Brittany Mullins of the website Eating Bird Food shares her strategies for planning and preparing vegetable-forward meals, plus lots of flexible recipes, in Mostly Veggies: Easy Make-Ahead Meals for Healthy Living. To readers wary of spending hours preparing endless containers of the same bland meals, Mullins says that the "beauty of meal prep is how flexible it is and how easy it can be adapted to your life." The process of planning, prepping, and cooking enough meals to feed a family for a week can be daunting, but Mullins breaks it down into achievable parts and provides plenty of encouragement along the way. She also shares four months of seasonal meal plans, complete with prep tasks and a shopping list, which provide a good framework for future customization.
Some of the make-ahead mainstays are here, including overnight oats and Mason jar salads, but Mullins adds plenty of variety. Breakfast recipes include sweet and savory options, like Kale Breakfast Quesadillas and Sweet Potato Pancakes. Salads are meat-free but hearty, such as a Cobb Salad with Coconut Bacon, which includes hard-boiled eggs and chickpeas. The best sections feature recipes meant for weeknight cooking: those cooked on a single sheet pan and one-pot or one-pan meals.
This is not a weight loss guide or a restrictive diet plan, but rather an invitation to shift plate composition. Readers can substitute meat for the tofu or beans in these recipes, but they'll always be eating mostly veggies. --Suzanne Krohn, librarian and freelance reviewer