200 Recipes, Variations, and Quick Meals

This cookbook is 100 pages longer than our first! Well Fed 2 includes 110 original recipes, plus “You Know How You Could Do That” variations on almost every recipe. There are also 45 “no recipe required” “Quick Meals” ideas and plenty of “Tastes Great With” tips for turning individual dishes into multi-course meals. We kept our recipe design similar to the original Well Fed, but bumped up the size of the type — based on your feedback — so the recipes are a bit easier to follow when you’re in the midst of chopping and stirring.

Photos and Illustrations

My husband David Humphreys outdid himself on the visuals this time around! Not only are there full-page photos with every recipe, this book is packed with supporting photos and adorable illustrations. Here’s a sample to whet your appetite:

More Than Recipes

The book opens with info to help you manage your relationship with food, including ways to identify emotional appetite versus true hunger, 30 reasons to do a Whole30, tips for socializing while keeping good habits, and a call to action to develop the best version of yourself. Some of this stuff started here on my blog, but it’s been re-written (and re-written and re-written) to be even better.

International Cuisine Made Healthier

I don’t like that some people still think that paleo is restrictive, so I paleo-ized more of my favorite international recipes for delicious flavor without sacrificing good nutrition, including Deconstructed Gyro, Thai Basil Beef, Chinese Five-Spice Pork Ribs, Lemon Lamb Tagine, Tod Mun Chicken Cakes, Belly Dance Beet Salad, Garlic Creamed Spinach, Sesame Cucumber Noodles, and Banana Pecan Ice Cream. Here’s the Table of Contents so you can see all the yumminess inside. (Click to see a large version.)

Burgers, Balls & Bangers

This might be my favorite part of the cookbook: 15 recipes — inspired by international sausage flavors — that can be shaped into patties, meatballs, or sausages and grilled, baked, or pan-fried. It’s exponential meaty goodness!

AIP Adaptations

More than 100 of the recipes and Quick Meal ideas in Well Fed 2 can easily and tastily be modified to comply with the autoimmune protocol of paleo. The book includes detailed instructions for adapting the recipes for people who need to take extra care. Special thanks to Mickey Trescott of Autoimmune Paleo for helping me make sure I got all the details right. Here’s a sample of the modifications; click to see it larger.

Whole30 Approved

Melissa and Dallas of Whole9 reviewed all of the recipes and gave me a thumbs- up for Whole30 compliance on all but two off them: the Sweet Potato “Waffle” and the Banana Pecan Ice Cream. They also graciously contributed the Foreword that opens Well Fed 2 with just the right amount of inspiration and spunk.

Tasty Terminology

In addition to plenty of how-to tips inside the recipes themselves, I included a short section this time that covers what I mean when I use standard culinary terms. I’ve been told I have an aggressive simmer (harrumph!), so the Tasty Terminology should help you feel like we’re cooking in your kitchen together.

Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

The PDF version of the book is available for $1 to everyone who buys a printed copy. From now until December 2015, those dollars — plus $1 from every regular PDF sale — will be donated to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, an organization devoted to getting clean cookstoves and cooking fuels into the kitchens in developing countries that need them most. Their goal is to reach 100 million households by 2020, and we can help.

Almost three billion people in the developing world cook their food and heat their homes with traditional cookstoves or open fires. Smoke exposure from these cooking and heating methods is responsible for four million premature deaths every year. Women and children—cooking the food and tending to the home—are the most affected by the smoke exposure.