Welcome!

Welcome to Natural Comfort Kitchen – where you’ll find recipes, meal plans, and information on how to simplify your plant-based meal planning with batch cooking. I’m Tessa, the owner and chef at NCK, as well as a human and pug mom, wife, Minnesotan, former accountant, iced coffee addict, amateur outdoorswoman, and fitness lover.

Ever since living alone in my twenties, I’ve loved meal planning, but truth be told, I was never that great at it. It always took me forever to choose complex, unrelated recipes. This led to tons of stress, as I unsuccessfully blended my love of cooking with real life commitments and trying to get dinner on the table. I even filled naturalcomfortkitchen.com with DELICIOUS recipes for years without getting a real handle on my meal planning struggles.

In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic and loss of my father to cancer finally prompted our family to commit to a plant-based lifestyle that we’d been dabbling in for so long–myself for over a decade. And with a new way of eating came a fresh opportunity to conquer meal planning once and for all.

THAT is where batch cooking comes in. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that cooking big batches of three different (and simple-ish) dinners a week to eat two times each saves HOURS in the kitchen, PILES of dirty dishes, and even a fair bit of cash. It’s reduced my meal planning sessions from three hours to 30 minutes max, it’s freed me of “what’s for dinner?” and “this isn’t gonna be ready in time!” stress, and, best of all, it has CLEARED my weekends of cooking time so I can spend them with family, on replenishing my own tank, and on providing meal plans, recipes, and tips to help you do the same.

To get in touch, go here. I’d love to hear about your own meal planning or plant-based journey, and I’d really like to know what you want to see more (or less) of on this site.

Happy cooking!

Tessa