Health Begins In the Kitchen

Many people have shelves full of “healthy” cookbooks created by chefs with little or no nutritional expertise or home-cooking experience. The recipes are either too fussy or impractical and leave out a key ingredient—taste! 


In Health Begins in the Kitchen: Delicious and Easy Vegan Recipes and Seasonal Food Plan Joanne Mumola Williams combines the know-how of a foodie, who has been an avid cook her whole life, with a PhD in nutrition to create a practical and seasonal approach to good eating imbibed at her southern Italian family’s table and continued for years with her own children. Healthy has never been so easy or so delicious.


In this cookbook Joanne Mumola Williams, creator of the popular blog, FoodsForLongLIfe.com, shows you how to have a guilt-free, joyful and healthy relationship with food. Health Begins in the Kitchen demonstrates the possibility of avoiding disease and achieving remarkable health by the simple and joyful process of eating delicious food. 


She candidly discusses the important benefits and shortcomings of different types of vegetarian diets, dispelling dietary myths along the way. Her book also demonstrates how to easily incorporate more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and seeds into your family’s current diet. Besides the wide variety of healthy recipe ideas (from learning how to build the ultimate vegetarian lasagna to preparing guilt-free desserts), lots of tips are given on how to remake popular family recipes. For example: how to cook with less oil and sugar, how to replace eggs in cakes and other baked items, how to make fettuccine Alfredo or mac and “cheese” without dairy, and more. An entire chapter is devoted to making healthy jam and jelly.  


Most people believe that their health and longevity depend on their genes and feel powerless to change their “destiny.” But actually, the diseases they will suffer from or the health they will enjoy depends more on the family recipes, rather than the genes that have been passed down to them from past generations. 


Health Begins in the Kitchen provides 160 delicious, plant-rich recipes (most are gluten free), 145 beautiful photographs, and an abundance of critical nutritional information that will inspire you to get into your kitchen and take control of your health. 


This book introduces the Seasonally Raw Food Plan (with sample menus), emphasizing the importance of including raw, plant-rich foods in the diet. Unlike raw food diets that promote a high consumption of uncooked food all year round, the author encourages a balance of cooked and raw foods that changes with each season. 


Cleansing the body of accumulated toxins is also important for one’s health and well-being, and many people find it helpful to do this periodically. An unsupervised water or juice fast can be dangerous and very difficult to complete; a safer and easier way to cleanse the body is by simply eating a diet of raw food for a period of time. Health Begins in the Kitchen offers instructions and sample menus for a gentle raw food cleanse that will never leave you hungry. 


This book is not just for vegans or vegetarians. It’s for anyone struggling to obtain the number of daily recommended servings of fruits and vegetables needed for good health.  Drawing from the book’s recipes, a variety of sample menus are provided from a casual burger night to Thanksgiving dinner. The author also shares tips for easy and enjoyable entertaining.  This book will become your favorite addition or a wonderful first introduction to a plant-rich recipe collection.