recipes

Here’s the best diet advice anyone ever gave me: find ten recipes that you love–that you love as much as whatever you ate before you changed how you eat. Most people only eat about ten different dishes in rotation, except on special occassions. So if you can find ten great recipes, you’ll never feel like your diet is bland.

This was a particular challenge for me when I switched to a whole-food vegan diet–which means I only eat plants and I don’t eat anything with added salt, sugar, or oil. And the only grains I eat are whole grains. Because my diet is so austere, I can’t even eat in most vegan restaurants!

And I’ve always been a picky eater.

It took me about six months to find even five recipes I loved. But little by little, I built up a list. And now, five years later, I have so many recipes on my list, I have a hard time picking which one to make. And the list keeps getting longer! I never find myself missing meat, cheese, icecream, salt, sugar, or any of the other things that used to tempt me, because I always have so much tempting food at hand!

I have just two rules of eating: (1) the food must be healthy; (2) the food must be delicious. I don’t eat so-so food. Ever. If I make a recipe, taste it, and don’t like it, I immediately throw it away. Wasteful? Yes. But life is short. I want every bite of everything I eat to be orgasmic or not in my mouth.

By the way, when I started this, I knew nothing about cooking. The most complicated recipe I could make was scrambled eggs. I discovered the secret of learning how to cook: don’t try. I never learned how to cook. I learned how to cook one recipe. And by “learned,” I mean I followed the directions, googling any terms I didn’t understand. Once I learned how to make that recipe, I learned a second one, then a third, and so on. I haven’t memorized any of these recipes. Why bother? I have them in my list.

Below are the best recipes I’ve found. If you’d like to try my diet but aren’t used to it, the lack of salt will most-likely be your biggest obstacle. Try adding some to appropriate recipes. (But if you go for long enough without adding salt to your food, you eventually adjust, and what once tasted bland now bursts with flavor. Celery tastes very salty to me!)

There aren’t a lot of sweet foods in the list, because my desert is generally fruit: grapes, bananas, apples, peaches… When you don’t eat refined sugar all the time, fruit starts to taste like candy and candy becomes sickly sweet.

Main Courses

Soups and Stews

Sides, Addatives, Snacks, etc.

Sauces and Dressings

Breakfast

Breads

Deserts

Condiments

Beverages