Hi, I’m Ravyn, and welcome to Small Plate Fate.
Here I was, working my ass off on an entire house rehab, tearing out floors, hauling debris, painting until my arms gave out, certain all that effort was doing something. Meanwhile, hormones had other plans. I hit the age where menopause decided to join the party, and my ass was not actually falling off. If anything, I just kept getting fatter, even sticking to my go to low carb diet, the same one that had always worked for me before.
I have leaned on low carb, Atkins style eating for years, low sugar, sometimes almost no sugar. I am not a couch potato either. I am always doing something, a DIY project, the gym, just generally out and about. Still, nothing moved the needle.
It took me a while to put the pieces together. A few years earlier, I had started working from home, which is wonderful for a lot of reasons and terrible for exactly one, the refrigerator is right there. On a call, between tasks, waiting on someone else to finish something, it is so easy to get up and grab a little something. I did not realize how much those little somethings were adding up until I started paying closer attention.
Eventually I caved and signed up for a program to get some outside help with portion control. I will be honest, I was skeptical at first. But it was eye opening. Once my portions shrank, my grocery bill actually went down, even though I started buying better food. That is the thing nobody tells you, when you are eating less, you can afford to eat better. You do not have to obsess over food to eat well. You just have to eat the right amount of the good stuff.
That is the whole idea behind Small Plate Fate. I do not want to depend on anything forever. I want to eat pretty much what I want, within reason, just in a smaller way, and actually enjoy it. Stop and smell the roses, but for food.
One of the biggest hurdles I ran into was baking. Baking is chemistry, and if science was never your thing, it certainly was not mine, trying to guess how much baking powder a half batch needs is enough to make you give up before you even start. So I built a calculator to do that math for you, whether you are cutting a family recipe down to size or splitting a box mix in half. No guessing, no ruined batches.
This site is not going to be strictly diet food. We are going to have fun here. There will be desserts. There will be baked goods. There will eventually be other paths too, gluten free, low sugar, maybe even carnivore, as I hear from more of you about what you need. This is meant to be a place and a bit of a community, not a rulebook. If there is a recipe you try and do not love, tell me. It might just be a difference in taste, or it might be something I genuinely need to fix. Either way, I want to hear it.
So welcome. Pull up a small plate, and let’s go on this journey together.