Happy New Year! What's cooking?

I recently opened yet another cookbook that started with the phrase, "As far as I can remember, I have always enjoyed cooking." 🚩🚩🚩

For someone like me, that's a big red flag.

I'll still read the book because I want to learn some flavor-boosting tips from people passionate about food... and at the same time I'm careful to take advice from them, because I'm just not as keen as they are about cooking.

It's not that I hate cooking. But I don't love it. It's not my creative outlet or anything such.

It's more like I appreciate the power of cooking.

🥦 Home cooked healthy vegan food supports my health and nurtures resilience.

🤚 No-one else will cook for me every day in a way that's consistent with my criteria for taste and nutritional value (at a price I can afford).

🔪 I better just take responsibility and do it myself.

That's it.

I'm prepared to invest time and effort into cooking to create healthy vegan meals for myself and my loved ones... but I have other things to do with my time!

Can I make cooking more efficient?

Before going fully vegan, I had internalized a number of "cooking scripts" I used to get dinner on the table. Based on the food I grew up eating, those scripts were centered around meat or fish (always choosing the "protein" first), with the addition of a starchy component, and usually (but not always) a vegetable.

In summer 2015, when I committed to making every meal fully vegan, those scripts didn't work anymore! Vegan "3 part dinners" weren't appealing and seemed lacking from a nutritional standpoint. (As a side note, the truth is that the omnivorous 3-part-dinner is nutritionally lacking, too! But I didn't know that then.)

I didn't know what I was doing and had to fall back on cooking from recipes all the time. Meal planning and choosing what to make based on what seemed feasible and possibly tasty took me hours every week. And then of course there was all the cooking and cleanup time. It was not a sustainable way to organize my life. Yet I wanted to continue eating a whole food plant-based diet! But how?!

Coming from a project management background, I spend a lot of brain cycles looking for ways to make cooking more efficient without sacrificing nutrition and flavor. Now almost a decade into this lifestyle, with two nutrition certificates under my belt and after working with hundreds of meal planning clients, here are the three main strategies I have identified to sustain a healthy vegan stress-free cooking lifestyle:

• Vegetables are what meals should be structured around, with beans and grains as essential complements.
• Decoupling cooking from eating allows me to do make the most of my higher energy levels on the weekends, and not rely on weeknight willpower to make the right decisions.
• Building block cooking beats the recipe approach. Instead of choosing seven individual recipes for the week and then cooking them each in turn, I carefully select building blocks that will then be assembled and complemented, with minor additional preparation, into full meals. The building blocks can be mixed and matched, because they are chosen to work well with each other. That's what I call "cascade cooking."

This is the approach I teach in my new course, "Plan, Prep, & Relax: Plant-Based Batch Cooking for Busy Beginners."

There are a limited number of spots still available for the course, which starts as a live cohort next Friday, January 10th. If you'd like to learn more, you can visit this page. (If you decide to sign up, make sure to use coupon code WINWIN for $70 off.)

On Saturday, I will send you another email describing what the course is all about. In short, what it does is create a space to learn and above all practice, with my support, and that of our small community, a new, stress-free way to get healthy vegan meals on the table day after day after day.

I hope this is useful.

Brigitte

p.s. Choosing 7 recipes for 7 dinners and just cooking those day after day is a surefire way to end up with stressful nights and wasted food. If you think there has to be another way... there is! I can teach you how to Plan, Prep, and Relax! Got questions? Just hit reply and we'll chat!