Category: Recipe

5 Cookbooks to Make Healthy Eating Easier in 2015

by Maria

cookbooks to help with healthy eating

If you like food, (i.e. you are any sort of human), you’ve probably encountered one of the most gut-wrenching struggles of mankind. It is this: food has calories. Calories make you fat. This is not good.

I do wish a scenario had worked out where we could eat unlimited qualities of highly caloric food and feel more energetic and healthy than ever. Part of me is still holding out hope that this scientific breakthrough is on its way. It’s the same part of me that is convinced my life purpose is to eat twelve brownies a day.

BUT, until that golden day, you can bet your butt that I will be trying to get as much flavor out of healthy food as possible. And the best way to do this? To the cookbook shelf!

Here are the 5 cookbooks I’ll be pulling from my kitchen shelf this year to make my “get healthier STAT” resolution happen:

For your post-holiday detox:

Clean Slate

Clean Slate: A Cookbook and Guide to Reset Your Health, Detox Your Body, and Feel Your Best by the Editors of Martha Stewart Living

How gorgeous is that cover? My sister bought this book over the holidays, and we both completely fell in love with the spare but elegant design. It also has options for a 3-Day Cleanse or a 21-Day Cleanse, and the recipes look delicious. If you need to watch what you eat, why not do it in style?

Read More

Read, Eat, Drink–Weekend Roundup

by Maria

Read: 

Screen Shot 2014-11-20 at 10.57.33 AM
Leo Babuata of ZenHabits, one of my favorite sites on creativity and living, is finally launching his new book. Watching this launch has been incredible–it’s funny how sometimes we can learn so much more from people who are outside of the publishing industry.

He traditionally published a few books several years ago, and he’s self-published a few ebooks since then, but this is his first self-published print book to be sold direct to his fans (he has over a million readers on his blog). And he decided to approach writing a book the way a coder would approach writing new software. As he explains:

The traditional way of writing a book is like the old Microsoft model of developing software: you write it in isolation for a year or two, and then put it out as a fully-formed product.

The problem with that method is that it’s never been tested in the real world. You don’t know if readers (or users) will want it, you don’t know where you’ve made huge mistakes, you don’t know how it will work in the wild.

That “Microsoft” model of making programs has been replaced in the last decade or so by iterative programming, where you make a Minimum Viable Product as soon as possible, and let a small group of people (alpha or beta testers) use it and give you feedback and report bugs. Then a new version is made, more testing and feedback, and so on, making the product better and better each iteration. I love this model, because it leads to a better product over the long run.

Read More

Read, Eat, Drink–Weekend Roundup

by Maria

Read:

We have our Friendsgiving weekend in the hills of Virginia coming up, so here’s some light and fun reading looking. I so enjoyed this visual essay Medium published this week on How to Sell a Book–you can find it here. It’s by Sarah Lazavoric, who herself just released a book called A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy. I absolutely love the premise of her book–here’s a snippet from the back cover copy: “Like most people, Sarah Lazarovic covets beautiful things. But rather than give in to her impulse to spend and acquire, Sarah spent a year painting the objects she wanted to buy instead.” 

I really admire this idea of enjoying beautiful objects without having to purchase them, maintain them, and store them. I just wish I could paint at all, so I’d be able to do what Sarah did!

And here’s my favorite graphic she drew for the Medium essay. I want to deny this and pretend that I’m more multifaceted, but…it sounds about right.

1-Krg-Hr263KDqdAuupjEzaA

Read More

Read, Eat, Drink–Weekend Roundup

by Maria

Read:
As much as agents do our best to try to help writers and offer insight into the wild, whacky world that is publishing, sometimes nothing resonates quite like hearing directly from other writers. So here’s my favorite author blog post of the week–Colleen Hoover’s incredible story of how writing changed her life. Three years ago, she was living in a trailer, working 12 hours a day, and barely making ends meet. She picked up writing in her spare time and self-published her first book. She sold about 30 copies in the first week, but she kept at it. Today, she’s the New York Times bestselling author of 6 books and has a lucrative book deal with Atria/Simon & Schuster. And the best part of it all? In her words:

Three years ago, my husband and I dreamed about the day we would be able to build a new house. Tomorrow, that’s going to happen. On the same land where we happily lived in our single-wide trailer, we will be breaking ground on the house we will spend the rest of our lives in, and I still can’t wrap my head around it.

I know this started with the fact that I wrote and finished a book, but that was as simple as putting a pen to paper. Nothing would have followed had it not been for the support of my readers. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the motivation. And remember-

Dreams are free, so make sure you have a shit-load of them.

And THAT right there is exactly why we’re all in this crazy, unpredictable, shaky business.

You can read Colleen’s full story here.

Eat:
Raise your hand if you like bacon. Looks like…everyone on the planet. And the only thing better than bacon is bacon + pasta, especially when it’s Mario Batali’s Spaghetti Carbonara. This is (I think) the same recipe he uses at his restaurant Otto in New York, but you can make it yourself at home for, oh, a 95% discount.

Read More