Can you tell me more about your backstory?

Q A

I moved to San Francisco three years ago. I'm originally Canadian — we moved to the states after living in the U.K. I went to a culinary school in New York called Natural Gourmet Institute of Health and Culinary Arts and then went to college and became a dietitian in Canada. I was working as a dietitian in Toronto for a few years in a community setting, doing cooking classes, teaching people how to read nutrition fact tables and showing children vegetables, essentially. I was feeling disconnected from my love of food, so I started a small food blog in 2017 to get more excited about eating dinner every night.

When my husband and I moved to the U.K. in 2018, I started to work in food media doing what I do now: recipes, writing and photography for brands, newspapers, magazines and my own food blog, Nosh with Micah, where I share vegetarian Jewish-inspired dishes. Often, it's inspired by ingredients that might be found in the diaspora, so there's a lot of tahini, a lot of dates and date syrup, but also everything bagel spice.

What inspired this book?

When I was 12, I told my mom I wanted to go vegetarian. She freaked out a little — it was a different time to be vegetarian in in the '90s than it is now — so she hired a dietician to teach us. The main thing was that she didn't want to make two dinners every night, so if I wanted vegetarian food, I had to make it.

I always noticed that when I went to Jewish holidays, sitting around the table as a family, there wasn't a lot for me to eat. Nobody really knew what to do with me. I'd always have to bring my own food or eat mashed potatoes and a sad salad. (This) book shows that Jewish food can evolve with the times, as people are eating less meat now, and there are more vegetarians at our holiday tables. Just because you don't eat meat doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to connect with the food of your heritage. Jewish food can be modern, exciting and different and deserves a place on any diverse cookbook shelf.

Passover is coming up. Tell me more about what Passover means to you.

I grew up Ashkenazi. My family's from Eastern Europe, and my husband's family is Turkish. Depending on where your family comes from, that dictates what you can and can't eat during Passover. During Passover as a kid, there were many more restrictions than I have now, where I can eat something like corn, beans or rice because I've married a Sephardic Jew. It's a whole new world for me.

Growing up, (Passover) was always my favorite holiday, because I thought it was so fun that we had to get creative (with) food. My mom had this cookbook called “Matza 101,” and it told you 101 ways to use matzo, so we had matzo baklava, matzo tiramisu and taco shells made out of matzo. It was a time of experimentation and getting out of our dinnertime