Cookbook author Ilene Godofsky Moreno reveals how colourful plant based cooking doesn’t need to be complicated

For New York-based Ilene Godofsky Moreno, twenty years of suffering from severe allergies and stomach issues, prompted her to look beyond prescription medications and to start thinking about her own diet in relation to health.

After spending too much time following complicated plant based recipes and spending too much money on exotic ingredients. A blog has now turned into a cookbook, with Ilene determined to share her enthusiasm for colourful, plant based cooking and to show how fun and easy it can be.

Congratulations on the release of your new cookbook. Can you tell us a little about your own plant based journey?

I was simply tired of feeling sick all the time. I had heard of the macrobiotic diet as a magical cure-all and I was desperate so I decided to give it a shot. I was already a vegetarian but my diet mostly consisted of faux ‘chicken’ nuggets and grilled cheese so the whole foods in the macrobiotic cookbook I bought were totally foreign to me.

I started making all my own food, eating whole grains, and fresh produce and staying away from dairy and processed food. The results were practically instant — my allergies let up, my stomach problems disappeared and after a month I was able to go off all my medications.

Why did you decide to release The Colorful Kitchen?

My background is in textile design so I started looking at cooking the same way I approached my design work — by utilizing elements like colour, texture and balance to come up with recipes that are ‘colourful, not complicated’. I wanted to create the kind of cookbook that I wish I had had ten years ago when I decided to start eating more plants and less junk. The recipes all call for familiar ingredients, without requiring any crazy kitchen gadgets or hard-tofind superfoods.

I see many of the recipes in the book as starting points or templates, where readers can swap in their favourite ingredients and really make the recipes their own.