Eating your vegetables can be a pleasure.
Here at Cruciferous, I’m not going to tell you to eat your vegetables. I’m going to tempt you to eat your vegetables. In this free weekly newsletter, I’ll share approachable vegetable-forward recipes featuring the healthiest ingredients on the planet. But to qualify for inclusion in this newsletter, the recipe must be, first and foremost, delicious.
Like, second-helping, lick your plate, make-again delicious.
The recipes will be my own original recipes straight from my kitchen notebook and dinner table as well as vetted, tried-and-true plant-based recipes from around the Internet that I have been making for years.
Along the way, we’ll tackle home-cooking topics, kitchen tools, and the trials of triumphs of eating a plant-based diet. I’ll take you inside my own food and health journey and hope to create a community where we can share inspiration, tips, support, ideas, and (of course) our favorite recipes.
Change can be hard. But it doesn’t have to be.
As someone who transitioned from a gleefully omnivorous diet to a totally plant-based diet, I can tell you from experience: It’s not easy. But it is possible. And here’s the good news—you don’t have to overhaul your diet overnight to get the substantial health benefits of eating more vegetables.
Cruciferous isn’t just for vegans. It’s for anyone who wants to cook, loves great-tasting food, and would like to eat more plant-based meals. You can start making a difference in your health and how you feel one plate at a time. For me, the secret to success has been to love vegetables and plant-based meals so much I prefer them to anything else.
Change can be powerful. In 2017, I was diagnosed with high cholesterol. That’s what inspired me to change my diet. Today all my numbers are in check, I don’t take any medications, and I love eating vegetables all day every day. (You can read more about my cholesterol and plant-based journey at Eating Well.)
Who is Joy Manning?
Writer Joy Manning lives at the intersection of food and health.
But for years she lived on butter, meat, fried foods, and pastries as Philadelphia Magazine’s restaurant critic.
That gig drove her straight into the arms of Prevention magazine, where she wrote about nutrition and ate mostly steamed quinoa and vegetables grown on Rodale’s organic farm.
Since then, she’s learned to balance her love of all things panko-crusted with her plan to live to the age of 120.
So now she writes and teaches about health and plant-based cooking. A self-taught cook, Joy became a master recipe developer by learning from every chef she’s interviewed and each cookbook she’s cracked open. Her recipes have been published in The Washington Post, Serious Eats, Food & Wine, Epicurious, and Women’s Health to name a few.
She writes books (Is Our Food Killing Us?, Stuff Every Cook Should Know) and helps other people make their cookbooks (Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking).
The James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals liked Joy’s work enough to nominate her for some splashy awards she didn’t end up winning. (She likes to say, “It was an honor just to be nominated.” It really was!) Her work has appeared in the Best Food Writing book series.
She has written for many health publications, including Web MD, Everyday Health, Diabetes Forecast, and Shape.
