Ella Mills Woodward - Deliciously Ella The Plant-Based Cookbook: 100 Simple Vegan Recipes to Make Every Day Delicious

Ella Mills , founder of Deliciously Ella, is an award-winning cookery author and entrepreneur, and a champion of eating well. She started off with her popular blog, deliciouslyella.com , which has had over 110 million hits in the last three years. Her first book came out in January 2015 and has been the bestselling debut cookbook ever in the UK and a New York Times bestseller. She has since released a further three bestselling books, created a #1 app and, with her husband, opened a deli in London, as well as launching a food product line across the UK.

Deliciously Ella

Deliciously Ella Every Day

Deliciously Ella with Friends

Deliciously Ella Smoothies & Juices

New York London

2018 by Ella Mills

First published in the United States by Quercus in 2018

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e-ISBN 9781635061390

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Hachette Book Group

1290 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10104

www.quercus.com

Contents

The last few years have been an incredible experience, a huge learning curve and, at times, an emotional roller coaster. In fact, I cant begin to explain just how unexpected the whole Deliciously Ella journey has been. When I first started writing my blog in 2012, I had no idea that it would engage the interest of so many people or end up becoming such a huge part of my life. I never thought that it would grow to the size it has and I definitely wouldnt have guessed that an interview I gave for my first book would be the catalyst for my introduction to Matt, my now husband, and kick-start a whirlwind romance that ultimately turned Deliciously Ella into a family business where Matt is our CEO, Im the creative director and our dog, Austin, is king!In this book I want to give you a glimpse into the Deliciously Ella world and share some of my personal insights from recent years, including how I turned a blog into a large community of people, bound together by a collective sense of values, purpose and passion. As well as my story, I want to share our plant-based philosophy and of course some very special recipes that I know you will enjoy making and eating.I think its worth saying now that while Deliciously Ella has grown and adapted, my ultimate aim has remained the same: to make fruits and vegetables more interesting and delicious, and inspire you to put them at the centre of your plate.Im excited to share the stories of our adventures, the lessons weve learnt (the good and the bad!), the advice weve been given and, best of all, the recipes that tell these tales. To me, the recipes that have developed over this period from our kitchen, delis, pop-ups, festivals, dinners and supper clubs are so much more than words on paper; theyre little pieces of our journey, and together they form the building blocks that have made us who we are today. I cant wait for you to fall in love with them too.

Our journey As many of you might know, I started Deliciously Ella in 2012 as a way of recording my own experiments in the kitchen as I learnt to cook and looked for ways to manage an illness that had affected my autonomic nervous system and had me largely bed-bound. Since then, I feel that both Deliciously Ella and I as a collective have been through two stages of growth and development.Phase one was completely organic and unexpected as Deliciously Ella evolved from a personal diary that I initially wrote in my student kitchen and then my parents kitchen, to a small but strong community on social media. From day one I spent a huge amount of time getting to know my audience and connecting with as many people as possible, and as that community grew both my readers and I wanted to take that connection from the online space into something more tangible. So I hired a small team who worked with me in my flat to organise supper clubs, talks and workshops. The next step was our app and on the back of that came my first book deal, which changed everything.Somehow my first book caught a moment: our community had such a connection to the journey of Deliciously Ella that they all wanted to hear more. A week or so before the book was due to be published, orders went through the roof to the point where my publisher rang me to let me know that theyd run out of books and were reprinting it across six different printers to keep up with demand! Nothing has ever surprised me more, and I cant tell you how surreal it felt watching it sit at the top of the bestseller chart. Up until this point in my Deliciously Ella journey, most people were still asking me when I was going to go and find a real job!It was an amazing moment in my life and something for which Ill be forever grateful. Ultimately, Deliciously Ella has shaped everything I do and has led me on the most wonderful path, but at the time I wasnt ready for the intensity with which my career took off or the attention that I started to receive. If you remember, I got ill halfway through my time at university, so Id never had a proper job before, which meant I was pretty clueless on the professional front, and on a personal level I was still struggling to rebuild my self-confidence and self-esteem after my illness had taken such a hammer to them both. Id spent most of the previous few years on my own watching other peoples lives unfold via Facebook and I had a very negative view of myself and my self-worth, so suddenly operating in the public space was pretty terrifying. I had a few periods where I felt so far outside my comfort zone and incredibly vulnerable, which created a sense of real anxiety. I ran with it to a point, and tried to be a yes person, but rather than me making proactive decisions, everything I did was very reaction-led, as I just wasnt sure what to do, where to take Deliciously Ella next or how to create something meaningful for the community that supported me. Just as I started questioning everything, I was introduced to Matt, and that turned my world upside down in so many different ways.Next page