One Last Push

good food ahead

Hey Broiler Heads! This week’s newsletter is an abridged version of the intro for our new book Hungry as Hell: Meals to Live By, Flavors to Die For that we’ve been dying to share with you for months. It’s our best book and the last one we’re gonna write for a long, long time so please consider grabbing a copy. It helps us keep our jobs AND you get 100 brand new, delicious as hell recipes for less than the cost of ordering dinner. That’s a good fucking deal. Enjoy!

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Everyone loves to cook, until they don’t. This is one of the biggest things we’ve learned since the release of our first book, Bad Manners: The Official Cookbook, almost a decade ago. Everyone wants delicious, life-changing, healthful food, but when it’s 7:45 p.m. we’ll frantically reach for the chips and make depressing microwave nachos. Our goals, preferences, and plans fall apart under the weight of everyday life. We want jeweled rice and homemade soup but only leave enough time for dino nuggets.

You can’t manifest dinner. We’ve tried.

There’s just too much shit to do before you sit down to eat. All the technology we’ve brought into our lives under the guise of ease have turned into attention and time thieves. We endlessly scroll as we wait for room-temp takeout to appear at our door. We swear this is faster than cooking for ourselves despite all the signs to the contrary. We build communities with brands instead of each other. We save recipes we’ll never make time to cook, bookmark workouts we’ll never even start. We are starving for real food and real connections. We’re hungry as hell and bet you are, too.

for the first time, we wrote all about ourselves in this new book. feeling vulnerable as hell

We believe that real, everyday cooking shouldn’t be hard. Weeknight meals shouldn’t take Herculean efforts of prep on Sundays or hours in the kitchen to get made. Who the fuck has that many storage containers anyway? No one wants to eat leftovers from the same motherfucking meal four days in a row either. We hate how cooking for yourself has become something people think you need days of planning to pull off. All these common cooking hacks do is turn you into a joyless kitchen assembly worker and take all the fun out of eating. On average, people today spend half as much time in the kitchen as a generation ago. That’s why grandma could whip up dinner in 30 minutes with whatever the fuck was in the fridge. SHE HAD PRACTICE. We understand that most of us have barely any time to begin with. Our schedules are fucking packed from dawn ’til dusk. That’s why all our recipes for weekday foods take less than 45 minutes to make, start to finish. Yup, from chopping to chomping. We want everything you make to be bringing you some sort of healthy something, but at the end of the day the food needs to be craveable and practical. The longer weekend recipes are just as important to building your skills in the kitchen as their faster brethren. Grandma could cook fast because first she learned to cook slow, you know?

When you block out time in the kitchen to cook some longer recipes, you learn so many tricks that will make you a faster cook when pressed for time. You can perfect your stovetop multitasking, your chopping techniques, your mise en place all without looking at the clock or someone in your family crying about how late dinner is. When you get confident at cooking slowly, then it’s no big deal to speed that shit up. You never know when hunger will come knocking, so those skills have gotta stay sharp.

Don't forget to download our FREE ebook full of recipes and tips to make the most of your time in the kitchen.

So you’re on board, but we can feel your hesitation about eating so many plants. We get it. Most of us grew up with broccoli, salads, and beans that were cooked with open hostility. They all tasted like shit because no one took the time to learn how to season and cook them properly. Vegetables, like anything we eat, are only as good as you make them. Well lucky for you, we’ve been cooking exclusively vegan meals for over twenty years so we have all the know-how you need to make your meals so fucking delicious you’ll forget you ever hated to cook. The fact that these dishes are more healthful than your average meal will help you keep the momentum going when all the fake fluff you’re used to eating would have let you down. In fact, you might have noticed that none of our books calls for any ingredients like this. Sure, some are fucking delicious, but that’s not how we like to cook. We use minimally processed, accessible ingredients because they’re both cheaper and better for you. Eat that fake shit when you’re out in the world, but when you’re cooking with us, you’re cooking some motherfucking plants.