Meet the Good Food Goddess - Aoife Howard

As a third-year medical student, Aoife Howard has a particular method of dealing with stress.

“I take out my knife and start chopping,” laughs the 20-year-old from Limerick of her passion for cooking, as she offers Irish Country Living a brownie from a batch still warm from the oven.

While students might have a reputation for surviving on takeaways, you’re not likely to find a whiff of curry chips around Aoife. Because, as her online alter-ego The Good Food Goddess, Aoife is on a mission to prove that healthy eating can be, well, easy. And maybe even fun.

While a student at UCC, Irish Country Living meets Aoife at her family home near Patrickswell, where she and her sister Siobhan were raised by their mother Marian, a former secondary school teacher, and their father John, who is a manager at Grassland Agro.

She explains that her interest in cooking came as a result of suffering from acne in her teens. Having tried lotions and potions without success, she decided to look at her diet and cut back on processed food to introduce more fruit, veg and natural options.

“It’s not that it’s anything far-fetched; porridge instead of cereal from a box,” she says by way of example. “I didn’t change anything fundamental.”

Though she does admit that she had to wean herself on to vegetables with copious amounts of ketchup; which should give hope to any parent of a fussy eater.

When she started college, Aoife kept up her healthy eating habits by batch cooking at weekends, meal planning and stocking her cupboards with staples like tinned tomatoes and pulses. Holidays were spent in the kitchen at home experimenting with recipes – which was exactly what Aoife was doing when she heard an ad for the RTÉ show A Taste of Success, where contestants got to pitch an original product idea to Lidl.

Aoife was shortlisted for her healthy breakfast snack, mentored by Martin Shanahan, and finished in the final eight. But, most importantly, the experience gave her the push to publish a blog that she had been quietly working on.

“It gave me the confidence to start it. I had set it up, but I was too afraid to do it,” she says. “I didn’t tell anybody I had a blog at the start.”

Though we suspect the secret is well and truly out now about The Good Food Goddess. With recipes like banoffee breakfast pancakes, butternut squash, courgette, sultana and chickpea tagine and salted caramel cheesecake – each with a full explanation of the nutritional benefits and beautifully styled and photographed – Aoife wants to promote healthy eating without the hand-wringing.

“You don’t want to be preachy,” says Aoife. “There’s so much pressure for everything in life, you don’t need to guilt people. They should enjoy it.”

While food fads come and go, Aoife believes that her medical background means she is not swayed by trends. Although her recipes are tailored to suit a range of dietary requirements – from gluten-free to vegan – she explains that this is so as many people as possible can enjoy them, and she is not interested in bashing any food groups.

“It doesn’t have to be fire and brimstone. It doesn’t have to be: ‘I can never have this,’” she reasons, saying her approach is very much to start with “small changes”.

“Maybe swap a slice of bread at lunch for some salad or even pick one meal – say breakfast – and say: ‘Instead of buying a croissant or a muffin in a petrol station, I’m going to have porridge.’”

While The Good Food Goddess is very much a hobby for Aoife, the website has still amassed up to 200,000 hits a month. However, when she finishes her studies, she would like to bring her two passions together and her ultimate ambition is to have her own cookbook.

Because as Hippocrates once said: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”

And The Good Food Goddess might be just what the doctor ordered.