Brave New Meal

or how the panny changed our whole book

Brave New Meal was the first cookbook written without a gun pointed at my head. The first three books all came out a year apart, which meant I had one year to test and perfect 100 recipes for each book while creating free recipes and content for social media. It was intense. In Fall 2018 we signed a two-book deal with Penguin Random House with a release date of Fall 2020 for the first title. Originally, Brave New Meal was supposed to be a fruit and vegetable yearbook with recipes falling under star ingredients like zucchini or carrots so that you could look up recipes based on what was in season where you were. I wanted it to be the kind of cookbook that could hang on your kitchen counter forever; where you’d grab whatever was on sale in the produce section of the market because you knew this book would have at least one recipe for it. It was the most ambitious manuscript idea we’d pitched so far but the longer lead time made me confident that I could get it done. I started cooking and testing in Spring 2019, trying to plan out the next four seasons of recipes so I could stay on top of everything while making sure we knew when to shoot all the recipes based on the seasonal availability of ingredients. This was the first time we produced a book while recording our then weekly podcast Forked Up. It took a lot of effort to stay on track and despite being fucking exhausted, we were doing great. Then the pandemic happened.

In March 2020 book production stopped and honestly, I was thankful for the break. My personal life was a disaster, the grind of writing the podcast, creating and testing recipes, and trying to be funny and light when we recorded the pod was A LOT. I was grateful for those first terrifying weeks at home because I knew that I couldn’t be expected to keep on as usual. No one else was. But as the weeks stretched on, it became clear that the original production schedule wasn’t going to work because I couldn’t find toilet paper, let alone all the specific produce for my recipes. Then in June we rebranded the company and to reflect the seriousness of our decision, we pulled our entire back catalog from stores (more on that here). I pitched a new concept for Brave New Meal because we were clearly going in a new direction in the world and what we had planned just didn’t make sense anymore. Delivery apps had so many people in a chokehold during that first year so we pivoted the book to be focused on cooking as a lifesaving skill. I wanted to show that vegetable focused foods aren’t intimidating and could easily adapt to whatever you have in your cupboard or at your market. The Garden of Eatin chapter on page 216 is the last remnant of the original concept of the book, everything else got tweaked. We were going to have to reshoot almost everything, and I needed to change a lot of the recipes and all of the text. Our release date was pushed to Fall 2021.

The next months were spent trying to not catch COVID, both out of a general fear of death and more specifically because I didn’t want to lose my sense of taste. I can’t do my job if I lose my sense of taste so I stayed home and worked while other people took risks. I did eventually get COVID in Spring 2023 and did lose my sense of taste but hey, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We reshot many photos for the books in the back catalog, I updated some recipes, and had all the text combed over by sensitive readers and changed based on their occasional minor suggestions. We hurried to get this done so those books could be up for sale again by the 2020 holiday season, but like so many things that year, the books stalled somewhere further up the ladder and didn’t get out until 2021. I just kept cooking.

Brave New Meal went to print in summer 2021 and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the first copy. The pictures Matt took and color palette for the book were gorgeous. Dark and moody but full of hope, just like those first years of the pandemic. Even the title was supposed to signal an optimistic look toward the future with a nod to the dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley of a similar name. I was so proud of the cover. I bought all the most beautiful produce at the farmer’s market that day and started arranging it on the biggest surface we had. The results were so much better than I could have imagined, and Matt lit the whole spread in a way that made it look ethereal. I couldn’t wait to share it with you guys. On the release date, I posted up at my computer to interact with people all day on our social accounts and talk about the book. Then we started getting messages about missing icons.

I grabbed my copy and saw that the icons were missing there too. WTF. I pulled up the last draft we had signed off on before it went to the printer and just as I had suspected, the icons were in there. After a few emails back and forth with the publisher, we determined that somehow just that layer in the file had been turned off when it went out and thus all our books had that error in them in the US. And because that file was then shared with our publishers in other countries like Canada, they had it too. It was hard to not feel defeated. Technically, Brave New Meal was the fourth book we published that year since all our titles had been re-released in the months before with the updated images, titles, and text. I was tired and really needed a win. We had worked our asses off during very difficult times to try and create something beautiful to share with the world only to be embarrassed by some unknown person’s mistake. We still get DMs about the missing icons almost weekly. You can find them listed out on page 250-251 of the book but up front where they matter most remains blank. If you find one with them printed out, let us know because we’ve never seen it. But the recipes? The recipes are fire.

This is one of my favorites from the book, the Summer Tomato Tart. The sun dried tomato pesto could be the star of dinner all on its own. Toss it over warm noodles, use it instead of marinara on your next homemade pizza, or spread it on your sammies for lunch. It’s a winner, I swear. Make this tart now while tomatoes are still perfect at the market and you’ll put it on your menu until the end of summer. Here’s to Brave New Meal, flaws and all.

Summer Tomato Tarts

Makes 2 square tarts

Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto (or your favorite basil pesto)

1 ½ cups oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes,*with some of the oil in there, too, no stress

2/3 cup slivered or sliced almonds or pine nuts, toasted

4 garlic cloves, roughly chopped

¼ cup chopped fresh basil

1 to 2 small fresh red chiles, such as Fresnos, chopped

½ teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons nutritional yeast (nooch)

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

¼ cup olive oil

2 sheets puff pastry*

½ cup chopped fresh basil

4 large tomatoes,** cut into ¼ inch-thick slices (like you were putting them on a burger)

Salt and black pepper to taste

First, make the pesto. Throw the sun-dried tomatoes, nuts, garlic, basil, chiles, salt, and nooch into a food processor. Pulse that shit until the tomatoes start getting broken up, then drizzle in the lemon juice and oil, still pulsing the food processor, until a coarse pesto starts to form. This does not need to be smooth at all, just make sure there are no big chunks. This will keep in the fridge for at least 1 week, so you can toss any leftovers over hot pasta or spread it on sammies.

When you’re ready to tart it up, crank the oven to 400°F. Line a large baking sheet with some parchment paper. Roll the puff pastry into squarish shapes. Put the puff pastry on the baking sheet and spread a couple spoonfuls of the pesto over the pastry leaving a ½ inch border around the edges. Like a fucking pizza, okay?

Sprinkle the basil over the pesto and then arrange the tomatoes in a single layer and press them a little into the pesto so they don’t slide around. Sprinkle some salt and pepper on top and spread on the cashew cheese sauce (if you’re using that shit). Now repeat with the other piece of puff pastry.

Bake until the pastry is golden brown and well, puffed, 15 to 20 minutes. Let it cool for at least 5 minutes before tossing torn basil leaves over the top and serving.

* Puff pastry should be near the frozen pie crusts in a grocery store.

** These can be whatever the fuck kind of large, ripe tomatoes you can find (but heirlooms always look the prettiest). Try to mix up the colors, though, because that really says “I KNOW HOW TO MAKE A FUCKING TART.”

Summer Tomato Tarts

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