Vegan Cooking 101: Part 2
How to make your food taste incredible
After you get the ‘healthy’ part of cooking down, it’s time to focus on taste!
‘Cause let’s face it – if you tell someone you made an exceptionally healthy meal, they’re probably going to assume it tastes like cardboard, right?
If you know the right techniques, your healthy meal can have so much awesome flavor you’ll blow them away.
(NB: This series is all about learning how to cook, so I’m offering my online cooking classes for more than 30% off – just for subscribers. Your exclusive coupon code is in your email. CLICK HERE to check them out!)
My tip – let them take a bite and say “Wow!” You can tell them how healthy it is after…
It did take a while for me to learn how to make healthy meals that taste amazing. I had to practice a lot, and make a lot of mistakes. So if that’s where you are, don’t get discouraged. It will get better, I promise!
When I go to restaurants, I’m often disappointed because it doesn’t live up to what I make at home. It’s such a great feeling to know my cooking is so flavorful.
Trust me, it tastes WAY better than anything from a box or a bag when you learn how to bring out and work with the amazing natural flavors of fresh whole foods.
Once I got the hang of it, I started having so much more fun cooking because I loved the results!
I found the biggest improvement came when I took some healthy cooking classes. They gave me the confidence I needed in what I was doing in the kitchen, with flavor combinations and cooking techniques.
And it’s always awesome to hear from you that your family loved one of my recipes that you made for them! It’s so rewarding to me that I can help you make healthy food that’s fun AND tasty.
There are lots of things you can do to add flavor to your cooking, but the tricky bit where most people lose confidence is in knowing how to pair herbs, spices, and flavorful foods together.
The best way to learn what combinations of spices and herbs work together, and with which foods, is to start by looking at recipes.
There are some flavors that generally work well, and are always used in the same combination. But also keep in mind that everyone has slightly different tastes and you might prefer to swap something – maybe ditch coriander for cinnamon.
Start from the tried and true as a base, then experiment. Over time, you’ll figure out what you like.
In my online cooking classes, a lot of what you learn is how to uses spices and herbs, combine flavors, and make dressings and dips that really make a meal special.
Plus, I put together a cheat sheet for keeping on your fridge with all the best spice, herb and flavor combinations that you’ll get as a bonus when you sign up.
But for today, I want to give you one of my favorite veggie burger recipes, that combines some really amazing flavors, through roasting a red pepper as well as adding some great herbs and spices.
You can download a PDF of the recipe, and watch a video tutorial of how to make them come out perfectly.
These burgers are the kind of thing we did in my live online cooking lessons, but we got into much more detail on how burgers and other meals work, making variations on ingredients and techniques, and how to create a meal.
I got such great feedback from everyone who took part in my live cooking classes, that I wanted to give everyone a chance to take them, but it gets hard to coordinate time zones around the world.
So I’ve put the recordings of all the classes together, and you’ll be able to get access through a private membership site. In there, you can watch the cooking classes online any time you want (day or night), download the videos and recipes, upload photos of your meals, and ask me questions about any of the recipes or techniques.
In each class, I go through a recipe and a general topic. For example, I make a sweet potato quinoa chili and talk about how to make soups in general. I also get into the nutrition of the foods while we’re cooking – and of course have a little fun, too!
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You can sign up for the classes right now, over here. And remember, there’s a coupon code for over 30% off in your email! (You can sign up on the left if you want to get it.)
What’s your favorite herb or spice? Let me know below.
Coming up next: Improv cooking (+ granola bar recipe)
Knowing how to cook is about understanding how ingredients and flavors come together. When you start to get the underlying concepts of cooking, you can start to improvise on recipes – and maybe even learn to cook without using a recipe at all.
The next video will show you how I put together a granola bar, without using a recipe. I kept track of measurements, though, so you get a recipe out of it.
Not signed up for this series? Get in on it, over on the left.
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