The UnDiet Cookbook & Giveaway!
The UnDiet Cookbook is 
the follow-up cookbook to the original lifestyle book titled UnDiet. Meghan Telpner is a Toronto based nutritionist who has cured her own Crohn’s Disease entirely through diet and lifestyle. Her passion for healthy eating and delicious cooking comes through loud and clear in this book with her lively personality smiling out from every page. UnDiet features 130 gluten free plant-based recipes with options for any diet. The cookbook is just beautiful and is in full colour with full page pictures of her recipes. While Meghan herself eats mostly a plant-based diet or plantiful (as she calls it), the whole premise of UnDiet is to eat in a way that works best for each individual. She believes labels (vegan, paleo, raw, etc) are too restrictive and belong on tin cans and not people. She makes no excuses for her theory and encourages people to understand their own nutritional needs and let their own bodies and how they feel be there guide.
While I personally eat a plant-based diet and proudly identify with a vegan/vegetarian “label” as I’m sure most of our VegFamily readers do, I have always appreciated Meghan’s no-nonsense style and non-judgemental approach and her cookbook reflects that beautifully. For those of you especially that are cooking plant based for yourself and have someone else under your roof that is not eating a vegan/vegetarian diet this book is a perfect option. In half of her recipes in her “Main Event” section she offers options to add organic meat/fish in the recipes. This way you could cook one huge batch of a specific meal and eat it vegan style for yourself and then follow the instructions to make it “Protein-Powered” for anyone else. Meghan also is very sensitive to the many food allergies that exist today so she has options to make some of her recipes soy-free, nut-free and grain-free and all of her recipes are already gluten-free.
Some of her must try recipes are her Sweet Potato Brizzles (page 69), Sunflower Power Spread (page 89), Texi Mexi Wraps (page 176), Cinnamon Spike Brownies (page 276) and her UnShepherd’s Pie (page 166) which is my favorite! One of the most unique features of this book is it has a recipe section for Beauty Care which is something I haven’t seen in any of the cookbooks that have come my way. She features recipes for toothpaste, deodorant, conditioner, and many facial products, all with natural normal ingredients that you can easily put together yourself. The end of the book contains a section for Entertaining with many ready-made meal plans and a section on how to eat naturally and healthy when travelling…which always presents itself as a challenge.
UnDiet is a wonderful addition to anyone’s cookbook library, regardless of the type of diet they currently follow. We all know that the more plants you eat the better, the more local you eat the better and the more you stay away from processed foods and ingredients that are made in a lab the better and that is exactly what Meghan promotes. To learn more about Meghan, please visit her website at http://www.meghantelpner.com/.
If you’d like to win a copy of the UnDiet cookbook, were giving it away to one lucky reader! Check out our facebook page to enter at https://www.facebook.com/vegfamily.
Rawmazing Key Lime Pie – Featured Recipe from The UnDiet Cookbook
Soy-Free
Grain-Free
Raw
Prep Time: 25 minutes
Setting Time: 3 hours
Serves 8–10
Crust
1 cup dried dates
1/2 cup whole almonds, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup whole pecans, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup unsweetened shredded dried coconut
1 Tbsp coconut oil
Pinch of sea salt
Filling
2 cups cashews
3/4 cup fresh lime juice
1/2 cup maple syrup
⅓ cup melted coconut oil
1 tsp matcha powder (optional for color only)
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
Garnish
6 key limes, sliced (optional)
Make It Like So
- Put all the crust ingredients into a food processor, and process until the ingredients can just stick together. You shouldn’t have a gooey mess. Stop and scrape down the sides as needed. Press the crust mixture into the bottom and up the sides of a 9inch glass pie dish.
- Place all the filling ingredients in your high-speed blender or food processor and blend until the filling is completely smooth and creamy.
- Pour the filling evenly over the pie crust, smooth with a spatula. Place the pie in the freezer covered to set for at least 3 hours, or overnight if possible.
- Let the pie sit at room temperature for 10 minutes and garnish with key limes before serving.
The above recipes are Excerpted from The UnDiet Cookbook: 130 Gluten-Free Recipes for a Healthy and Awesome Life by Meghan Telpner. Copyright © 2015 Meghan Telpner. Photography Copyright © 2015 Maya Visnyei and Catherine Farquharson. Published by Appetite by Random House, a division of Random House of Canada Ltd., a Penguin Random House Company. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
