About Jas

Welcome!

Jas is a writer, cook, photographer, and an avid cheesecake lover. She’s a mom and grandma who absolutely adores her granddaughters, her biggest kitchen helpers. They don’t do the dishes yet but are really good at stirring ingredients and even keeping some of it in the bowl.

I’m a Bosnian expat living in Northern Indiana since the summer of 1998 following a six-year exile in Germany.

I grew up in a traditional European family, the kind of family that sits together for big weekend lunches. Those lunches always began with some kind of soup. It isn’t a big lunch unless you begin it with a spoon.

Fun fact: as a child, food didn’t interest me in the least and actually disgusted me. I would eat enough just to survive, and even then it would be just a few things such as bread and soup….rather, broth. And there better not be anything floating in it, or I wouldn’t touch it.

As a matter of fact, gagging was pretty common with most foods. My mom tried just about everything to get me to eat, including bribery. Endless doctor visits, blood tests, MRI, CT scans, spoonfuls of fish oil in the middle of the night, but no matter what they’d try, I wouldn’t touch food. Not even all the teasing from schoolmates and name-calling (stick, skeleton, just to name a few) helped me like food.

I suffered from anorexia throughout my childhood, but not because I had issues with my weight. It’s not that I didn’t WANT to eat food, I just physically couldn’t. I can’t even say that I actually ever felt hungry.

Anorexia has two definitions:

an·o·rex·i·a
ˌanəˈreksēə/
noun
1. a lack or loss of appetite for food as a medical condition [me]
2. an emotional disorder characterized by an obsessive desire to lose weight by refusing to eat. noun: anorexia nervosa [not me]

Besides not feeling hungry, most foods made me gag. Researches now call the extreme picky eating a food neophobia or Selective Eating Disorder (SED). Some psychiatrists attribute it to anxiety around past traumatic experiences such as choking on food with a particular texture. I have no recollection of ever choking on food.

This promptly changed when I became pregnant with my daughter. I don’t have medical confirmation, but I believe that my pregnancy hormones changed something within my body, which in turn affected my metabolism. Now I’m the opposite and can’t stop eating. 😆

Skinny Jas — I always wore baggy clothes to hide how skinny I am (sometimes even two pairs of pants)

I share my home with my husband Rob, a fire investigator by day (and sometimes at night) with a side job of being my taste tester.

Jas and her family on Easter 2019 — my beautiful family

About All That’s Jas

All that’s Jas is a website dedicated to sharing comfort food from around the world made simple and accessible while preserving their true flavors.

There are so many dishes in other countries that you would never try if you do not travel. Traveling somewhere new opens your eyes and your taste buds to a whole new range of authentic flavor profiles and foods that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

But what if you can’t travel outside your country?

If you can’t travel, bring the world to you!

Nothing compares to homemade food, anyway. It almost feels like magic when you prepare a delicious meal yourself. It is also THE best way of bonding with family and friends and such an ego booster.

Whether you’re new to cooking or don’t have the time (trust me, we all wish we had more time) my goal is to help you learn a few tricks and skills to create new family favorites without traveling the globe.

I ~~believe~~ know that you can make quick and tasty meals with only a handful of ingredients. Food is meant to be enjoyed, but I believe moderation is the key to a healthy lifestyle.

Be ADVENTUROUS! Try new foods. Life is too short to only have apples and peanut butter & jelly.

The Tour

In the Recipe Index, you will find different categories and then more categories. For your convenience, everything is sorted like a suitcase ready to travel to foreign lands. By the way, I love packing and especially unpacking suitcases.
NEW FEATURE: Interactive Map – Taste the Globe through the map of countries we cooked on All that’s Jas.