The Laura Lea Balanced Cookbook: 120+ Everyday Recipes for the Healthy Home Cook

Goldberg, the woman behind food and lifestyle website Laura Lea Balanced, offers a friendly and relaxed approach to healthy eating. The recipes here are simple and most can be made in 30 minutes or less. Goldberg is never preachy and her recommendations to eat more nutritiously and mindfully are grounded in the idea of moderation and balance. Along with tempting recipes, Goldberg offers a useful list to build a healthy pantry, as well as recipe-by-recipe vegan substitutions. Innovative breakfast recipes include grain-free cinnamon waffles, blueberry-coconut morning porridge, and pumpkin-spice protein pancakes made with red lentils. Her Southern heritage (Goldberg hails from Tennessee) can be seen in recipes such as barbecue shrimp and quinoa grits, but her recipes also pull flavors from around the world, as evidenced by her Asian salmon cakes with sriracha aioli and refried-black-bean enchiladas with sweet-potato “cheese” sauce. Her vegan desserts sound good enough to convince the most devoted nonvegans, particularly her nondairy version of St. Louis’s famous gooey butter cake, here made with almond flour, cashews, and coconut sugar. Goldberg’s diverse and enticing recipes promise to make healthy eaters out of even the most reluctant. (May)