I'm Lou.
I used to feed hundreds of women every week.
Now I teach them to feed themselves.
No recipes. No rigid plans. No performing. Just real food, made with confidence, in the middle of a real life.
Start here — it's free →
A cancer diagnosis brought me to food.
I had very little skill and even less confidence. I didn't trust myself in the kitchen. I spent a lot of time reading recipes, forgetting the instructions halfway through, and wondering why cooking felt so hard.
Then I went to Vietnam.
I found myself drawn back to the food markets again and again. Fresh food made with passion. People shopping for their families every morning. You could feel that they cared. Something about that stopped me in my tracks.
That trip cracked something open. I came home and started cooking differently. Not from recipes, from instinct. From what was in front of me. From trusting myself for long enough to find out what I actually knew.
Turns out, I knew more than I thought.
I started feeding hundreds of women every week.
Recipe free.
In 2013 I launched a lunch delivery business in the Sydney CBD. A hair-brained idea that morphed into a commercial kitchen operation. Cooking hundreds of meals a week for the women who worked in the buildings around me.
No recipes. No time for them. Just a deep understanding of how food works — how ingredients behave, how flavours go together, how to cook at scale with confidence and consistency.
Those years taught me everything. How to ditch the recipe testing. How to trust myself completely. How the best meal ideas come from within, not from someone else's instructions.
I knew the world needed better food options. Then I realised what it needed more was better home cooks.
In 2019 I closed the kitchen.
I was raised by a mother who cooked without recipes.
And I still had to learn to trust myself.
Even with that foundation, I spent years feeling like I had to look things up. Like my instincts weren't enough. Like someone else's recipe was more reliable than my own experience.
That's how deeply the message has been absorbed. That recipes know better than you do. That cooking is complicated. That confidence in the kitchen is something you're born with, not something you build.
It's not true. And it's costing us. Our time, our money, our health, and the food knowledge that used to get passed down through families and now just... isn't.
These skills need to come back into the home. For the sake of our kids. For the sake of ourselves. For the sake of the women who will sit down to dinner tonight and feel like they've failed - when all they were ever missing was the right way to think.
The things that drive everything I do.
Recipes aren't the enemy
Over-relying on them is. There's a difference. And once you see it, dinner changes completely.
You already know how to cook
If you've been cooking for 10, 15, 20 years. You have 21,900 meals of experience. You just haven't been shown how to use it without instructions.
Well fed families do wonderful things
Real food made at home with confidence and calm is one of the most underrated things a family can have. It starts with you.
Self trust is a learnable skill
Confidence in the kitchen isn't something you're born with. It's built through the right reps, the right framework and someone reminding you that you're the best person to decide what goes on your table.
Mum of two. I've been on mat leave.
Building the thing that matters.
Since 2020 I've been home with my two kids and building Ditch the Recipes into the most complete version of everything I know. The methodology that came out of six years cooking commercially, tested at scale, refined through hundreds of women who came through my programs.
I live in Sydney. I still carry lemons. I cook without recipes every single night. Because I genuinely can't imagine it any other way.
I'm a Certified Nutrition Consultant. I've been featured in Vogue Australia, Body + Soul, Harris Farm, Broadsheet and more.
That's the work. That's why I'm here.
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in the kitchen?
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