Love Real Food

Description

Learn to eat well with more than 100 approachable and delicious meatless recipes designed for everyone—vegetarians, vegans, and meat-eaters alike—with substitutions to make meals special diet–friendly (gluten-free, dairy-free, and egg-free) whenever possible. 

The path to a healthy body and happy belly is paved with real food—fresh, wholesome, sustainable food—and it doesn’t need to be so difficult. No one knows this more than Kathryne Taylor of America’s most popular vegetarian food blog, Cookie + Kate.

With brand-new, creative recipes, Taylor inspires you to step into the kitchen and cook wholesome plant-based meals, again and again. She’ll change your mind about kale and quinoa, and show you how to make the best granola you’ve ever tasted. You’ll find make-your-own instant oatmeal mix and fluffy, naturally sweetened, whole-grain blueberry muffins; hearty green salads and warming soups; pineapple pico de gallo; healthier homemade pizzas; and even a few favorites from the blog. Of course, Love Real Food wouldn’t be complete without plenty of stories starring Taylor’s veggie-obsessed, rescue dog sous-chef, Cookie! Taylor celebrates whole foods by encouraging you not just to “eat this,” but to eat like this. Take it from her readers: you’ll love how you feel.“As a longtime reader of Cookie and Kate, I’ve anticipated this book for years. And not surprisingly, it 100% delivers. The recipes and photos perfectly echo Kate’s taste and aesthetic, while providing new and exciting dishes for the beginner and advanced cook alike. I can’t wait to get in the kitchen and try everything.”—Dana Shultz, author of Minimalist Baker’s Everyday Cooking

“Kathryne’s debut cookbook is packed with all the wholesomeness, approachability, and charm that fans of her blog, Cookie and Kate, have come to love. Featuring flavorful recipes made from simple, whole foods, a ton of helpful tips, and many heartwarming cameos from Taylor’s canine sidekick, Cookie, Love Real Food is sure to become an everyday staple in kitchens everywhere—mine included!”—Angela Liddon, founder of Oh She Glows

“I’ve always loved Kathryne’s approach to cooking because of her focus on flavors and easy-to-master meals. Her cookbook is no different: it’s filled with beautiful, approachable vegetarian recipes that the entire family will enjoy. This book will easily become a staple for everyday cooking!”—Erin Alderson, creator of Naturally Ella

“I just love Kathryne’s approach to real food! Simply put, this is the food that I want to eat every day. It’s a celebration of real, beautiful, and wholesome food. The book has a range of healthified favorites, like Easy Carrot Cake and Roasted Eggplant Lasagna, as well as recipes with super creative flavor combinations, like Chickpea Tikka Masala and Fresh Greek Nachos (yum!). No one is going hungry at this party—I think we can all raise our glasses of Strawberry Rose Sangria and (avocado) toast to glorious satisfying food.”—Jeanine Donofrio, creator of Love and LemonsKathryne Taylor is the personality behind the hugely popular blog Cookie + Kate, named after her crumb-catching dog Cookie. In six years, the vegetarian and all-natural food blog has grown from a hobby to a full-time project, and now garners over two million visits per month. Kathryne researches, develops, cooks, photographs, and writes every recipe on the blog. Originally from Oklahoma, she now lives in Kansas City.Cookie and Kate Love Real Food

My dog, Cookie, is the most effective alarm clock I’ve ever met. You can’t push snooze on Cookie—once she’s decided it’s breakfast time, she morphs into a squirmy, insistent, enthusiastic little alarm bell who will shove the pillow right out from under my head. She’s lucky she’s so cute.

Every morning, Cookie herds me into our Kansas City kitchen. I feed her first (she wouldn’t have it any other way), and then I start shuffling around to make my own breakfast. I always eat breakfast, in part because I know I’ll feel lousy later in the day if I don’t, but also because I adore breakfast. Cookie and I both love food.

I might reach for a bag of granola in the freezer, and some yogurt to go with it. I know exactly what’s in that granola because I made it myself: old-fashioned oats sweetened with maple syrup and made crispy with the help of some coconut oil, plus spices, nuts, and dried fruit. Learning to make my own granola was a revelation. It’s super easy and tastes so much better than the store-bought kind.

Later in the day, lunch might consist of a giant, colorful bean salad (left over from last night’s dinner) with fresh greens and crumbled goat cheese. Dinner could be a spicy, vegetable-packed stir-fry. Whatever I throw together, you can bet it will be a well-balanced meal that lights up my taste buds and keeps me energized for hours.

I haven’t always eaten so well, and I haven’t always felt so good. I was a picky kid who tried to get away with eating pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast, but my body wouldn’t allow it, even when my parents would. Those pancakes would turn me into a shaky, miserable, sweaty mess. My doctor called my extreme reaction to simple carbohydrates hypoglycemia. Trust me, if eating pancakes for breakfast turned you into a mumbling zombie, you wouldn’t touch them no matter how good they tasted.

The funny thing about metabolism is that I’m just an exaggerated example of how every human body functions in response to processed foods and unbalanced meals. I simply have a more immediate reaction to the foods that are contributing to our country’s growing obesity epidemic, and the chronic diseases that come with it.

You might think, then, that eating well came easily for me. It didn’t. When I left for college, I thought that cardboard-flavored 100-calorie snack packs were healthy options, and that fat was best avoided. I tallied up calories in my head and repented for them on the elliptical machine. When I felt overwhelmed or sad, I turned to food for comfort, oftentimes to an unhealthy extreme. I struggled with binge eating, and I am all too familiar with the self-loathing and despair that go along with it. Basically, I asked far more of food than food could provide, and rode a miserable roller coaster of sugar highs and food-related guilt for years. My story is all too common, and I would do anything to spare you from these struggles. We all have to eat, after all. It doesn’t have to be so hard.

Fortunately, my conscience is no longer at war with my taste buds. After a lot of selfreflection, I’ve learned to deal with stress and anxiety in ways that make me feel better, not worse—like reaching out to friends, going to a yoga class, and taking walks with Cookie. Perhaps most valuably, I’ve learned to listen to my appetite and eat accordingly. Now, I open the refrigerator and greet the contents like trusted friends, and my body thanks me for it.

Learning more about nutrition was tremendously helpful in shifting my habits and helping me cut through the marketing noise. Once I started reading, I was shocked to hear that the food pyramid wasn’t quite the pinnacle of nutrition I had once believed, and that protein comes in all different kinds of foods, not just meat. The more I read, the more I naturally gravitated toward the whole foods philosophy set forth by food writers and researchers like Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle. Their recommendations made sense to me on multiple levels. Of course I should be eating foods that my grandmothers would recognize, not artificially sweetened, processed foods with a “healthy” sticker on the front. The truth is always in the ingredients list.CN

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