Southern cooking with a purpose

The dude can cook. That is the obvious takeaway from the new cookbook from Houston power couple Eric and Shanna Jones.

But there is a bigger, more important message tucked into the 60 recipes of “Healthier Southern Cooking,” a project born from the Jones’ website, the Dude That Cookz (dudethat cookz.com).

The just-published cookbook, like the website, is a friendly, honest tome that suggests that small changes to your everyday diet — reducing sodium and certain fats, making low-carb substitutes, using more vegetables, making key meat substitutes, amping up herbs and spices — can result in better health and a more positive lifestyle while still producing bold, craveworthy dishes that sacrifice none of the flavor.

While the Cajun/Southern/Gulf Coast style of cooking isn’t traditionally considered healthy, the cookbook demonstrates that comfort foods aren’t always inherently unhealthy and don’t have to be.

The Dude That Cookz website, launched in 2018, was Eric’s attempt to make positive changes in his life through diet. His motivations were simple: He lost both his parents to health issues, which forced him to evaluate his own lifestyle. Coupled with his desire to help get meals on the family table — he and Shanna, both of whom work in IT fields, are raising two young children — and to indulge his own interests in home cooking, Eric began experimenting.

“I’m just a regular dude who loves to cook,” said Eric, who is not a trained chef but grew up in a Louisiana family of accomplished home cooks, including his mother and his grandmothers. His goal to cut certain foods from his diet and to eat “cleaner,” he said, resulted in recipe development for a new way of approaching mealtime staples both he and Shanna enjoyed.

Starting a website focusing on cooking wasn’t entirely out of the Jones’ wheelhouse. Shanna lent her expertise in social media and local culinary know-how, developed from her work with Urban Swank, the lifestyle blog she launched and wrote with Felice Sloan in 2011. The Dude That Cookz site, created after the Urban Swank duo hung up their blogging hat in 2017, came at a good time when both Southern cuisine and healthier eating were trending.

Years spent indulging at the city’s best restaurants and cocktail bars also left Shanna wanting to take up Eric’s flag for a healthier-eating lifestyle. Their changes in the home kitchen were profound, she said.

“I noticed almost immediately I didn’t feel so tired. I could work out longer, my mood was different. I felt lighter,” she said.

Together, they worked on Eric’s ideas for a healthier spin on their everyday meals. Their approach not only made sense, it felt comfortable and natural, Shanna said.

“We’ve always cooked together. Food was always at the forefront at home and outside the home,” she said. “When we started, I was already a blogger, so we said let’s just see what comes from it. We had no expectations.”

But the site caught the attention of foodies not just in Texas but throughout the country at a time when home cooking wasn’t just growing but becoming essential. Page Street Publishing, the cookbook’s publisher, took note of the full-flavored recipes with a healthy spin.

“These are simple recipes with simple ingredients everyone has access to,” Shanna said. “You can make easy tweaks with your diet that will become lifestyle changes that is not like dieting. They can make a lifelong impact to your health that isn’t temporary like a diet.”

The cookbook recipes include dishes such as chicken meatloaf, low-fat chicken and dumplings, low-sodium vegetarian Creole risotto, guilt-free baked okra, veggie-forward Cajun cabbage and low-fat sweet potato cheesecake. They employ easy cooking swaps like olive oil for butter, coconut milk for dairy richness, low-sodium broth, protein substitutions, spices and herbs to punch up flavor, and the use of Himalayan pink salt instead of ordinary table salt. The recipes, the Joneses say, resonate with home cooks who want to eat cleaner and within the Black community, which has become more aware of the need to make healthier choices in their diet.

“Healthier Southern Cooking” no doubt will give a boost to the Jones’ website and position Eric for even greater media exposure. He’s already doing more cooking demonstrations and lining up television appearances. The brand has the potential for additional cookbooks and perhaps even a product line.

Eric, however, said he doesn’t want to lose any of the joy he feels from the work he and Shanna are doing with food.

“The minute it doesn’t feel fun and feels more like work, we might have to take a step back,” he said. “I don’t want not to enjoy it.”

Shanna added: “It’s been a blessing. It’s changed our lives. There’s nothing like being able to do what you want every day with passion in the kitchen. We love it even more than when we started it.”