Love this food and still eat healthy

Julia Turshen connects with readers through healthy dishes

In Julia Turshen's eyes, cookbooks can be like Trojan horses. Enthusiasts welcome their comfortable, familiar and seemingly predictable packages. But unforeseen ideas can lie between those sleek covers.

“Cookbooks are incredibly powerful,” says the Hudson Valley, N.y.-based author. “They have the power to reach a large number of people and to reach people in a way that's a little unexpected.”

In her new cookbook, Simply Julia (Harper Wave, 2021), Turshen does just that. Sandwiched between recipes for the almond chicken cutlets she created for her wife, Grace, and a “weeknight wonder” spinach and artichoke dip chicken bake, she offers an intimate account of how she started “untangling the knot” of body image issues.

“My entire life I've just loved being in the kitchen. It's where I feel most excited, most calm, most confident, most curious — all these wonderful, wonderful things,” says Turshen.

Entitled On the Worthiness of Our Bodies, the aforementioned essay, along with Turshen's approach to healthy comfort food, is clearly resonating. Within 24 hours of the book's publication day on March 2, she received more messages and social media support than ever before.

The book's subtitle — 110 Easy Recipes for Healthy Comfort Food — hints at what sets Simply Julia apart. Rather than using the word “healthy” as a synonym for weight loss, restriction and deprivation, Turshen's definition is guilt-free, holistic and non-judgmental.

She acknowledges that “healthy” and “comfort” have many different meanings, which vary from person to person.

The recipes Turshen features in the book reflect the “low-carbhigh-quality life” she shares with Grace, who has Type 1 diabetes, and meet the needs of the homebound community members they cook for in their volunteer work. (She emphasizes plants and grains, and is mindful of her use of ingredients such as butter, sour cream and sugar.)

For Turshen, healthy food encompasses more than just what she eats. It includes fostering connections to where her food comes from, who she's eating with and who she's cooking for. And, as an extension, who are the readers who have related to her story in Simply Julia.

“I feel so connected to everyone who's reading it and cooking from it and people I'm hearing from. I've been having these incredibly vulnerable and honest conversations, which leave me feeling deeply connected and I really value that,” says Turshen.

“To me, that's the point of making cookbooks. That's the point of cooking. That's the point of eating, is to feel super connected.”

As someone who cooked at home every day pre-pandemic, Turshen's understanding of the labour of home cooking has only deepened over the past year.

For all the role entails — planning, shopping, cleaning up, managing finances and tracking inventory — home cooks too often go unacknowledged, she says.

“It's a lot of work and cookbooks have a tendency to romanticize cooking in a way that doesn't always acknowledge the reality of it. My goal in this book was just to be honest.”

Easy, another word Turshen uses in the book's subtitle, plays a key role in her approach. She uses a non-stick skillet in many of her recipes, for example — not because it requires less oil or butter, but because it's effortless to clean. This ease is likely to draw people into the kitchen more often.