphany.
The original way I was eating in 2008 on an ancestral, primal raw foods diet was full of foods I was allergic to! However, I continued to ponder why the hives continued to exist with the food allergens taken out of the picture. Unfortunately, at this time I had no knowledge of the correlation of oxalate dumping and hives. Or the fact I had been drinking a high number of oxalates in my juices. And that I when you went onto a strictly animal-foods diet, that the body would then release oxalates and experience dumping symptoms. So I just dropped the carnivore diet and stuck to an animal-based diet.
But then, I leveled up. When I was plant-based, my husband and I tried over a year to have another baby but unfortunately it never worked out. The previous surgery I had for endometriosis lingered in my brain as the words echoed through time from my surgeon, “If you want to have more children do it now before surgery, because you most likely won’t be able to conceive after surgery.” Those words haunted me as I thought about how I didn’t want more children back then, but because of that choice, my daughter would be alone when we turned to dust. She even cried, “I don’t want to die alone!” at the age of 7 from the back of a car, driving home from a friend’s BBQ gathering. But I had no idea at this point in time, I was infertile because I was a vegetarian, not because of the surgery.
The year 2023 also was a year of re-discovering all the things I loved about meat and all my favorite raw recipes. I ate meat at every meal and loved every little bite. One day, a flicker of hope passed through my consciousness, “What if because I am eating meat, I can get pregnant now? What if meat is the missing link?” I knocked it off, thinking I was being irrational. But then the thought kept pressing in my brain and I finally talked to my husband about it. We agreed to try again, but with no expectations. After all, I had been eating an animal-based diet for 8 months. BOOM! By the second month of trying, I was pregnant! Meat really is supreme!
At 10 months, came my transcendence. Morning sickness was wicked, and I developed an aversion to all plants and fruits. And if I forced myself to eat some, I would have horrid cramping, gas, the runs, headache, and feel like I was being poisoned. All my favorite fruits and veggies went out the window and into the chicken run. My body only craved meat, dairy, eggs, salt, water, and sometimes orange juice. Going out to eat socially gave me anxiety as I knew if I had to eat these things, I would get very sick. Baby knows best.
Before I knew it, my diet transitioned to a carnivore diet again, but this time naturally. But instead of getting sick, it made me feel like I had transcended to a higher plane of existence for both myself and my baby. And my hives STOPPED after 30 days of strict carnivore! I learned oxalates from plants and fruits can also cause hives when the body detoxes from them. The carnivore diet became a total game changer for me.
As I navigated this new existence, my husband and daughter reaped all the benefits of my carnivore cooking and baking. They absolutely loved all the carnivore recipes I created, and my daughter exclaimed, “I never want to eat vegetarian food again!” Her favorite recipe to this day, is carnivore chili, made from pastured bison, 3 cuts of pastured pork, pastured beef, 72hr pork bone broth, and bacon fat.
It is my hope that our journey as a family will help you to ignite your own health and fitness to reach your maximum human potential. I had to come full circle to truly appreciate and understand the importance of animal-based foods. I also learned that plants and fruits are more reserved for medicinal uses over daily eating. And that all animal products are the only foods we should be eating on a day-by-day basis. By changing this perspective, my health changed dramatically – I restored my fertility and got off daily prescription allergy medication for my chronic hives.
Published recipes on this website will be taking a focus on nourishing and healing the body through carnivore recipes I developed for my family, plants as only medicine, wellness through biophotons, healthy weight management, daily yoga practice, and maintaining homeostasis in the body through a carnivore diet and cannabis when needed. Recipes will be rolling out with step-by-step instructions.
So, What Do You Need to Eat to be Considered Carnivore?
Meat, dairy, eggs, salt, and water. And yes, I have become radical. No birthday cake, bakery treat, or cheats at a restaurant on a family vacation is worth becoming sick over.
Carnivore Not Your Thing? Don’t worry, I Got You Covered!
Alternative recipes you will also be able to find here: traditional cooked edible recipes that I have written over the years for cannabis magazines, cookbooks, news articles, and press.
What is the Carnivore Diet?
Often, as time passes throughout the ages, memories often fade, and a clear picture of the past can become cloudy. Thankfully, we can thank our prehistoric ancestors who first taught us how important a meat centric diet is. When paleontologists discovered Australopithecus, which are thought to have lived on Earth 4 million years ago, were the first humans to start eating a primarily meat-based diet. It is from here, that the carnivore diet started to unfold in our human history.
Certainly, as human evolution progressed, diverse groups in various regions consumed foods that were available in their climates. With the opening of trade routes, food availability shifted yet again. Historically, tribes such as the Inuit and Maasai have maintained a predominantly meat-based diet. In contrast, other cultures, like the Irish, have traditionally relied on dairy, grains, meat, and vegetables as their dietary mainstays. Ultimately, meat tends to take a central role, with all communities endeavoring to secure it above all else.
It’s crucial to remember that there wasn’t a singular “ancestral diet”, that all ancient humans adhered to. Based on their geographic locations, agricultural season, genetic makeup, and the eras they lived in, our ancestors’ dietary habits and the food that was readily available to them varied greatly. For instance, the diets of African hunter-gatherers and European subsistence farmers were very different from one another. Nevertheless, despite their differences, several of these diets had some fundamental similarities across the board – and that was a focus on hunting as much meat as possible.
Advancing to the 19th century, German writer Bernard Moncriff, author of “The Philosophy of the Stomach: An Exclusively Animal Diet” in 1856, is recognized for introducing the all-meat diet concept after subsisting on only milk and beef for a year. Italian physician Arnaldo Cantani, in the 1870s, prescribed an all-animal diet to his diabetic patients. In the 1880s, James H. Salisbury advocated for a meat-centric diet that involved consuming three to five quarts of hot water and two to four pounds of lean beef daily for four to twelve weeks, known as the Salisbury diet, or simply the meat and hot water diet.
In 2018, Dr. Shawn Baker, an orthopedic surgeon and author of “The Carnivore Diet,” began promoting an all-meat diet on social media. He co-founded Revero, an online medical clinic leveraging carnivore diet protocols to treat patients. Dr. Paul Saladino, another proponent of the meat-only lifestyle, authored books and diet plans highlighting the alleged health benefits of this zero-carb approach. However, after five years, he shifted to an “animal-based diet” that includes meat, fruits, organs, dairy, and honey. Mikhaila Peterson and her father, Jordan Peterson, have also been strong advocates for the diet, adhering to a strict regimen of beef, salt, and water, known as the “lion diet.”
The carnivore diet focuses on unprocessed, organic, and natural foods sourced through hunting, gathering, fishing, and farming from land, air, and water. Its goal is to foster health restoration, reduce excess body fat quickly, and mirror the pre-industrial revolution ancestral diets. Many are astonished to discover that this diet offers all essential nutrients, including proteins, vitamins, and minerals.
What Foods Can I Eat?
Carnivores consume animal-based foods such as seafood, poultry, pork, beef, game, lamb, goat, eggs, and dairy. They strictly avoid grains, legumes, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and all fruits. Salt is permitted and necessary to maintain electrolyte balance due to the diet’s low carbohydrate content. Similarly, humans have historically sought out salt, which has been a resource worth waging wars over, much like animals in the wild.
- Pastured raised meat
- Wild-caught seafood
- Wild game
- Raw grass fed dairy
- Fermented dairy and meat products (protects the gut microbiome)
- Bone broth
- Organ meats
- Animal fats
- Animal by-products
- Eggs
- Salt
MJ’s Chookie Farm
In 2018, I started a micro-farm for my daughter Mary Jane and reclaimed the native plants that were trying to grow but that the previous owners did not want. At first, I tended to the existing fruit, deciduous, and evergreen trees that hedged our entire property in a green fence. We cleaned up the property and stocked a cord of firewood. My husband built raised beds so that I could plant berries, herbs, onions, garlic, tubers, and pollinator plants that all would come up every year. I wanted to plant food for us and for the bees that would take minimal maintenance and were perennials. He also built German style compost bins so that I could make my own soil.
Every year, I added more perennial food and flowers and reaped the benefits of making my own soil. In addition to the perennials, we also enjoyed planting seasonal root vegetables. Instead of working against nature, trying to create a perfectly manicured lawn, I worked with nature and created a habitat that quickly became a wildlife refuge. Then the natural progression of regenerative farming really began to snowball in the most beautiful way.
We bought baby chicks late season and quickly got to building a chicken coop and run. At first, we gave away our eggs to our community at church, friends, and neighbors. But we quickly realized that our hens were quite literally sitting on something special. “Best eggs EVER” literally came out of the mouths of every recipient of our eggs. It seemed orchestrated at first, but the same words kept coming from new people. Under the guidance of the local chicken guru Charlie, from Charlie’s Chicks in Port, Orchard, Washington – I legally started MJ’s Chookie Farm.
As our flock grew, so did our customer base and the food on the farm I was growing for the chickens. Our farm became a full-blown regenerative farm, that was giving back to the land and back to our clients. It was an amazing feeling to be able to provide quality nutrient dense eggs that people kept coming back for more. Today, we are truly blessed with the continual growth of our regenerative farm and our customer base.
MJ’s Chookie Farm free-ranges the entire flock, and they are meat fed. Every day they also get raw or cooked meat, cheese, raw kefir, a fruit/veg salad I grow on the property, and scraps from the kitchen and left over meals. During the winter they get organic cracked corn only during the coldest days, as it increases heat in the body and helps keep them warm. I also ferment oatmeal and kefir overnight to pull anti-nutrients in the fall/winter. Organic soy free chicken feed and oyster/eggshell is always available as a supplement. And then they get a big bowl of mash everyday as well. The mash ingredients are a secret recipe. But its fermented as well 🙂
American Spirit Yoga
During the pandemic I wanted to start a yoga business because, why not? I saw how many people’s health were being affected negatively and decided to do something about it. I realized at this moment that people needed more yoga and whole foods in their life.
American Spirit Yoga, came to life, to bring accessibility to yoga that has never been seen before. It was my goal to make this daily practice obtainable by everyone and every, body – regardless of income, race, gender, disability, or creed.
“Yoga, as a way of life and a philosophy, can be practiced by anyone with inclination to undertake it, for yoga belongs to humanity as a whole. It is not the property of any one group or any one individual, but can be followed by any and all, in any corner of the globe, regardless of class, creed or religion.” – K. Pattabhi Jois
Going Zero Waste
When I transitioned into a minimalist lifestyle, I realized my efforts to be green since I was a little child was a poor attempt at most. I was trapped in the consumerist and disposable web that our culture has propagated. Therefore, my family and I decided to commit to going Zero Waste.
What Is Zero Waste?
This term was originated for waste management operations within factories in 2001. Overtime, this term was adopted as a lifestyle within the environmentalist movement. In short, zero waste aims to: send nothing to the landfill, reduce our over consumption of products, recycle plastics/metal/glass/cardboard, donate or giveaway clothing and other items we no longer need, compost, be self-sufficient, and reuse things as much as possible.
Slow Living, Slow Food, Micro Farming, Hyper-Local Gift Economy, and Minimalism
Since moving to a rural suburb of Seattle in February of 2018 our family began to slowly incorporate principles of the slow living, slow food, regenerative farming, hyper-local gift economy, and the minimalism movement. We found that by slowing down to appreciate things in the moment, developing and restoring our land into a micro farm, cooking simple meals at home, participating in the hyper-local gift giving economy, and living with things we only really need – life became immeasurably richer. Dropping out of the so called “rat race” is an eye-opening experience like no other.
As I walk on the path, I will be posting DIY recipes, tips, and hacks. I want to show you how easy it is to walk a greener and more simple life path while also putting your hard-earned money in the bank instead of the pockets of big-time greedy corporations. Simple living is not expensive or overly complicated, it is quite the opposite! You will be amazed what a huge environmental impact you, as one person, will make. And every little change you make not only affects our environment positively but also inspires others to do the same <3
15 Year Cannabis Industry Veteran and Leading Expert
Jessica Catalano is a professional Cannabis Chef who is classically trained, cannabis edibles expert, carnivore recipe developer, food writer, the pioneer of strain specific cannabis cuisine, chicken farmer (your local egg plug), founder of American Spirit Yoga (RYT 200), and author of The Ganja Kitchen Revolution: The Bible of Cannabis Cuisine traditionally published by Green Candy Press. She is a Medical Cannabis and Cannabis Lifestyle advocate who has combined her two loves of food and cannabis into stylish medicated dishes for Medical Cannabis patients.
She was born and raised in Buffalo, NY and then headed west to Colorado at 23. Catalano holds three culinary degrees: Pastry Arts, Culinary Arts, and Food Service Management and an EMS certificate that she earned while living in Colorado. Between her education, experience in the bakery and restaurant industry, impressive cannabis industry working experience, and her knowledge of cannabis, she has been called the “OG Cannabis Chef” by many.
Catalano pioneered strain specific cannabis cuisine for flavor, the first chef in the world to publicly do so, by infusing terpenes into cooking and baking via strain specific recipes to elevate the taste in the edibles she creates. What this means is that she uses specific strains in specific recipes to enhance the flavor profiles of the dishes she constructs. For example, Lemon Kush can be paired with Vietnamese Spring Rolls. By doing this, the Lemon Kush will impart a lemony taste with floral and mint undertones which deepens the flavors in this dish because of the similar taste profiles already present in the ingredients. This also helps patients to understand the importance of terpene flavor profiles in recipes for a more enjoyable experience and how each strain will affect their bodies.
In 2009, she began experimenting with Strain Specific Cooking and Baking in conjunction with Raw Cannabis Cuisine then launched a blog in June 2010 to share her recipes with medical marijuana patients. The Ganja Kitchen Revolution blog was born and quickly became such a success that in September 2010 she was approached by Green Candy Press. Jessica was offered a book deal at 26 years old which she accepted and TGKR went into production. Two years later it hit the market as the first Strain Specific Gourmet Cannabis Cookbook. It has quickly become the authority on strain specific cannabis pairings and a must have in any aspiring cannabis chef’s cookbook collection. Today Chef Jessica Catalano still produces free recipes for medical marijuana patients to make in the comfort of their own homes.
Currently, Catalano tests carnivore recipes in her kitchen and runs her blog to help educate cannabis patients on cooking and baking with cannabis. She is the former Food Columnist for the international SKUNK Magazine and former cover girl for Tokin’ Female of the Month (Skunk Magazine Volume 8, Issue 3). In addition to SKUNK Magazine, she has written for their sister magazine The Highway as a cannabis food writer. She also was a contributing editor to Diane Fornbacher’s LadyBud Magazine, contributor to the national Cannabis Now Magazine, and Culture writer for Weedmaps.
Catalano was also named Stoner Girl of Winter 2015 by the Stoner Girl’s Guide. She is the former Cannabis Chef at Cultivating Spirits who taught the Cooking with Cannabis Class as well as the Sensational Fusion Private Dinners. She cooked for and co-hosted the first cannabis pairing dinner at the 2015 Aspen X Games with the Cultivating Spirits family. Catalano has cooked for celebrities such as Snoop Dogg in Aspen and has served as a judge for the Denver Hightimes U.S Cannabis Cup in 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2016 for Edibles, Topicals, and CBD products. She is also a former reviewer for Seattle products on “The Proper Cannabis Committee” for A Proper High
She has appeared on TLC, Munchies VICE, and Al Jazeera. Her work has been mentioned in Vogue Magazine, Vice, Al Jazeera, Brazil’s Carta Capital Magazine, Buzzfeed, the Associated Press, The Guardian, Business Insider, StarChef’s Rising Stars Magazine, Culture Magazine, Skunk Magazine, Cannabis Now Magazine, Ladybud Magazine, FSR Magazine, Denver Westword, the Aspen Times, the Summit Daily, the Cannabist, the Stoner Girls Guide, and many more. She has also done cannabis food writing for StickyGuide, Releaf Magazine, Smell the Truth, The Nug, PROHBTD, Whaxy, Stuff Stoners Like, the Smoking Bud, Starchef’s, Leafly, High Times Magazine, VICE, MUNCHIES, Colorado’s very own weed-rag The Daily Doobie, and many other publications.
As a Medical Cannabis patient herself, she has extensive knowledge since early 1997 for medicinal purposes. She continues to strive for excellence both in cooking, baking, living foods, and Medical Cannabis knowledge. Her goal is to help as many Medical Cannabis patients as she possibly can creating a better quality of life for them. She explores the health benefits of cooking with cannabis which when balanced with good nutrition and a healthy lifestyle can help promote a longer and more fulfilling life. She is also a passionate yoga teacher and martial artist (Taekwondo), who draws upon inspiration from exploring the Pacific Northwest to fuel creativity in the kitchen. Catalano currently resides in a suburb of Seattle, Washington on a micro-farm with her husband, daughter Mary Jane, Bombay cat Mao, Russian Blue cat Rarity, Snowshoe Siamese Barry, and flock of chickens.
Get in Touch:
Questions? Press and media inquiries? Fan mail? The fastest way to reach me is via email at Info@jessicacatalano.com
You can also check out my press page for interviews, videos, and my freelance recipes from 2010 to present day.
I hope you love what you find here!
My recipes and book are my gift to you. I hope that they bring you good health, happiness, and a return to nature. Happy cooking and baking!
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