Raw food gets a bad rap. People think you have to have lots of complicated equipment to make it and that it takes days to prepare anything out of a dedicated raw food cookbook. But chef Amber Shea Crawley is helping change minds and delight palates with her new collection Practically Raw. In recipes cleverly designed with variations, substitutions, and even cooked options, Crawley frees the reader to play around with living cuisine at her ... Read More

  This recipe from the creative new title The Sexy Vegan Cookbook: Extraordinary Food From an Ordinary Dude by Brian L. Patton caught my eye because my CSA farm share this week was bursting with eggplant, bell peppers, and zucchinis and Patton’s Caponata incorporates all three in a luscious sauce. He recommends it as a topping for grilled seitan or pizza. I served it over quinoa and was in veggie heaven. Basically, anything you ... Read More

Everyone knows Tim Burton would much rather focus on the visual elements of his filmmaking than on insignificant trifles like plot, character development, and cohesion. This is especially true of his latest fantasia, Dark Shadows, but that doesn’t keep the film from being a spooky good time. Based on a beloved occult soap from the ’60s that was as famous for its low-budget blunders as it was for its spine tingling twists, the ... Read More

When Natural Gourmet Institute grad Chloe Coscarelli became the first vegan chef to ever win Food Network’s Cupcake Wars last year, I had a hunch a cookbook deal wouldn’t be far behind. And now that her debut recipe collection Chloe’s Kitchen (Free Press) is finally here, it’s clear that her winning ways don’t begin and end with dessert. First off, the book is absolutely lovely to look at. Big, full-color ... Read More

My one and only New Year’s resolution this year was to eat more kale, and for good reason. Crammed with fiber, vitamin A, and calcium, kale is such a nutritional powerhouse it should have been Popeye’s snack of choice instead of spinach. But I was having a tough time finding a way to prepare it that I actually enjoyed, until I stumbled on this recipe for raw, vegan, cheesy kale chips that fitness trainer Nathane Jackson of ... Read More