 Welcome to Healthy Planet, the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet on the Think Tech live streaming network series. I'm your host, Dr. Grace O'Neill. And joining me today is Alicia Muñez, vegan chef and artist. Today we are talking about her journey to veganism, art and cooking. So Alicia, tell us about how you became vegan. Gosh, so starting my vegan journey, it was, I didn't even know vegan was a thing. Honestly, it was, I was in college and I had two classmates that I would study with these two like bigger guys. They were very muscular and they were both vegetarian. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And here I am, I was like, we were studying together and I thought like, okay, I wanna do this as a challenge just to see if I can do it, if I can be vegetarian. Because I did grow up eating meat and Mexican cooking, there's a lot of meat. Now, now there is. And so for me, it was more of a challenge really to see if I could actually do it. And the first time that I tried it, I didn't do very well because I was, it was in the middle of like our finals and I didn't really have time to like prepare food for myself or to feed myself enough. And so I went back to eating, I ate chicken. I think my friend's mom gave me chicken and so I ate that. And then my birthday came around and I thought, okay, I'm ready to give it another try. And by that time I was, I had already, my friend who was the vegetarian showed me a lot of vegan videos or like things that go on in slaughterhouses and dairy farms, all of that. And once he introduced me to that, I knew that I like didn't really wanna participate in adding on to that type of suffering. And so once my birthday came around, I hosted just a small pot leg with some friends and I told them vegetarian, but at that point I wasn't really eating anything that was, like I wasn't really eating a lot of eggs or cheese or anything like that. And so from my birthday on, I actually went cold turkey and just cut everything out. And it's been about nine years now since then. So it's been a good amount of time. So with your friends that were the meaty guys, that you wouldn't think were vegetarian when you looked at them, why did they become vegetarian? I'm curious. One of them was more religious from his religious background. He already didn't eat pork and I think just naturally didn't really want to eat any other meats. And then the one that was like more of my friend, he had already gone into like finding out like all this. He's the one that showed me like earthlings, all the movies. And for him it was like, he doesn't want to create more suffering as well. So he's big on animal rights and just, I guess like more like peaceful living. And yeah, yeah. So for him it was really about the animals. And that was the beginning for me. Yeah. And so you are originally from Mexico, correct? Right. And then you were saying before that you had grown up cooking with your grandmother. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, so I remember we lived in a small village and there's no electricity. We had like a clay oven with a comal on top. So that's where we would cook the tortillas. And I remember I even now have like a grinder that you like put it on the thing and it has the, I forget that handle that like grinds to the corn and it comes out as masa. So I remember watching her do that as a kid and then watching her care, like beautifully just lay the tortillas on the comal. And she did everything like she wasn't using, you know, here like sometimes we get scared to get burned or to like, you know, that's too hot. But she's just doing it so easily, so gracefully and she taught me how to make tortillas. And I remember as a kid, that's like the only memory that I have of cooking with her. Just I knew how to make tortillas and I could make them really good. So yeah, and then later when I came to the US I didn't really cook too much until I became vegan when I was like, okay, I want to make sure that I can keep up this lifestyle. So I want to learn how to cook more things than just like one or two dishes. And so it wasn't until I became vegan that I really started exploring cooking in a deeper way. And I thought, why not veganize all the items that I grew up eating, all the dishes that I ate growing up? So yeah, that was a, it really sparked a passion for me to like really get creative, experiment, try new things. And I really enjoyed just like putting the dish together, making it beautiful, making it presentable. And I had my family try the food that I made and luckily it was them and not anyone else because I was still learning. So there was a lot of things that didn't taste great, but as time went on, I picked up a few skills and learned how to play with the ingredients a little bit more. And now I can confidently say that I'm an excellent cook. Can you show us some of the pictures, Eric, of her food? So what is this? This right here, so this is a red chile pozole and it's got hominy, so the corn, the bigger corn. Oh, I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Instead of chicken, I use a jackfruit in there. And then just topped up with a little cabbage, some radishes, cilantro and a little lime and it's a perfect stew. Typically you have it on the weekends, people have it after they've had their nights of partying in the morning, they go and have their pozole. So yeah, it's a favorite for sure. Yeah, okay, here we go. This one is, so this is a spinach masa. So I was watching Chef Stable actually when I was doing this, when I started this project. Chef Stable, am I ignorant or? Chef Stable is a show on Netflix where they do, they have all these like well-known chefs and they show, really get to know their story and they're at the restaurants and putting all these like beautiful dishes together. They're using the tongs to like place a flower petal on there. Yeah, I know. And I was so inspired and I think that really sparked my interest in like making food beautiful because when I look at it for me, it's like it's such a work of art and I would look at this and I'm like, I don't even want to eat it. I don't even want to touch it because it's so nice. So I just got started to get it really creative in that sense and yeah, yeah, I really loved it. Yeah, so that's just spinach masa but it has like radishes on top and sprouts and is that cashew cream or what is that? It's a cashew cream and underneath that there's actually a refried beans. So it's a sope and that's really, normally they have the sopes are round and they have the beans spread on there and then you put the toppings. It can be anything like cabbage but I went ahead and used the microgreens and radishes and then the sour cream. Nice, nice. And then this one right here, this one is a jackfruit emoladas. So traditionally you would think enchiladas, right? But with this one, what we do is we puree the beans. So these are black beans, pureed and they have a little bit of spices, not too strong. They're pretty simple. I really love simple foods. And so it's the bean puree on top and at the bottom and then we've got the sour cream again with the radishes and the jackfruit filling. Oh, that looks delicious. I gotta make those again. Yeah. Okay, so these are the chile rellanos and this one I put in with a vegan cheese and a zucchini sautee with a little bit of onions, garlic. I love cumin so I use a little bit of cumin in there as well and then the puree at the bottom is like a beet puree, just very light broth of beet and I really just added that for the color because again I was like so into the presentation and I just wanted it to look beautiful, yeah. Is that spicy? It's pretty spicy. They can get a little bit spicy if you leave more seeds in there in the chile but if you take out the seeds, most of the spice goes away and traditionally they're not really that spicy anyway. The poblano peppers are not really very spicy. Yeah, so you can totally have some of that one. These are pretty simple, just a potato floutas so it's just mashed potato inside. You roll them up, fry them and I just splashed a little bit of that sour cream again on the plate for the presentation but normally we'd have those like I remember growing up eating them, at least four of them on the plate and a cabbage salad on top and then you put salsa, so usually like a tomato salsa and then growing up we did like a cheese but as vegan now you can make like a vegan like parmesan and just sprinkle that on top and it's good and then a sour cream if you want as well. Nice, so what was I gonna say? Do you feel like your love for art has really, it seems like it's really influencing the kind of food that you make. Can you tell us more about how you got into the art scene and what kind of mediums you like to use? Sure, yeah. Well, I do a lot of videography a lot and photography as you can tell these photos I was really getting into it. Yeah, so I think for me it's just about like, I don't know if I, like I wanna be able to share something that I'm creating, something that's beautiful and yeah, with the videography I've been playing around with it a little bit more just kind of putting together recipe videos now. I haven't really shared too many of them online but I'm planning on setting up, I've been working on my website for a little bit now and I wanna start a YouTube channel where I can just share the recipes. I would definitely subscribe. I'd love to learn how to cook, you know, good Mexican food. It's hard to find good Mexican food here inside yours. It's like, you know, it's not like California here. Right, that's one thing I learned that like it's hard to find good Mexican food here in Hawaii and so I actually was teaching cooking classes at the beginning of the pandemic. So once everything went into lockdown, I was like, okay, how can I keep sharing my food? How can I give myself something to do because now, you know, we're just stuck at home and so I started teaching cooking classes and every week we would do a different recipe. So and that kind of for me, it satisfied my love for sharing, for community, for art and yeah, just like helping people. So when you like see these photos of the food that I'm creating, it can look a little bit like, oh, that's a lot of work or it looks a little intimidating but as we go through the process step by step, it's really, it starts to turn into a lot of fun where you can just kind of like play and like see kind of like bring out that creativity in yourself as well. Yeah, and I think I was sharing a little bit before with you that one way that I incorporate my art in along with my cooking is I would draw the ingredients first. So just like draw a turmeric, draw the ginger, time and then write the recipe down next to it. But yeah, it's really, I think just cooking itself is an art and it's yeah. Yeah. Do you still offer those cooking classes? You know, I stopped a little while ago but right now I'm kind of in a transition period in my life and I'm considering restarting them. Yeah. I do have plans again with them, the blog and the YouTube for the recipes but I've also been playing with the idea of starting to host pop-ups kind of like, so in California. Yeah, that would be great. In California. Before I came here, I was hosting a dinner, like a dinner party at a location so everyone would buy their tickets and they'd come and I would host like a three, four course meal with drinks and dessert included and it was really a lot of fun and people loved it. So I've been kind of playing with the idea of maybe starting that here again and then seeing where that goes. Where would you call the pop-up? Well, I'm not sure what the laws are here for like a dinner party but I was thinking, so right now I'm in my living room but I was thinking I'm gonna turn in my living room into a dining room and I want to have a long dining table so it could be that sense of community and if that, it's either between that or setting up a couple of different tables around and then setting that up just to test it out and see how it goes. But yeah, just keeping it super more casual at home like a think of like going to a dinner party. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of places like that now. I mean, I'm sure, I don't know what the laws are like here. I haven't seen that many pop-ups here but I don't see, I mean, they are loosening COVID restrictions and everything so I think it's a possibility for you. I'm not sure where to do the rest. I think how to do it. I think they were giving out permits in the past so that because a lot of places weren't able to serve food in certain places and so, or like food vendors couldn't be out and so they gave a lot of permits where you can do that from home. Yeah, that would be awesome. Yeah. And then how did you end up starting Tamales O'ahu? Tamales O'ahu, gosh. You know, it's so interesting because I had never planned on making Tamales and starting Tamales O'ahu but as Christmas started coming around friends would message me and ask me, hey, are you making Tamales? And I think there's a vegan O'ahu page on Facebook. Yes. And I was wondering like, where can we get vegan Tamales? And so it's very difficult. Yeah. Yeah. And so I had a few different friends message me multiple times asking me if I was gonna make them. And so one year I decided to choose, I was like, okay, I'm gonna do it just because people are wanting Tamales and I'm just gonna do it this one time and then just to satisfy it because I know in the holidays everybody craves that and wants that. And so I remember I did it, I just put up the ad and I was like, okay, I'm gonna make some. And then I had a, I think I had a limit of how many people could get just to make sure that everybody could get some. Yeah. And then from there, it just kind of kept growing and growing. And now it's been more of a regular thing. I wanna make it more consistent for sure because I know there's people that are always asking me, okay, when is the next one? It's convenient, I know. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really great to be able to offer that at least for the holidays and then just throughout, I think once a month or twice a month is a good balance for me right now with what I've got going on. But yeah, so it just really started from that need of having them for the holidays. Yeah. Yeah. How about catering? Do you any catering or anything? I did a little bit of catering. I haven't done too much. I also had, I recently actually just left my other job as a caregiver. So I was balancing, cooking and caregiving and that can get a little bit heavy and it requires a little bit of energy. So, and I also just love surfing and like all my other hobbies. So I'm like, where do I find the time for everything? Yeah. Maybe once I start doing the dinners or brunches, I could probably maybe pick up some catering in the mix there. Yeah. So you, how did you make it? I mean, how did you decide, I'm assuming you went from Mexico to California first? Like how did your family end up going to California from Mexico? Right. So the town that I lived in in Mexico, it's very, very small. It's really like village. There's no electricity like I mentioned or running water. That's how it was when I was there. So I was there until I was about 10 years old and yeah, very, very village life. We were running around no shoes. And then unfortunately my father passed away when I was five years old. And so my mom was a single mother of five kids and living in that small village, there's not much work to do. Like there's not much work to be able to support a family, especially on your own. And so she came to California to just work and be able to kind of, because they can get a little bit, at that time it was a little bit dangerous where we were living too. And my father was actually murdered. And so my mom wanted to get us away from that environment and just making sure that we were gonna be safe and had food and a roof over our heads. And so she made the brave journey to come to California and eventually brought us over. And we went to San Francisco, the Bay Area in California. So Northern California, whereas like most people from our town lived in Southern California. So she, I don't know if she did it on purpose to get us to just further away from them. But I really, so from 10 up until, I guess maybe 18, 19, I was in the Bay Area in California. And I really loved, I loved it. I still do, but yeah. That's great. And then how did you end up deciding to come to Hawaii from San Francisco? Right. So I came here, I came in 2017 really just for vacation with a boyfriend at the time. And we're thinking like, oh, maybe we'll move there. But that's how we came here. We had already broken up. So we came just as friends. And yeah, and I just fell in love. I fell in love with a place I was welcomed with so much aloha. Everyone that I met was just so kind and so lovely. And you know, it's really interesting because even though I grew up in California most of my life, I think maybe since leaving Mexico, I never really felt fully at home. And when I came here, I don't know if it was like just the energy or the everyone that I met that I really got that sense of like being at home, feeling welcome, feeling home. And yeah, so it was really interesting to notice that even though I grew up in California most of my life, I never really felt at home until I came here. Yeah. Well, I'm in California. It is a really big place. I used to live in California too. And it's definitely, it doesn't have that small town feel that you get here and you kind of know everybody, especially in the vegan community. Right. You know, I know so many people in the vegan community and it's like a little family really. So it's quite nice, you know. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah. So tell us some about what, tell us about your new project, the YouTube channel and the recipes you're gonna do. Like when is that gonna come into fruition, I guess? I'm wondering. I know you have a lot of projects, but you know. Yeah, yeah. So I'm hoping, I hope in the next couple of months I can just have the website ready. Cause I already have so many recipes that I have collected over the years. And I have some that I've recorded, I haven't shared any yet, but I really wanna get into, I have a lot of very creative recipes, but I wanna get into more simple cooking and more clean cooking. I think that we can easily get lost in the fact that like, oh, just because it's vegan, it's healthy, but that's not necessarily true because you can be vegan and be eating a lot of junk food, a lot of fried foods. And you know, people go vegan for different reasons, maybe for their health, for the planet, for the animals. For me, it was, it started with the animals and the environment, and then later my health. That was the third reason for me. And now I'm realizing like, okay, I wanna be able to share recipes where it's gonna help people heal. It's gonna help promote their health. And yeah, so I wanna focus on a lot of more simple cooking and simple recipes. Still wanna share a lot of like my hometown recipes as well and then explore different cuisine, but I wanna stay focused on, and the blog too, I really wanna emphasize about like, eating more greens, like even if you're not, even if people aren't vegan, include more greens in your diet and naturally you'll start to shift. You'll start to feel better, you'll start to shift your diet and you'll be craving more of the cleaner foods. So I really want to focus on that, both my blog and the YouTube channel as well. And I'd also like to get into more sustainable living, maybe reducing plastic. So yeah, that's wonderful. I mean, really, I was listening to an audiobook from Michael Greger how not to diet. And then he was talking about again, all the obesogens that they have in all these plastic problems like phthalates, which you don't get as many cause we're vegan, but you know, BPA still, like a lot of people are using plastic bottles, maybe they buy coconut water. I mean, I used to buy ton of coconut water and plastic bottles and you don't realize that you are actually consuming toxic chemicals that make you obese and have other side effects like estrogens, everything. So yeah, that was a, she's amazing Suzanne Frazier. She's said, you know, she's done a lot of research and it's really helpful to know about that cause most people don't know, you know? Right, I was really shocked at the fact that we're eating a like a credit card worth of plastic a week. Was that the, is that right? Or is it a month? I think I'm not really sure. It was like there's microplastics in everything now that like we're eating up to a credit card worth of plastic a week without knowing it. Yeah. And that was really a shocker for me. Yeah, I know it's ridiculous. Things that you don't even know have plastic, like, you know, cans cause people use cans, they're convenient to, you know, for beans or whatever you're trying to eat healthy or eating beans, but they're lying with plastic, you know? And the little packages of almond milk and whatever, you know, those are all lying, everything is lined. So, I mean, the only solution is to make everything yourself, but it's hard, you know? It's hard. Yeah. And that's why. Like you, you know? Yeah, I really want to, like, I really want to inspire people to cook more at home to, yeah, make more, like all the nut milks, you can make them so easily with a blender. You know, it's simple changes and it takes a little bit more time, but it's worth it, like in the long run, it's worth it for our health and our well-being. So, I really, yeah, that's really like a focus for me, is just get people to get in the kitchen and experiment, try new things and like eat as whole, like whole foods, as many whole foods as possible and try to steer away from the processed foods. Yeah. I mean, one more thing I want to say before we close up. So, for people who don't know, Alicia has a great Instagram website, Tamales Oahu. And, you know, I don't know if you're going to post any of your recipes there, but people should really check it out when she's making tamales. They're delicious. I've had them many times, I think I commend it. And, you know, but we're out of time and we're going to have to wrap it up now. So, I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill. This is Healthy Planet on the Think Tech Livestreaming Network series. We've been talking to Alicia Nunez of Tamales Oahu and she's been telling us about her cooking and artwork in cooking and thanks to Eric, our broadcast engineer and the rest of the crew at Think Tech for hosting our show. And thanks to you, our listeners for listening. I'll see you on August 19th for more of Healthy Planet on Think Tech, the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet. Our next show will be featuring Susie from Susie's Duck Sanctuary in Kailua. If you have ideas for the show, please contact me at Healthy Planet Think Tech at gmail.com. Check out my website at graceandhawai.com for more information on my projects, including future show guests. I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill, aloha everyone. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawai.com. Mahalo.