It’s. About. To. Go. Down.

This is gonna get real personal and honest.

Quarantine has been HARD. The lack of a structured schedule has me feeling aimless. Especially when this right here in front you, this blog, is my dream. Suddenly, I’ve found myself with all the time in the world to talk to you about my passion for vegan cooking. Annnnnnd instead I find myself down endless Netflix and YouTube rabbit holes, accomplishing very little- if anything at all.

Sometimes, that’s fine! Sometimes, we all need a day to veg out. Sometimes, it’s healing. However, after nearly a month straight with no direction, I decided I need a project. I needed a focus. Hell, this blog needed a focus. I’ve been wanting to start a blog for nearly a decade and I’ve had a multitude of ideas. However, I’ve had no real plan for it- until now.

In thinking about my “why” for this blog, I’ve realized it’s always boiled down to this core concept: I want to show the world that vegan cooking can be healthy, easy, accessible, and most importantly, delicious.

This quote from Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table has always resonated with me:

“I wanted to do something with food, I said. That was what I kept coming back to, after everything else. At the end of the day, when I was exhausted and fed up and unsure of everything, food was a certainty. It was what I thought about, what I cared about, what I wrote about, what got me out of bed in the morning. (I mean that. I get up for the sole purpose of eating breakfast. I don’t know why else you would.) It was so obvious, and so utterly terrifying.”

This blog was always going to end up being about food. However, I am not a not a recipe developer. I am not a health expert. I am not an official pro when it comes to the things I am most passionate about. Maybe someday, but in the meantime I’ve held myself back by believing I needed all of those qualifications in order to share my passion with you.

But, I don’t. I don’t require a culinary degree or need to be a registered dietician in order to share my personal experiences. I love making healthy vegan food and I’ve been doing it for over ten years. I am a meal prepping pro and have racked up some tips and tricks in the kitchen along the way. I can share my favorite resources for nutrition education and hope you find it helpful. All I can hope for is that somehow, my knowledge and experiences can help you nourish you body and delight your tastebuds!

I have decided I am going to cook my way through Chloe Coscarelli’s Chloe Flavor.

Cooking my way through an entire cookbook has been a goal of mine for some time now. Probably, ever since I saw Julie & Julia. It has proved to be difficult for me though. I am a cookbook-a-holic. Meaning, I’m constantly flipping through a new cookbook, being inspired to jump into the kitchen. It makes it hard to stick to one single book. Hell, I’ve even had two new ones arrive on my doorstep since committing to this project. Yet, I am determined.

Chloe has long been someone I’ve admired and respected. She has four cookbooks under her belt, became the first vegan to ever win a televised cooking competition, and even found herself on Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2017.

Her first book, Chloe’s Kitchen (which took the number two spot on my list of Top Five Cookbooks for Beginners), has had such a large influence on me. It was published roughly a year and half into my vegan journey. While I had been managing to get along just fine the kitchen with Isa Chandra Moskowitz teaching me the brilliance of tofu scramble, and Kim Barnouin keeping me in banana nut muffins. Yet, Chloe’s book was a game changer for me.

She brought me vegan mac and cheese. Her Double Double Drive-Thru Burgers became almost a weekly menu item for me. I’m also fairly certain I purchased my food processor just to make her Avocado Pesto Pasta. Her desserts quickly became my go-to recipes for every holiday and birthday party I attended thereafter. In other words, it was my very first “staple” cookbook. The first book I ever used so frequently that the pages have fallen out from use.

If there was ever a book to cook my way through, that would’ve been it! Simply, because I’ve made almost every recipe in the book already. Honestly, I surprise myself that I’ve left a few untried. However, as I’ve been making these recipes on repeat for eight years now, I figured it was time to expose my pots, pans, and tastebuds to something new. Hence, Chloe Flavor.

I purchased Chloe Flavor upon its release and have made a handful of the recipes before embarking on this journey. However, for the purpose of this project, I will be cooking all 115 recipes, including the ones I have already tried. My goal is to make every single recipe before the end of 2020.

My aim is to cook a minimum of four recipes from the book each week. This will allow me to tackle every recipe by my goal completion date. It also leaves wiggle room in my weekly menus to explore other cookbooks and enjoy the occasional dinner out. I will be documenting my progress with weekly posts on the recipes I’m making, along with a photo for each recipe on my Instagram account (@citrusandcharm).

So, bear with me as this site continues to grow and evolve. I hope you will join me each week to see what I’m whipping up and feel free to snag a copy of Chloe’s books for yourself and cook along with me!

See you back here soon friends.