The Book of the Lamp — Read free with Kindle Unlimited · Kindle eBook: $0.99 · Paperback: $5.75.
About
🍲 About Kitchen Monk
🌿 Kitchen Monk™ is a nurse-led home for nourishing food, health education, community, and stories that inspire us to flourish.
🥷 Founded by Flourishing Nurse Ninja Nathanael Elijah Smith, FNP-C, DipACLM, Kitchen Monk brings people together to make healthier living more approachable, joyful, and connected.
💡 In one sentence: Kitchen Monk™ is a free, nurse-created health education and community project that helps people put healthier living into practice, one meal and one meaningful connection at a time.
👥 Who it’s for: patients, families, caregivers, and neighbors. Anyone, whatever you eat, whatever medicines you take, however your body moves, and whether or not you’re religious.
🔄 How it works: Learn → Practice → Belong → Sustain → Flourish. Free education, one small step at a time, practical skills like cooking, and a community so you don’t do it alone.
🚫 What it isn’t: not a clinic, not medical care, not a religious order, not a diet company, and not selling supplements. No religious belief is required. The word “Monk” is a metaphor, not a membership.
🔗 How it connects: Flourishing Nursing is the professional nursing framework developing alongside Kitchen Monk, for nurses and health professionals. The EVERgreen Chronicles™ is its story-world (fiction), optional and never required.
🥷 Susan Benigas — My Inspiration
🥷 Susan Benigas is one of my inspirations. Her encouragement and support for clinicians pursuing lifestyle medicine certification meant so much to me. I was one of those clinicians, and I successfully passed my lifestyle medicine board examination in 2019. I am grateful for her part in helping clinicians like me carry this work forward.
I remember 🥷 Susan closing the 2025 Lifestyle Medicine conference with the reminder, widely attributed to Margaret Mead:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Widely attributed to Margaret Mead; recalled by Nathanael from 🥷 Susan Benigas’s closing remarks at Lifestyle Medicine 2025.
Thank you, 🥷 Susan. This picture means so much to me—a reminder that leadership, encouragement, and working together can help us carry more than we could alone. Flourishing is a team effort.
— Flourishing Nurse Ninja Nathanael Elijah Smith, FNP-C, DipACLM
✨ Our work begins with a simple conviction: people deserve more than disease management. They deserve the opportunity to flourish.
We are building a place where people are not simply told what they should change. They are supported in learning how to change. They are given tools, community, opportunities to practice, and encouragement when life becomes difficult, and they are welcomed without shame, condemnation, or an expectation of perfection.
🤔 Why “Kitchen Monk”?
🍲 The Kitchen
The place where health information becomes everyday food and everyday behavior. It is where ingredients become meals, where families gather, and where health advice either becomes real or stays words on paper.
🕯 The Monk
A metaphor for intentionality, reflection, simplicity, compassion, steady practice, and purpose. Health is more than physiology: people have meaning, values, relationships, stories, grief, and hope.
🎯 Our Mission
Kitchen Monk™ helps individuals, families, and communities put lifestyle medicine into everyday practice through accessible education, whole-food plant-based cooking, practical tools, and compassionate connection. We support realistic steps that fit people’s lives and create opportunities to learn, participate, belong, and flourish: moving from knowing → practicing → belonging → sustaining → flourishing.
🩺 “Nurse-led” includes the whole nursing team: Certified Nursing Assistants, Licensed Practical Nurses/Licensed Vocational Nurses, Registered Nurses, and nurse practitioners. The nursing assistant who helps you eat, walk, and rest is part of the flourishing too. For nursing professionals, our companion site is Flourishing Nursing.
🌱 Where Our Mission Began! 🪔
🎒 Before Kitchen Monk™ ever cooked a meal, Nathanael finished high school a year early through dual enrollment and became the first nursing student in Pensacola Christian College’s history to complete that pathway! 🚀 He served as a nursing student leader from 2009 to 2012, received the Jude 22 Award for compassion in 2010 🏅, and in 2012 was the nursing commencement speaker for his class. 🎓
🛤️ From bedside care to primary care, home-based healthcare, lifestyle medicine, and nurse leadership, that early chapter still guides everything we do: Moving Nursing Forward, one kitchen, one family, and one community at a time. 🍲🌎
🧭 The Principles We Carry
- 🩺 Nursing as service
- 📚 Education as empowerment
- 🤝 Compassion as leadership
- 🌱 Prevention and flourishing as healthcare priorities
- 🌎 Nurses as catalysts for healthier communities
Nursing is more than a profession. It is an opportunity to serve, educate, advocate, lead, and help others flourish. 🌿
Nathanael Elijah Smith, MSN, APRN, FNP-C, DipACLM
✝️ Our Christian foundation · 💚 A mother’s encouragement
Kitchen Monk™ grows from Nathanael’s Christian faith and his conviction that caring for people is a sacred responsibility. It brings together nourishing food, lifestyle medicine, faith, compassion, and community—an invitation into flourishing rather than condemnation.
My Mom Says I Should Be a “Medical Pastor”
My mom says I should be a “medical pastor.”
Her words resonate with the kind of service I hope to offer: bringing together the clinical knowledge of a nurse practitioner, the practical teaching of lifestyle medicine, the welcome of a shared table, and the compassionate presence of someone willing to listen.
I hear in her encouragement an invitation to serve the whole person—to care about someone’s physical needs, emotional burdens, relationships, questions, hopes, and spiritual life when they wish to share it.
For me, this begins with following Jesus Christ in love of neighbor. It can take the form of teaching an affordable meal, encouraging restorative rest, helping someone take a manageable next step, listening to a weary caregiver, or offering prayer when it is welcomed.
I am discerning what that calling means in my life and work. My mother’s phrase gives me something meaningful to reflect on as Kitchen Monk™ and Flourishing Nursing™ continue to grow.
“But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,”
Luke 10:33 · KJV
Excerpt from the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37).
🌿 My reflection: My mother’s words bring together two forms of attention: concern for a person’s health and concern for the person living that experience. The Good Samaritan offers a picture of compassion that notices suffering, comes near, provides practical help, and makes arrangements for continued care. That story speaks deeply to the work I hope to build.
🩺 Professional identity
Flourishing Nurse Ninja Nathanael Elijah Smith, FNP-C, DipACLM
Founder & Chief Flourishing Connector, Kitchen Monk™
“Medical pastor” is my mother’s encouragement and a calling I am discerning. It is a personal description that brings together my interests in health, faith, teaching, and compassionate service, not a credential, certification, employment title, or claim of ordination.
🤝 Kitchen Monk is rooted in Nathanael’s Christian faith and welcomes people of every faith and of no religious affiliation. Visitors may engage with spiritual reflections as they choose. Prayer and religious participation are never conditions for receiving respect, education, or access to the resources offered here.
🌿 With Gratitude to Alan Goldhamer, DC
💚 Our sister site, Flourishing Nursing™, was born, in part, under the leadership of Alan Goldhamer, DC, co-founder of TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, California. Nathanael’s time there, first as a nurse practitioner intern (December 2018) and later as Clinical Administrator (April–November 2023), showed him how health-promoting care is carried by a whole team: clinicians, nurses, kitchen staff and everyone who supports them.
🪔 Learning under Dr. Goldhamer’s leadership helped spark a simple question that still guides us: Who nurses the nurse?
🙏 Nathanael’s personal gratitude. TrueNorth Health Center was former employment, not a current affiliation, and neither Dr. Goldhamer nor TrueNorth Health Center has endorsed or sponsored Kitchen Monk™ or Flourishing Nursing™.
🔭 Our Vision
A world where everyone has access to the knowledge, food skills, resources, and supportive relationships that make healthier living possible. 🌎 Where healthcare becomes a story of flourishing, reimagined one kitchen at a time, and prevention, lifestyle medicine, nursing, culinary skills, health coaching, and community support are part of how care works, not optional extras.
🤝 Our Shared Commitment
Kitchen Monk™ and Flourishing Nursing™ proudly support the American College of Lifestyle Medicine’s mission to advance evidence-based lifestyle medicine. Our contribution brings together practical education, food skills, nursing, compassionate support, and community connection to help people put that knowledge into daily life.
🌅 We are working toward a future in which more people can access the understanding, resources, relationships, and professional support they need to care for their health and flourish.
🎯 Our Goals
- 🥕 Help people use what they learn. Every page should lead to a next step you can actually take: a recipe leads to a grocery list, a movement idea leads to an activity that suits your body and your day.
- 🌱 Support lasting participation. Choose one step that matters to you, identify the support you need, and adjust as you learn what works in your life. Practice, encouragement, and follow-up matter more than perfection.
- 🚪 Make access part of the mission. Free resources, affordable ingredients, clear instructions, accessible formats, Spanish-language pages where available, and connections to community support. Food access, income, disability, housing, work schedules, and caregiving all shape what is possible, and we plan with that in mind.
- 🌉 Connect patients, communities, and professionals. Kitchen Monk provides the public doorway for everyday learning and practice. Flourishing Nursing develops the nursing and professional education side, helping connect that learning with compassionate support.
- 🪔 Support the people providing care. Nurses and caregivers need rest, supportive relationships, belonging, and working conditions that make good care sustainable.
- 📏 Develop responsibly. Our recipes, meal plans, and guides are available now; programs such as the Flourishing Map™ are still developing. We share what people tell us about the site separately from measured health outcomes, and we never claim results we have not measured.
Kitchen Monk™ and Flourishing Nursing™ are independent initiatives. Our support for the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and its educational resources does not imply organizational affiliation or endorsement.
🌲 The heart behind our work
🕊️ Love made visible through compassion and service
Rooted in Christian compassion. Welcoming every person. Kitchen Monk™ is inspired by Jesus’ teachings, and every resource here is free for you to use whatever you believe, or don’t. No one is asked to share our faith, agree with it, or take part in any religious practice.
📜 Our founding statement is the EVERgreen Oath™: a commitment to notice those who feel forgotten, offer nourishment, companionship, and practical help, and remember that those who serve need care too. It is our own original statement, voluntary, and never a condition for using the site.
🧭 Founder Nurse Ninja Nathanael carries a simple question: “What would Jesus do?” It guides how we treat people: with compassion, humility, dignity, and practical help.
🌱 The Plantrician Project — Thank You for Lighting Our Lamp
Power of the Plate helped light a new lamp for Kitchen Monk™ and Flourishing Nursing™. From San Diego, we brought home more than education: we brought home belonging, interdisciplinary friendship, practical tools, and a renewed commitment to move nursing forward.
🎓 Plantrician education led by Jill Edwards, MS, CEP, DipACLM, Director of Education. Explore free Quick Start Guides, Plantrician University, open-access science, Plantrician Providers, Power of the Plate, scholarships, culinary education and systems-change resources.
💃 Dedicated to Jill Edwards — our Chief Flourishing Educator™. 🌱🩺 Scott Stoll, MD — Co-founder & Board Chairman of The Plantrician Project and our Chief Plantrician Guardian. These are honorary titles created by our organizations.
Moving Nursing Forward: Read the science → Learn the practice → Connect with support → Bring it home.
Kitchen Monk™ and Flourishing Nursing™ independently recommend educational resources from The Plantrician Project. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, this does not indicate sponsorship, partnership, endorsement, or organizational affiliation. Honorary titles are ours, not Plantrician Project positions.
🌿 Leadership lesson from TrueNorth: founder Alan Goldhamer, DC leads an organization whose public team includes clinicians, nurses, kitchen staff, administration, housekeeping, facilities, concierge and scheduling. Health-promoting work is carried by whole teams. That same principle guides our conviction that the people doing the caring must be able to flourish, too.
🪔 Why this matters to Nathanael: he honors The Plantrician Project for helping keep the heart in medicine—bringing evidence, food, human connection, and interdisciplinary care back together. That vision resonates deeply with the nursing leadership Nathanael has followed throughout his professional life, including the work of 🥷 Dr. Karen Laing, whom Flourishing Nursing™ honors for carrying forward a modern nursing tradition of whole-person care inspired by 🥷 Florence Nightingale.
Our gratitude is wholehearted: The Plantrician Project has spent years helping clinicians and communities imagine healthcare that nourishes people, relationships, and the systems around them. We want nursing to stand beside that work, strengthen it, and help carry it farther.
🌼 Invitation, Not Condemnation
People are frequently told what they are doing wrong, and asked to fit it all into lives already filled with work, caregiving, financial pressure, grief, and exhaustion. Kitchen Monk takes a different approach. We ask: What would make the healthier choice easier? What skills and support are missing? What strengths does this person already have? What would flourishing look like for this individual, not an imaginary perfect patient?
👣 We do not demand perfection. We pursue progress.
🌲 Kitchen Monk × The EVERgreen Chronicles
Kitchen Monk is the real-world movement. The EVERgreen Chronicles™ is its story-world. Kitchen Monk teaches the science, skills, and community practices that support health; the Chronicles give those principles characters, landscapes, symbols, and meaning. One provides the practical pathway. The other gives the pathway a story.
📖 Story gives meaning. 🔬 Science provides evidence. 🛠️ Skills make change possible. 🤝 Community helps it endure.
📱 Explore Kitchen Monk
Kitchen Monk is connected to Nathanael’s creative and real-world work — it is not an official EVERgreen Chronicles account. Follow along for lifestyle medicine, culinary medicine, and flourishing in practice.
💎 Our Values
🤲 Compassion
Every person deserves dignity.
🔬 Evidence
Recommendations grounded in credible science.
🛠️ Practicality
Advice that works in everyday life.
🤝 Collaboration
Healthcare works better when professions cooperate.
🏘️ Community
People flourish together.
🔍 Curiosity
We continue learning.
🚪 Accessibility
Health resources should reach more people.
🙇 Humility
No one has every answer.
🌅 Hope
Change is possible.
🚫 What Kitchen Monk Is Not
Kitchen Monk is not about perfection, shame, or blaming illness on lifestyle. It does not replace appropriate medical care, require one universal diet, or force spirituality on anyone. It is about building teams, building skills, building community, and helping people create healthier lives.
🥷🌿 Flourishing Nurse Ninja
Nathanael Elijah Smith, FNP-C, DipACLM
Flourishing Nurse Ninja Nathanael Elijah Smith, FNP-C, DipACLM, is a board-certified family nurse practitioner and the Founder & Chief Flourishing Connector of Kitchen Monk™, known across our sites as the Flourishing Nurse Ninja. He is also the author of The EVERgreen Chronicles™, the story-world of the Lamp and the Garden that gives Kitchen Monk its language for flourishing. His clinical work and his writing grow from the same conviction: that people deserve an invitation into flourishing, not a verdict on how they’ve fallen short. 🩺 The American College of Lifestyle Medicine features Nathanael’s personal testimonial about his lifestyle medicine training on three of its pages, and each link is set to jump straight to his words: I Am a Clinician, What Is Lifestyle Medicine?, and Continuing Education. It reflects his own experience as a member and is not an endorsement of Kitchen Monk™, Flourishing Nursing™, or his books.
💚 Nathanael’s story, in his own words
Kitchen Monk grew out of three threads in my life: nursing, lifestyle medicine, and faith. As a family nurse practitioner, I kept seeing that people needed more than instructions; they needed encouragement, practical help, and somewhere to belong.
It also grew out of gratitude. In a season of renewed connection, I learned again how much grace, patience, and a shared table can heal between people. That is why this work is dedicated to my family, and why it begins with compassion rather than condemnation.
🌱 I believe the people who care for others deserve care too, and that flourishing starts with one small, practical step.
📖 This is my personal testimony, shared with gratitude. It is not a promise of any health result for anyone else. Health information on this site is education, grounded in the sources each page cites. 🕊️ Rooted in faith and compassion, welcoming people of every faith and none.
🌿 How the two sites fit: Kitchen Monk™ is the free public doorway for patients, families, and caregivers. Flourishing Nursing™ develops the nursing, nurse-coaching, and professional-education side. Same heart, two audiences.
👋 Connect with Nathanael
🗞️ The Documented Journey
🧑🍳 From the Teaching Kitchen to Kitchen Monk™
Years before Kitchen Monk™ had a name, Nathanael, then a newly credentialed nurse practitioner, reached out to Chief Flourishing Chef Robin Jeep after learning about her work through Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s website. He wanted hands-on training in Nutritarian whole-food, plant-based cooking, and she invited him to her Missouri farmhouse kitchen to cook, talk about nutrition and health, and share ideas.
That early lesson became a lasting principle: health advice only helps when people know how to live it. In her September 1, 2026 feature for Women’s Wellness / OptiMYz, Robin describes that chapter and the nurse-led vision that grew from it, including the Flourishing Experience Center concept.
Written by Robin Jeep. Opens the original article on optimyz.com, outside KitchenMonk.org.
🪔 From the EVERgreen Archives
🌱 Before Kitchen Monk™ Had a Name
Kitchen Monk™ grew from decades of lived experience and years of nursing, advanced-practice nursing, prevention, lifestyle medicine, mentorship, Food as Medicine, patient education, family history, storytelling, and community-building. It did not appear overnight, and it did not grow alone.
Nathanael’s professional development has included mentorship and collaboration across nursing and lifestyle medicine, including an earlier mentorship relationship with Dr. Ron Weiss, DipABLM. Some pieces of that journey remain preserved online, including archived Chef AJ conversations in which Nathanael was publicly acknowledged.
🏁 Milestone · Earlier lifestyle medicine mentorship: Dr. Ron Weiss, DipABLM
Archived Chef AJ moments: Iodine conversation (March 2023), 53:47–58:34, with a Nathanael reference at about 56:36 · Lyme disease conversation (March 2024), 23:30–29:30
Historical mentorship, not endorsement. Dr. Weiss is independent and not affiliated with Kitchen Monk™.
🩺 Clinical Administrator | TrueNorth Health Center
April–November 2023 · Santa Rosa, California
My professional relationship with TrueNorth began in December 2018, when I completed a nurse practitioner internship that helped shape my commitment to lifestyle medicine, nutrition-focused care, chronic disease prevention, and whole-person health.
I returned in 2023 as Clinical Administrator, combining advanced practice nursing with clinical and administrative leadership in a medically supervised lifestyle medicine setting. I supported daily clinic operations, coordinated patient care, strengthened interdisciplinary communication, and helped maintain a safe, organized, compassionate, and patient-centered experience.
My responsibilities included:
• Supporting patient assessments, follow-up care, education, and clinical documentation.
• Coordinating daily operations, workflows, handoffs, and continuity of care.
• Collaborating with physicians, nurses, registered dietitians, health educators, and administrative professionals.
• Helping patients translate clinical recommendations into practical habits they could continue at home.
• Advocating for caregiver well-being, including helping change a phone-routing routine that unnecessarily interrupted a night-call nurse’s rest around shift change.
My work emphasized nutrition, physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, supportive relationships, patient education, and sustainable behavior change, with medical nutrition therapy provided in collaboration with registered dietitians.
Progressing from intern to Clinical Administrator was an important chapter in my development as a Family Nurse Practitioner and lifestyle medicine professional. The experience strengthened my commitment to interdisciplinary care, clinical leadership, prevention, nutrition, nurse coaching, and healthcare systems designed to address the underlying contributors to chronic illness.
This chapter included meaningful learning and challenges that sharpened my commitment to supporting both patients and the professionals caring for them. It helped shape a question central to my subsequent work: Who nurses the nurse?
Today, I carry these lessons into my practice as a Family Nurse Practitioner and my development of Kitchen Monk™ and Flourishing Nursing™—with a focus on compassionate education, interdisciplinary collaboration, program development, and practical systems that support whole-person well-being and long-term flourishing.
🌙 Rest checklist · 🎬 Selected Goldhamer recordings · Plant Based Support replays · Meryl Fury and Plant Based Support resources · American Holistic Nurses Association resources and research · 📖 The Book of the Lamp
An invitation into flourishing rather than condemnation.
— Flourishing Nurse Ninja Nathanael Elijah Smith, FNP-C, DipACLM. Personal career account, updated October 17, 2026. The phone-system account is a recollection, not a claim of measured health outcomes or current arrangements. Independent projects; no former-employer or featured-organization endorsement implied.
⭐ A Mentor’s Recognition. Watch the archived Chef AJ moments in which former mentor Dr. Ron Weiss, DipABLM, publicly recognized Nathanael, with timestamp buttons so you don’t have to search the whole interview.
👩🍳 Meet Chief Flourishing Chef Robin Jeep
☕ Co-author · The Book of the Garden: The Cup of Flourishing
Chief Flourishing Chef Robin Jeep is a celebrity chef and published wellness author. She wrote The Super Antioxidant Diet and Nutrition Guide (2008) with Richard Couey, PhD, a Baylor University professor and cell physiologist. She has prepared nutritious and delicious meals for celebrities including Paul McCartney, Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra, and the Emmitt Smith family.
Robin worked for Dr. Joel Fuhrman as his dietary assistant and as a nutrition writer, and also developed recipes and taught cooking classes. She is a health coach, nutritional chef, and Nutritarian educator, and for years has taught Kitchen Nutrition courses that help people transition to whole-food, plant-based eating in ways that are practical and delicious. Robin is a co-founder of Enliven Foods, where she serves as Chief Creative Officer.
Robin is co-author, with Nathanael, of The Book of the Garden: The Cup of Flourishing, a clinical culinary medicine companion now in development. Robin has also written about Kitchen Monk (see her article below).
📰 Featured in Women’s Wellness
✍️ Chief Flourishing Chef Robin Jeep Writes About Kitchen Monk™
The Kitchen Monk: Reinventing Healthcare, One Meal at a Time
Written by Robin Jeep · Women’s Wellness / OptiMYz · September 1, 2026
Robin was not writing from a distance. Her article recounts the time, years before Kitchen Monk took shape, when Nathanael came to her kitchen for hands-on Nutritarian cooking instruction. She then describes the nurse-led vision that followed: helping people turn lifestyle recommendations into daily habits, and a Flourishing Experience Center where teaching kitchens, gardens, movement, and nurse practitioner care share one roof. That history makes her article part of Kitchen Monk’s documented origin story.
◇ FUTURE VISION The Flourishing Experience Center is a future vision. It is not open, and Kitchen Monk does not currently offer nurse practitioner care.
Both links open outside KitchenMonk.org. The article appears on optimyz.com, the original publisher.
Biographical details are drawn from Robin’s public profiles, including her author bio and Enliven Foods’ “Who Are We?” page, as of September 2026. Transparency note: because Robin is Nathanael’s co-author, Kitchen Monk has a personal connection to Enliven Foods, which it also recommends elsewhere on this site. Kitchen Monk receives no money, commissions, or free products from Enliven Foods.
📧 Connect with Robin
Nurses and patients: interested in cooking and learning with Chief Flourishing Chef Robin Jeep? Email Robin directly. Shared with Robin’s permission. General interest only; please don’t send personal medical information by email.
⚓ Where My Roots Began
🌊 Every trail begins somewhere. Mine began in Hammond, on the north Oregon coast, where the Columbia River meets the Pacific.
🏫 Anchor Christian Academy is, to me, the best Christian school in the world. Its teachers told me the truth, believed I could grow, and built the foundations I still use every day as a nurse practitioner and storyteller.
🦉 Among those teachers was Mrs. Sandra Smith, my high school English teacher, who taught me to write what is truly mine and then give it wings. In loving memory, her lesson lives on in Willow the Wise Owl of The EVERgreen Chronicles™. Willow is a fictional character inspired by her; the scenes Willow appears in are story, not biography.
⛪ Riverside Fellowship is the essence of what a flourishing community is meant to be: people who worship together, share life together, and care for one another.
Named here with gratitude. Anchor Christian Academy and Riverside Fellowship are not affiliated with Kitchen Monk™ or The EVERgreen Chronicles™.
Continue the Journey Together
Join the Kitchen Monk™ free community on Facebook. No purchase required, no perfection required.
🪵 Meet the maker: May Mac
May Mac is the creator behind Wood Be Remembered, our official apparel and merchandise partner. She makes handmade wood gifts, often on birch, with food puns, pet designs and personalized keepsakes. Nathanael met May at the 2025 California Avocado Festival in Carpinteria, California.
Artwork and product photograph: May Mac / Wood Be Remembered. Your purchase goes directly to May’s business; we receive no commission.
★★★★★ The Book of the Lamp — Reader Voices
🍎 Barbara Weaver
★★★★★ · September 22, 2026
“Very creative, well written book challenging us to carry the light forward.”
Nathanael’s third-grade teacher, writing about the book’s creative imagery, love, hope, family memory, and call to carry the light forward.
🌿 Erik L.
★★★★★ · September 24, 2026
“To Read Again. And to Comprehend.”
A caregiving perspective on self-care, purpose, younger-reader accessibility, everyday health, and reconnecting with why people choose to help.
See all reader voices · Read reviews on Amazon ↗
Independent reader opinions, quoted and attributed to their authors. Amazon may group reviews differently across editions.
🌟 Welcome to Kitchen Monk™
Every person deserves an invitation into flourishing.
Last updated October 27, 2026.
Watch Nathanael with Chef AJ — a TrueNorth memory from 2023
A joyful personal moment with Chef AJ during a skin-carotenoid scan, from my 2023 chapter as Clinical Administrator at TrueNorth Health Center. The corrected video is horizontal, with both of us upright.
▶ Play the Chef AJ video · Chef AJ’s story and video · TrueNorth 2023 story and video.
Food, hospitality, and my TrueNorth chapter — 2023
During my time as Clinical Administrator at TrueNorth in 2023, experiences of nourishment, movement, and community helped shape my path. Thanksgiving at Chef AJ’s home remains especially dear to me. Read about Chef AJ and Charles, and explore her treasured signed books.
✝️ Nathanael’s Faith: Jesus, Our Anchor, and Our Hope
A personal faith invitation from Nathanael: Riverside Fellowship in Hammond, Oregon, is my anchor church. Its teaching points to repentance, faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection, confession of Him as Lord, and salvation as God’s gift of grace. Receiving Jesus into our hearts means personally trusting and following Him.
Riverside’s salvation teaching · Its Jesus Class
My mom, Nina Delores Smith—Momma Eagle—is a devout Jesus follower. During my visit home for our special Jesus-loving reunion, I returned to Riverside for two Sundays. I treasure that homecoming and the faith and love woven through our family’s story.
Read the full explanation: accepting Jesus, resurrection, the Rapture, Tribulation, Christ’s reign, and everlasting life → The guide distinguishes Pensacola Christian College’s published position from wider Christian interpretations and Riverside’s own salvation teaching. Read Momma Eagle’s faith and reunion feature →
Our faith reflections are shared as an invitation. People of every faith and none are welcome and deserve compassionate care.
With Momma Eagle—Nina Delores Smith—may we renew our strength in the Lord and “mount up with wings as eagles” (Isaiah 40:31, King James Version): a poetic image of hope, not a promise of literal wings.
