Who: The Hemsley sisters – Jasmine, 35, and Melissa, 29, with the fringe – are the only ones of our healthy cooks who eat meat and they don’t do it by halves. Their first cookbook, The Art of Eating Well, features roasted bone marrow, osso buco and a hunking great steak, fried in ghee or duck fat and served with a mustard leek sauce. In fact, you have to read many of their recipes very closely to realise they have any connection with eating virtuously. Hemsley & Hemsley do fried chicken, just with almonds in place of breadcrumbs and oven-baked; their shepherd’s pie is topped with cauliflower mash.
Since 2012, the sisters have blogged for the Vogue website; The Art of Eating Well, published last summer, has scarcely left the top 10 lists. “We’re really meat and two veg,” explains Jasmine, a former model, with a smile – it’s just the veg is likely to be rainbow coleslaw or carrots twirled through a spiraliser.
Word, however, of her exotic packed lunches spread, and in 2010 Jasmine began to prepare meals for private clients, mainly in fashion and entertainment. She soon had so much work that she brought in Melissa, who was then working in marketing for a chain of gastropubs. They share all duties now, although Jasmine likes to bake while Melissa takes the lead on curries.
This is a refreshing summer salad with cucumber noodles and Asian flavours. And it is the perfect way to use up leftover chicken. If you have no leftover chicken, serve instead with a little fish or sliced seared beef. We love raw chopped pak choi, but you can substitute with Chinese-style cabbage or finely shredded English cabbage. Eat this within a few hours as the cucumber will start to get watery, or make everything else up in advance and prepare the cucumber noodles just before serving.
If you’re taking this for lunch, pack the chicken first, then arrange all the veg on top so they don’t get squashed, and take your dressing in a separate jar.
Gently toast the sesame seeds in a dry pan until fragrant. Use a spiraliser or julienne peeler to make the cucumber noodles. Or use a regular vegetable peeler to slice the cucumbers lengthways into wide pappardelle-style ribbons. You might want to cut the long, spiralised strands in half to make them easier to eat.
Prepare the dressing by whisking together all the ingredients in a bowl or shaking them together in a jam jar. Add the lettuce, pak choi, spring onion and coriander to a bowl. Pour over the dressing and mix everything together.
Plate up with some shredded chicken, and top with toasted sesame seeds and the red chilli, if using. Serve immediately.
No leftover chicken? Just roast 2 large chicken thighs at fan 200C/gas mark 6 for 25-30 minutes until cooked, then shred quickly with two forks to cool the meat quickly.
Who: Deliciously Ella is, simply, the food-publishing phenomenon of 2015. Four years ago, 23-year-old Ella Woodward was a university student who couldn’t cook. Really, scarcely boil an egg: “I hated fruit, I hated vegetables, I’d never eaten brown rice and I lived off pick ’n’ mix,” she says. Now her recipe collection, Deliciously Ella, which came out in January, is the fastest-selling debut cookbook ever, spending six weeks at No 1 in the charts. Her blog receives 6 million hits a month and she has 400,000 followers on Instagram. Not bad for someone who has never cooked in a restaurant and has no TV presence.
Woodward’s food is unfussy, mostly quick to prepare and generous. She avoids labels such as vegan – she doesn’t touch meat, dairy, gluten or sugar herself, but unlike some others featured here, she is happy to include pasta or rice (very occasionally) in her recipes. “It’s just about trying to put the vegetable in the middle of the dish,” she explains. But perhaps the main reason for Deliciously Ella’s success is Woodward’s own story: she suffered from postural tachycardia syndrome, which can cause debilitating nausea, dizziness and blurred vision. She was laid up in bed for almost a year and says her change in diet – along with exercise – has been a key part of her recovery.
How she got started: Rock bottom for Woodward came when she took a trip to Morocco with her boyfriend before her illness had been diagnosed. The trip lasted less than 24 hours before she had to return home on a drip with food poisoning.
These brownies have consistently been the most popular recipe on my blog. And there’s a good reason for all this love – the brownies are divine. I know it sounds strange to put vegetables into sweet dishes, but sweet potatoes taste more like dessert anyway and they create the gooiest consistency.
Preheat the oven to 180C/gas mark 4. Peel the sweet potatoes. Cut them into chunks and place into a steamer for about 20 minutes, until they become really soft.
Once they are perfectly soft and beginning to fall apart, remove them and add them to a food processor with the pitted dates. Blend until a smooth, creamy mix forms.
Place the mix into a lined baking dish and cook for about 20-30 minutes, until you can pierce the brownie cake with a fork and bring it out dry.
Who: Jones, 36, was a chef long before she became a vegetarian or had much interest at all in healthy eating – and it shows. In the introduction to her 2014 book, A Modern Way to Eat, she explained that “flavour, above anything else, informs my cooking”: that’s why if she thinks a recipe needs butter or sugar or white flour – three of the great evils of the new health movement – that’s exactly what she will (sparingly) use.
Jones’s first kitchen job came as part of the original intake at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen project, and after that she worked for another seven years following Oliver around school canteens and America’s most obese towns. Jones clearly learned a lot about creating dazzling yet deceptively simple food, and she has also embraced Oliver’s don’t-be-too-hard-on-yourself mentality. A Modern Way to Eat is, Jones concedes, a grand title – one that is at odds with its modest author. But the book, already on its fifth print run, could be quietly revolutionary. It is vegetarian but so indulgent, unfussy and satisfying that even carnivores will soon forget that fact.
Roasting this wonderful brassica gives a deep savoury flavour and an amazing crunchy texture, not too far away from the Chinese restaurant crispy seaweed of my childhood.
Preheat your oven to 220C/gas mark 7. Halve the tomatoes and place them on a baking tray with some salt and pepper, a good drizzle of olive oil, the zest of both limes and the juice of 1. Roast for 20 minutes, until blistered and golden.
Next, pile the kale on to a baking tray with the coconut. Pour over the soy sauce and toss well until everything is coated. Roast in the oven with the tomatoes for the last 5–10 minutes of their cooking time, until crisp.
Mix all the dressing ingredients in a bowl with the juice of the second lime. Taste and add a little more seasoning or lime juice if needed, letting your taste buds guide you – remember the dressing will be less punchy once it hits the salad.
Pull the kale and tomatoes out of the oven and tumble them into a big bowl. Toss in the miso dressing, adding a little at a time and tasting as you go, and serve still warm.
Who: Sarah Britton lives in Copenhagen and it is tempting to label her food as the new Nordic take on healthy eating. Tempting but probably too simplistic. “Denmark is the land of dairy and pork and potatoes – none of which I eat,” explains Britton, 32, who was born in Toronto. She also points out that she started her blog My New Roots in 2007, a couple of years before she came to Europe, following a Dane, Mikkel, whom she’d met in New York City.
Britton is a graduate of the Institute of Holistic Nutrition in Toronto (she can practise as a nutritionist in Canada, but her qualification is not recognised by the medical community). She cooks mostly with ghee, never olive oil; her recipes are vibrant, heavy on “superfoods” and ruthlessly seasonal. Her recent cookbook, also called My New Roots, is in fact divided into five seasons: after working on a farm – and in common with the Chinese – she splits summer into “early” and “late”.
Britton decided to leave her job and concentrate on My New Roots. Steadily, her readership grew and then one day a recipe launched the site into the “blog stratosphere”… The Life-Changing Loaf of Bread is a dense, chewy loaf of nuts, seeds and gluten-free rolled oats bound together by psyllium seed husks. Since it originally appeared in February 2013, the post has received 1,500 comments.
This salad combines fresh springtime tastes and textures, all sauced up with a delicious dressing featuring bright lemon and spicy mustard. The herbs add the final layer of flavour, making this a salad that truly tastes alive! Because the rice is sprouted, it is very sweet, requiring salt in the salad – make sure to season it well to suit your own taste.
Rinse the rice well, put it in a glass jar or bowl, and cover with fresh, pure water. Let it soak on the countertop overnight. In the morning, drain and rinse the rice; then cover it again with fresh water and put the jar in the fridge. Drain and rinse the rice at least twice per day for 2 to 3 days, until it has “bloomed” when it should be tender enough to eat. Drain and rinse and put it in a large bowl.
Whisk the olive oil, mustard, lemon zest and juice, and maple syrup together in a small bowl, adding a few pinches of sea salt. Pour half of the dressing over the rice and fold to coat. Stir the raw peas, chickpeas, carrots, and herbs into the rice.
In a dry frying pan over a medium heat, toast the pistachios until golden and fragrant, about 5 minutes (be careful not to burn them). Add the toasted nuts to the salad. Pour the remaining dressing over and fold to combine. Serve.