Flow in the Kitchen: Practices for Healthy Stress-free Vegan Cooking

"What's for dinner?" is a question that induces annoyance, resentment, and even dread in many of us. It's time to change the narrative. Cooking really good food for ourselves and others is the ultimate opportunity to nourish our bodies and souls, and those of our loved ones. When we are well fed, we can show up in our daily lives with more love and energy, ready to make the world a better place. Isn't that worth putting a little effort toward? Yes! And we don't need to be martyrs about it.

In Flow in the Kitchen: Practices for Healthy Stress-free Vegan Cooking, Brigitte Gemme invites home cooks like you to practice habits and routines that will transform cooking from a chore you dread to a ritual you embrace with gratitude and mindfulness. In addition to meal planning and batch cooking, Flow in the Kitchen leads you to adopt a new food and cooking mindset.

This short book guides you to:

Shift your mindset to experience gratitude and empowerment when cooking,

Strike a conscious compromise between our many values, requirements, and obligations,

Compose healthy balanced vegan meals using mostly whole plant foods: lots of seasonal vegetables and fruit, satisfying protein-dense foods, whole grains, and healthy fats,

Quickly plan meals for your week, realistically taking into consideration the time and energy you can put toward cooking,

Commit to streamlined batch cooking sessions on the weekend to set yourself up for stress-free weeknight success,

Roll with the punches and still get a good meal when your prep didn't happen or the week doesn't go as planned,

And keep the flow going from one week to the next so you can continue feeding yourself and your loved ones really good meals... and hop back on the meal plan and prep train after you fall off.

In the appendices, Brigitte shares her list of most useful pantry ingredients, her go-to vegetables (and what to do with them!), and the explanations you need to learn how to cook the most common standard vegan dishes using the ingredients you have at hand, without always scrambling to find a recipe.

Flow in the Kitchen is not only about cooking but rather about the complete process from thinking about food, planning meals, batch cooking, and finally assembling and serving dinner... before starting the flow process again for the following week. Cooking is one of those steps, but it is not the most important if our goal is to enjoy flow and be nourished. Feeling at ease and comfortable – not straining – in the kitchen depends on the quality of our presence as we plan, prepare, and serve our meals. The practice does not have to take much time, but it does deserve our full attention for a few hours every week.

Are you in?

Early reader comments
"I'm looking forward to Flow in the Kitchen. From what I have read, it's going to be amazing!" - TP
"It's looking really good and I can't wait to read the rest of it. I really like the idea of flow in the kitchen!" -IF

About the author
Brigitte Gemme is passionate about helping more people eat more plants, even if they think they will never go vegan. She used to love rare steak and blue cheese, but became vegan in 2015 to reduce her environmental footprint. Today, she is most motivated by the possibility of improving people's health and vitality by empowering them to cook really good food. She offers meal planning services, online cooking workshops, and a cooking club on her web site Vegan Family Kitchen. Brigitte has a PhD in sociology of education from the University of British Columbia and a certificate in Plant-based Nutrition from the University of Winchester. She lives in Vancouver (Canada) with her husband and two children.