Liddon - The oh she glows cookbook: vegan recipes to glow from the inside out

the

oh she glows

cookbook

Vegan Recipes to Glow

from the Inside Out

Angela Liddon

For my husband, Eric:

You are my light, my love,

and my inspiration.

contents

introduction

W hen I made the switch to a whole foods vegan diet five years ago, I witnessed a powerful transformation in myself. After a decade of struggling with an eating disorder and subsisting on low-calorie, processed, diet foods, I knew I needed to change my lifeand my healthfor the better. Gradually, I shifted my diet to focus on wholesome plant-based foods, and I was immediately struck by how amazing I felt eating this way. Vibrant vegetables and fruit, whole grains, beans, legumes, nuts, and seeds took the place of highly processed food from a box. Little by little, my skin started to glow, my energy levels soared, and my chronic IBS lessened in severity. Those 100-calorie packs of processed cardboard suddenly didnt sound so appealing.

In 2008, I started my blog, Oh She Glows, to spread the word about my journey to health and the powerful transformation that food can make in our lives. My goal was, and still is, to share my story openly and to hopefully inspire others who are struggling. To be honest, I didnt know if I would stick with blogging for more than a couple of weeks, but this hobby unexpectedly turned into a full-blown passion, and I can confidently say that my blog changed my entire life. Within the first few months, my readership grew rapidly, and before long, I was connected with readers all over the world. One by one, comments and e-mails sharing stories of pain and triumph started to trickle in. Hearing from courageous women and men became a pivotal tool in my own recovery, as it motivated me to stay on a healthy path. It was the first time in my life that I truly felt fulfilled by the work that I was doing. Before long, I found myself spending countless hours in the kitchen transforming my favorite recipes using plant-based foods, then racing to the computer to share the pictures and recipes with my blog readers.

Five years later, Oh She Glows has grown beyond my wildest dreams, receiving millions of page views a month. Over the years, Ive heard from readers all over the world who experienced positive health changes after embracing my recipes. I feel so grateful to be able to share my passion with others, spreading my joy for healthy food around the world. For years, its been a personal dream to write a cookbook, a place where I could share my most treasured recipes, such as go-to breakfasts, protein-packed snacks, hearty entres, and decadent desserts. I am simply delighted to finally share this collection of recipes that Ive had to keep secret until now. The Oh She Glows Cookbook is packed with more than one hundred recipes that will have you glowing from the inside out, including seventy-five new and exclusive recipes plus a few dozen new-and-improved reader favorites. Whether you are a vegan or you simply want to incorporate a few vegan meals into your week, Im confident the recipes in this cookbook will have a positive impact on your health and well-being, and hopefully renew your enthusiasm for simple, plant-based eating.

MY JOURNEY TO HEALTH

I wish I could begin my story with a romantic tale about growing up on a farm and learning to cook treasured family recipes from a grandparent. But the truth is my turbulent, on-again, off-again relationship with food has been fraught with challenges. For more than ten years, food was the enemy in my life. I struggled with the two extremes of self-starvation and binge eating, a vicious roller coaster that left me insecure, suspicious of food, and ultimately miserable in my own skin. At the time, I didnt consider how the food I ate each day impacted the way I felt, nor did I really care. Obsessing over calories and fat grams was indeed a mask for other issues in my life, but it also prevented me from truly appreciating the power of proper nutrition and its ability to impact my mood, my energy levels, and even my self-esteem. Deep down, I knew I held the power to create a huge change in my life, but I didnt quite know how to make the change.

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers. M. SCOTT PECK

In my twenties, I began the long road of recovery from my eating disorder. With a new sense of optimism, I allowed myself to look beyond the past and embark on a journey of personal healing. My goal was simple: learn to love real food again and eat wholesome foods that made me glow from the inside out. That meant ditching the 100-calorie snacks, artificially sweetened fat-free yogurt, and chemical-laden zero-calorie butter spray for good! Instead, I started to blend leafy greens and other vegetables into my morning smoothies before work each day. You name it, I threw it into my blenderfrom kale and cucumbers to beets and carrots. My first attempts were a bit scary-looking (and -tasting)hence the name Green Monsters (see pages )but eventually, I started blending up delicious concoctions and sharing the recipes on my blog. Much to my surprise, Green Monsters took the blog world by storm, and readers from all over the world began sending me pictures of their own Green Monster smoothies. Soon enough, my skin started to get its glow back and I reclaimed the energy I needed to power through my busy days. My husband, Eric, also reaped the rewards of plant-based foods by dropping twenty pounds and reducing his high cholesterol without any medication. These positive results motivated me to stick to this new lifestyle and not fall back into old negative patterns.

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. HIPPOCRATES

I started to bring more plants into my kitchen with the help of a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) vegetable subscription and frequent trips to the farmers market. A couple of years later, I planted my own vegetable garden and grew oodles of kale and other veggies (I wont tell you about all the herbs I killed, though!). Growing my own vegetable garden was the first time I truly felt connected to the food on my plate. I was simply amazed to see real vegetables growing in my garden, vegetables that I could pull from the soil and eat! Everything was flavorful and fresh, just like nature intended. For the first time in my life, I got busy in the kitchen teaching myself how to cook food (and photograph it) from scratch. There were countless cooking disasters (many of which I documented on my blog), but also many successes, and these encouraged me to keep learning and improving my culinary talent.