Cupertino Teen Shows a 'Rad' Way of Cooking Healthy Meals

At 15 years old using words like “gnarly” and “rad” aren’t too unusual. What’s unusual for a Cupertino girl who goes by the name of the Green Beanie and uses those words in casual conversation is that she cooks dinner for her family every day—because she enjoys it.

And now she has a running vlog, or video log, which Cupertino Patch is now sharing with readers every week.

What’s even more unique is that she adapts recipes to make them healthier, not because anyone told her to or because she’s overweight—she’s not—it’s because “it's just always been an important thing” in her life, she says.

The Green Beanie started cooking a couple of years ago making things her parents cooked such as fish with pesto or teriyaki chicken, but it didn’t take long until she started branching out.

“In the 2011 summer I started things like cooking a whole salmon, soup, ratatouille, chili, and cheesecake. Of course, all with health in count. I was doing it every day, and I was starting to consider it a hobby,” she says.

There were no formal cooking lessons for Beanie, she’s learned most of what she knows from her parents and other family members.

“Not to blow my own horn or anything like that, but I can probably tell you more about nutrition than many adults. At about 8th grade, I expected that the ‘glycemic index’ and ‘monounsaturated fat’ and things like that to be common knowledge,” Beanie says. “I was surprised to find out that some adults did not know of these things. I can thank my mom and my aunt for my knowledge about this stuff.”

For a girl who has no weight problems and gets plenty of exercise, she says people are curious about her focus on nutrition and altering recipes to cut out fat. To which she replies, “Why not, it's just as good without it.”

She uses as a tasty an example her “epic tiramisu.”

“(It) has 150 calories, 4.5 grams of fat, and 10 carbs. The average slice of tiramisu has about 600,” she says.

The only thing she likes better than cooking is snowboarding, but what’s a “hardcore snowboarder” to do when the hills are dry? Cook and vlog about it, of course.

Green Beanie was inspired by the movie 'Julie and Julia' where the main character, Julie, cooks her way through Julia Child's cookbook and blogs about the process.

The Green Beanie vlogs her recipes weekly on YouTube, and now here on Cupertino Patch. Her introductory vlog can be found here, and her first cooking video on how to cook beef and coconut curry is attached to this article.

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