— Mel Dorling

So, the first book that I ever used for recipes was "Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease" by Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. And I'm sure that many of you are familiar with Dr. Esselstyn's work. In the back of this book, which was written in 2009 and created a bunch of recipes, and these recipes are tried and true. They might be even 30 or 35 years old. Because when the Esselstyns decided to become whole food, plant-based, no oil, there were no cookbooks, there were no recipes. Plant milks were very difficult to find. So, this was the first bookI ever read, my favorite recipe remains the walnut dressing that is a recipe she adapted from Casa de Luz in Austin. If you are in Austin, I suggest to eat there three times a day. So, this is sort of like the foundation of whole food plant-based, no oil, no sugar, et cetera. And then, of course, this book was written in 2009, and it's the book that Bill Clinton used. He had mentioned it one night on David Letterman, and everybody in the Esselstyn family was just shrieking with joy. And then in 2010, Rip, AKA the firefighter, he wrote the "Engine 2 Cookbook," and I have been using this book for almost 17 years. That's how long I've been plant-based. This book has been well used. Great recipes. The dessert recipes are very easy to follow. Lots of muffins and delicious homemade desserts. So, I love this. You know that it was a New York Times bestseller, and other books followed. And then Jane Esselstyn, Rip's sister, co-wrote a book with Anne Esselstyn, and this was in 2022 or '23. A New York Times bestseller. Easy recipes to follow. Great, simple dessert recipes. So, if you get this book and you see a biography of someone named Char, that's me, so you can read about my road to becoming whole food plant-based, no oil. And I always say that I would probably have a very different life had I never become plant-based, using as a mirror my siblings who have a very different level of health than I do. And all of these books, I think, are packed with wellness tips and show ways for you to reach your optimum level of wellness. So, just Google Esselstyn and you will get some great ideas. So, to that, I want to just talk about baking for a second, because that was another one of your questions. When you bake this way, you kind of have something in your head, where you're going to use either a banana or applesauce as your fat agent. You're going to use some kind of non-white flour. I make my own oat flour because it's economical and it's very nutrient dense, and I like the flavor that it gives. And then you're also going to make your egg with flax meal, and I wanted to say that this is organic flax meal, and I got it at Walmart a while ago. I haven't been there for a long, long time. So, this lasts forever. It makes a beautiful egg. A tablespoon of flax meal to three tablespoons of water. So, if you're converting a traditional recipe and it calls for two eggs, you would add two tablespoons of this and six tablespoons of water. You want to make sure that you have the meal and not the seed. Other thing, the Esselstyns use a lot of maple syrup in their recipes. It's very unprocessed compared to using a, shall we say, white sugar. And also be mindful that not all white sugar is vegan, because in some processing plants, they will use charred bones to help granulate the sugar. So, if you're a sugar friend, you want to look for the words vegan, and that it says vegan sugar. So, you can use maple syrup. The other thing that I happen to really enjoy is organic maple sugar. Now, it's a little bit more processed than regular sugar. No, it's less processed, but it is processed, but it still gives that same delicious nutty flavor that you seem to find. So, maple syrup would be my number one go-to, and quite frankly, when this is on sale, I will buy some of this. And lastly, you want to talk about flavorings. You can use vanilla or whatever. This happens to be a maple flavor of a alcohol-free extract. So, if you have someone in your house or you don't keep alcohol in your house, using the Frontier brand, no alcohol, still give you a beautiful flavor, and it works deliciously in all of your recipes. So, I'm to a point now just to kind of make you laugh, because sometimes people describe me as being in a hurry. So, what I'll do is I'll put two cups of old-fashioned oats into my Vitamix, and then I will add all of my other ingredients, and I will just put it on medium and let it blend, and when it looks like I have made it from scratch with flour, I know that it's going to work beautifully as a muffin or a coffee cake or whatever. But you do you, and play around a lot. And the other part of that is take copious notes, because all of a sudden one day you're going to have an aha, it worked perfectly moment. And you don't want to have to live on, now what was it that I put in there? Did I put two teaspoons or was it one? So, get a notebook and just keep on writing and keep on being a recipe detective in your own kitchen. So, those were great questions, Mel, and I hope that they will become very helpful for you to use.