I am suspicious of any cookbook author who uses the word “effortless” in the same sentence as “cooking” — especially in the context of putting healthy, homemade dinners on the table night after night.
In the opening paragraphs of “The Vegan Week: Meal Prep Recipes to Feed Your Future Self” (Ten Speed, $35), Gena Hamshaw assures us she’s not one of them. “I get overwhelmed easily and become discouraged when recipes go awry,” she admits. “If I haven’t thought about what I’m going to cook, I’ll default to pasta nine times out of ten.”
Hamshaw wasn’t always so empathetic to these plights. In her late 20s, she adopted a plant-based diet — a lifestyle change she credits with helping her overcome years of struggling with eating disorders. As a graduate student working from home with a flexible schedule, she began regularly whipping up wholesome vegan creations in her tiny New York kitchen and posting them on her blog, The Full Helping. Several well-received cookbooks followed.
Her culinary enthusiasm took a nosedive in 2018 when she started an intense clinical internship as part of her training to become a registered dietitian. “For the first time in my adult life, " she writes, “there was nothing appealing about the prospect of dicing onions and garlic at the end of the day.”
That’s when she began devoting a few hours of each weekend to generating components for nutritionally balanced meatless meals to fuel her through the week. By the end of her internship, “I was a batch cooking evangelist.”
You don’t have to be vegan to appreciate her approach. Soaring egg prices motivated me to try her remarkably satisfying tofu scramble. Tonight I’ll be turning the extras into fried rice per her instructions. White Bean Fennel Soup, Baked Eggplant and Tomatoes with Chickpeas, and Cozy Red Curry Sweet Potato Stew could find their way into my freezer, along with a batch of Fudgy Brownies made with the liquid from a can of chickpeas (aquafaba.)
Meal prep, she explains, doesn’t eliminate the effort of cooking. “It does, however, ensure that the time in the kitchen will be well spent.”
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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