Heidi Swanson started her vegetarian food blog, 101 Cookbooks, in 2003. At the time, the Atkins Diet was sweeping the nation, even as schoolchildren still learned the carb-heavy Food Pyramid. It would take another year for a landmark study to link high-fructose corn syrup to the obesity epidemic, and another fifteen for the FDA to ban trans fats. Back then, granola was for tree-huggers, like organic produce, Whole Foods Markets and the Pacific Northwest.
Times have changed. These days, everyone outside the Lion Diet community agrees that a plant-based diet is best, preferably free of hormones and artificial sweeteners. 101 Cookbooks is still active and popular, if less countercultural than at its inception. Swanson is still sharing her signature fresh, seasonal, vegetable-forward recipes; in an effort to lighten up my diet for the summer, I explored the 101 Cookbooks catalogue — starting with the cookbooks themselves.
Swanson’s first published collection of recipes, Super Natural Cooking (2007), is by now a quaint introduction to the very concept of whole foods — it includes a pronunciation key for “quinoa” and a description of coconut oil, that exotic shortening now available in the grocery aisle of your average Rite Aid. That first cookbook was an introduction to a crunchy California lifestyle: its eighty recipes are mostly use-cases for unusual ingredients — amaranth! Beluga lentils! kumquats! — designed to make you feel more confident stocking your kitchen with heirloom beans and gluten-free flours.
Fourteen years passed before Swanson’s follow-up collection, Super Natural Simple (2021). The newer cookbook, like Swanson’s most recent blog entries, no longer bothers to explain wholesome pantry staples like clarified butter or turmeric or molasses. Instead, she focuses on the recipes themselves, borrowing popular food-blogger categories like “weeknight,” “sheet pan” and “make-ahead” to organize her 120 new recipes.
I made Swanson’s Vegetarian Paella with summer squash and cherry tomatoes, substituting Arborio for Bomba rice. It was tremendous, topped with lots of crushed green olives. While I waited for the paella to set, I sipped a basil-infused seltzer based on her recipe for Tarragon Soda, with a squeeze of grapefruit and a drop of bitters, and felt very sophisticated. Carrot, White Bean and Dill Salad tossed with whole-wheat penne makes a quick, satisfying lunch all week long. Between the herb-infused sodas and this brown sugar-dusted salad, you’ll notice that Swanson is not averse to sweetness, like some of her zero-sugar health-nut counterparts. While she forbids refined white sugars, she’ll never scold your sweet tooth.
By the end of my week with 101 Cookbooks, my Texan husband was growling for meat. Our final date with Swanson was her Feisty Tofu with Broccoli, Chile and Nuts, from Super Natural Simple. As I tossed squares of tofu in a skillet with chiles de arbol, I reflected that twenty years ago, tofu was a hippie punchline. Now, it seems perfectly natural.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2023 World edition.
