My Foodie Story
I'm Sarah, aka Sezzy Brown, and my love for food started at a very young age.
I was lucky enough to grow up with parents who had an appreciation for good food. Not the type to take me and my siblings to fancy restaurants, but to have an appreciation for quality and freshness when it came to purchasing produce and eating at smaller local restaurants.
I remember the excitement of my mum finding a great batch of cherry tomatoes or crispy apples, and my dad making a special trip to the market on his way home from work to cook us salmon. I would be lying if I said this was the case 24/7. My mum also left frozen pizzas and processed chicken strips in the freezer for convenience, and often gave in when we begged for McDonald's on a Friday night. Surely that's the reality for most homes!?
When it came to choosing a career, I was completely lost and never thought I would end up cooking for a living. I did study Food Tech in year 12, however that resulted in wagging many classes and getting pulled by my hair back to class by my teacher. I don't think she thought I would end up cooking for a living either, considering I drove her mad. I graduated year 12 in 2013.
After high school I took 3 gap years and worked in retail, still lost in choosing a career. I took this time to travel, party and certainly never found myself. I did go vegan in 2016 which then lead me to want to go to University and learn about health. I studied Health Science for a year, then canned that. Tried Public Health for a year and canned that, and then attempted Nutrition Science and canned that too. That felt like another 3 years wasted and getting nowhere in life.
Simultaneously, when I adopted the vegan lifestyle, I learned how creative you could get with cooking with plants and thought people needed to know how delicious vegan can be, so I started an instagram account dedicated to vegan food.
While always feeling like I was a failure, someone who struggled to stick to anything and believed maybe I just wasn't meant for anything, I found creating and sharing food brought me joy and a sense of purpose.
I was super passionate about the vegan lifestyle and started to create more and more content. It basically became my identity haha. At the beginning of 2021, in the height of COVID lockdowns in Melbourne, my partner Jacob and I decided to move to regional Victoria and I got a job managing the local Linen House store in Kyneton.
Since we were living in a pretty quiet town and still going in and out of lockdowns, I spent all of my spare time working on my recipes. I would cook and film a recipe before work, edit the video behind the computer at work when there were no customers and then post that evening. I spent all my weekends cooking, recipe developing and posting too.
Eventually, some of my reels on Instagram started going viral. In June 2022 I gained 100,000 instagram followers in one month and was able to quit my retail job to pursue content creation full time.
Around 6 months later and after 6 years of being vegan I ran into some health issues that lead me to quitting veganism. I have now been thriving for over a year without any food labels. I still have a huge appreciation and appetite for delicious plant based recipes but have found a new passion for cooking as I explore all kinds of food.
Which brings us here, to my food blog I'm a Foodie. A one stop shop for all your foodie needs. I've got those healthy recipe's you'll want on repeat, those vegan recipes that will convince anyone vegan food is delicious, as well as those vegetarian and meat recipes that will always hit the spot! I hope you enjoy them and please always leave a review, good or bad, so I can continue to learn and refine my recipes for you.
xx