Have you ever bought a recipe book, and found the recipes were not quite up to par? No fears with these books, as the authors are professional chefs. If nobody liked their food, they would not have been able to build successful restaurants or consulting businesses! And although plant-based food is now a lot more up-to-date than of yesteryear, it still helps if you have people for dinner, and don’t end up with a total vegan disaster meal on the dinner table! Here are books by chefs who can cook – and can also teach you how to cook! Read up on food safety for people & pets.
Makini’s Vegan Kitchen is a super recipe book by a professional chef from Seattle, who runs a highly successful restaurant and used to be Stevie Wonder’s personal cook. Uniquely, she has been vegan from birth (as has her chef brother Ayinde Howell who once made a vegan mac and cheese for Queen Latifah on her TV show who couldn’t tell the difference).
This book offers inspired recipes from one of the USA’s highest-ranked vegan fine-dining restaurants, focusing on local seasonal produce. The 60 boldly-flavoured dishes for every mood include:
- French toast with strawberries & soy cream
- Barbecue oyster-mushroom sliders with pickled onions
- Tofu & roasted yam sliders
- Plum’s smoky mac
- Cauliflower bisque with fresh fennel
- Blue corn pizza with pesto-grilled heirloom tomatoes
- Quinoa risotto with panko-fried portobellos
- Black plum & ginger sorbet
- Fresh blueberry shortcake
- Tiramisu pancakes
We so appreciate the wonderfully creative recipes in this very beautiful cookbook. Joaquin Phoenix
The food at Plum Bistro is a testament to the talented head chef Makini. It’s one of my favourite restaurants in the world. India.Arie
about the author
Makini Howell is a chef who runs a fine-dining restaurant in Seattle and has her finger in many vegan pies including a burger truck! Stevie Wonder loved her food so much he asked her to take a sabbatical to be his personal chef when he went on tour. She says he’s a very funny man who loves saying to people ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you’. Although he loved most things she made, once she made him pickled watermelon radishes’. He said ‘Makini, please don’t do that again!’
