Quick, plant-based meals

I am suspicious of any cookbook author who uses the word “effortless” in the same sentence as “cooking” — especially in the context of putting healthy, homemade dinners on the table night after night.

In the opening paragraphs of “The Vegan Week: Meal Prep Recipes to Feed Your Future Self ” (Ten Speed, $35), Gena Hamshaw assures us she’s not one of them. “I get overwhelmed easily and become discouraged when recipes go awry,” she admits. “If I haven’t thought about what I’m going to cook, I’ll default to pasta nine times out of ten.”

Hamshaw wasn’t always so empathetic to these plights. In her late 20s, she adopted a plant-based diet. As a graduate student working from home with a flexible schedule, she began regularly whipping up wholesome vegan creations in her tiny New York kitchen and posting them on her blog, The Full Helping. Several well-received cookbooks followed.

Her culinary enthusiasm took a nosedive in 2018 when she started an intense clinical internship as part of her training to become a registered dietitian. That’s when she began devoting a few hours of each weekend to generating components for nutritionally balanced meatless meals to fuel her through the week. By the end of her internship, “I was a batch cooking evangelist.”

White Bean Fennel Soup, Baked Eggplant and Tomatoes with Chickpeas, and Cozy Red Curry Sweet Potato Stew could find their way into my freezer, along with a batch of Fudgy Brownies made with the liquid from a can of chickpeas.

Meal prep, she explains, doesn’t eliminate the effort of cooking. “It does, however, ensure that the time in the kitchen will be well spent.”