Lauren Toyota - Hot for food vegan comfort classics: 101 recipes to feed your face

You want French friesfor dinner?
Duh! Who doesnt?

This is vegan food as youve never seen it before:always indulgent, never pious. Including gooey cakes,deep-fried everything, delicious sauces and saltysnacks, this book is full of the drool-worthy gourmetvegan comfort food you crave from Lauren Toyota, thechef behind the YouTube channel hot for food.

Your other vegan cookbooks are just a tease;this is the real deal

Lauren Toyota is a former MTV Canada host and a Youtube sensation. Her channel and blog, Hot For Food, attract a wide and engaged audience of young people curious about how to make vegan food fast and fun. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

Contents

Can you believe youre holding my first cookbook?
I can barely believe it either.

For those of you new to the hot for food fam, Im Lauren Toyota and I created hot for food a number of years ago just for fun. I didnt understand blogging, I was sceptical about the YouTube platform, and I wasnt even vegan when it all began! But now here I am with a cookbook full of hot vegan recipes and a YouTube channel with devout obsessive foodies following along every week, and Im totally happier living this vegan life!

The original blog entries and awful WordPress template from the first incarnation of hotforfoodblog.com circa 2010 are long gone, thank god! But the passion I have for vegan food hasnt changed and has only gotten bigger since then.

After nearly a decade hosting television, I took a leap and decided to make hot for food my career in 2014. At the time I was dating John Diemer and together we were cooking up all kinds of vegan love! He was curious as to how we could make all of his favourite meaty, cheesy meals with plants, and before long he was hooked on the lifestyle. That sparked a new vision of what hot for food could be something fun, real and comforting. We had all these ideas on how to grow the brand and get more people making vegan food (that wasnt boring). Thats where producing videos came into play, and we launched a YouTube channel. Prior to 2015 we had never picked up a DSLR camera. I learned how to take pretty good food photos, and he started playing around with the video settings. One day we just made a recipe video, and the rest is history!

Making a cookbook wasnt something I had on my bucket list, honestly. Circa 2015 I even claimed in one of my YouTube Q&As that I probably, most definitely, would not ever make a hot for food cookbook. Well arent I embarrassed! But I gotta give it up to the universe for throwing this opportunity my way. It knew something I didnt. I needed to make this cookbook, not just for me, but for you! It was something yall kept asking me about and I could never let you down. Thanks for the nudge Im so thrilled to share this book with you.

What youve got in your paws is a shiny printed version of some of hot for foods most popular recipes and more than eighty more brand spankin new ideas that will not appear anywhere else. The photos are all new too. My resistance to creating all this was just a big ol bunch of fear, and believe me, that fear kept rearing its ugly head during the entire process of birthing this thing. But great challenge brings even greater reward. I guess the task of creating a book was so much more pressure for me than delivering YouTube videos every week. Prior to this career path I spent nearly a decade hosting and producing television, so Im comfortable being on camera and editing video, but I certainly hadnt wrapped my head around publishing a book. A book is permanent, it lives on forever, and I can never go back and edit something. Im also asking people to pay for it. Ive been fortunate enough to give you all the recipes and content for free up until now! So I think that all got to my nerves. A few panic attacks and lots of hours of meditation later, it all came together. This truly has been one of the most rewarding, eye-opening and biggest learning experiences of my life. For that Im beyond grateful!

why hot for food?

I honestly dont remember when, why or how I came up with the name hot for food. But I feel like its how Ive always felt. You too, I bet!

My entire day revolves around food! During breakfast Im thinking about dinner. During dinner Im thinking about what Im going to make on the weekend. The only way to find solace is to manifest these thoughts as delicious recipes! If Im taking a trip, it most definitely focuses around trying to stuff as many restaurant adventures as I can into whatever time weve got. Once I almost missed a flight home from Hawaii because I went hunting for vegan chicken wings in Waikiki! Ummm, totally worth it! Theyre at Downbeat Diner & Lounge by the way.

why vegan?

Because I cant stomach food any other way! But it took me a long time to realize this. I spent my teenage years as a vegetarian and my college years in a constant dilemma over whether I should go back to being vegetarian or not. Bottom line: I just felt sick and guilty every time I ate meat, dairy or eggs, but my love of food and stubborn attitude about not wanting to be a bother at the dinner table kept me stuck to old habits. Finally, in 2009 I couldnt take the stomach pains and emergency bathroom breaks any longer. I had also just watched the documentary Food Inc. and that led me down a path of ferocious learning. That research helped me decide once and for all that I needed to go vegan. I started blogging my transition on hotforfoodblog.com, and by 1 January, 2010, I would no longer eat animals or animal by-products. My only regret is not doing it sooner!

Also eating animals is just weird to me. Were socially conditioned to do it and have done so throughout history. But we dont have to do it, especially in this day and age.

Ive always had a strong love for animals, and something always resonated deep inside me that didnt feel right when I ate meat. Plus now the issue of what to eat is so much bigger and more confusing than any of us can even grasp. Do I really need to tell you that animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change? Our food choices matter, and whether you eat vegan all the time or most of the time, or even just occasionally, its a step in a good direction for all of us on Earth. So thats that.

feed your face

I want you to devour this cookbook the same way you binge-watch your favourite shows: ferociously! My mission from the start has been to show the world how good vegan food is and how easy it is to indulge in all your favourite foods without feeling guilty.

I know a lot of rumours are going round that vegans cant eat deep-fried food, ice their cakes with sugary buttercream or consume fat and salt. Who would want to hang out with someone like that? Not me. Im of the belief that as long as its free of animal-based ingredients its A-OK to eat it! So that includes things like gooey cakes, fried everything and salty snacks. My motto is maintain a balance of foods I should eat with foods I want to eat, and make these two things one in the same whenever possible.