Home cook Cat Owens lives in Brookhaven and likes to create vegan and vegetarian versions of popular dishes. She presents them with recipes, photos and exuberant commentary on her website, catowenscooks.com.
“I come from a cooking family,” Owens said. “Growing up, my mom just always cooked really healthy meals. I carried that through to adulthood, and now I’m cooking healthy, and trying to encourage other people to cook healthy.”
Owens also champions Georgia produce and local farmers markets. “We have so much good produce available here in Georgia, so I try to encourage people to shop locally, go to farmers markets, and support their local farms,” she said.
Owens, who has a nine-month-old son, started her blog about a year and a half ago.
“It’s a lot, but it’s so much fun,” she said. “I’ve been cooking my entire life, just sort of following in my mom’s footsteps. Then, it just evolved from there, and I started learning how to modify recipes to make them healthier and gluten-free.”
An example is her take on biscuits, a Southern comfort-food favorite that Owens makes both vegan and gluten-free, using almond flour, sorghum flour, butter-flavored coconut oil and coconut yogurt.
“The best Southern-style vegan butter biscuits ever,” she enthused on her blog. “Guys, these are so good! My aunt, Betsy Bairstow, is a biscuit connoisseur, and even she approves! She couldn’t believe they were gluten-free and vegan, too!”
Owens based her recipe on a similar recipe from California’s Sweet Laurel Bakery, tweaking it and changing up the ingredients before finding what she thought was the perfect combination.
“Sweet Laurel is awesome,” she said. “But, we made their biscuits, and, to me, there was something missing. I’m from the South, and we take our biscuits pretty seriously down here, so there was some room for improvement.”
Credit: Cat Owens
Credit: Cat Owens
GLUTEN-FREE SOUTHERN-STYLE BISCUITS
Cat Owens recommends Sprouts and Whole Foods as good sources for vegan and gluten-free ingredients. She serves her biscuits with homemade apple butter or local honey.
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