Justine Cooks: Recipes (Mostly Plants) for Finding Your Way in the Kitchen

by Justine Doiron

Find your cooking style through 110 approachable and innovative plant-forward recipes from social media storyteller and food influencer Justine Snacks.To her audience, Justine Doiron is known for her love of vegetables, beans, bread, and farmers’ markets. She was a beginner cook who turned her hobby into a creative outlet and discovered her cooking style along with the confidence to cook intuitively and adventurously with the flavors and ingredients she loves. Here she shares plant-forward recipes for salads, snacks, vegetables, breakfasts, seafood and tofu, plus beans (of course), sweets, and breads, and as well as things to eat on or with bread. Recipes Baked Kale Salad with Chili QuinoaBrown Butter Tahini on Any NoodleParmesan-Crusted Butter BeansTofu Cutlets with a Bright, Summery SaladBoyfriend SalmonBasil Cucumbers with Slightly Sweet PeanutsButternut Squash Grilled Cheese with Pickled FennelBlack Pepper Chai BlondiesSweet Potato FocacciaRipple BreadIn sharing simple tips and techniques, as well as cooking wisdom she's picked up along the way, Justine Cooks is a delicious invitation to explore your own cooking style and creativity in the kitchen.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction, Reference

288 pages, Hardcover

Published October 29, 2024

Reviews

[Annie Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tagged every page and cried once. Cant beat that in a cookbook

[Elena Cotton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so thoughtfully well written. Justine has a delicious array of easy to follow recipes with mouthwatering photographs (I neeeeed my cookbooks to look pretty to inspire me.) Her recipes are flavor packed yet approachable. She provides excellent groundwork for future recipes to build upon, supporting my just-wing-it approach in the kitchen. My only regret is I haven’t cooked all the recipes yet. 😆

[Pearl_kurian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Received my first cook book for Christmas (thanks Paul) and finally read it cover-to-cover. I can’t wait to try all of these creative recipes! Justine uses ingredients that are always in my kitchen and some that are new, but soon will be staples. First up: sourdough starter :)

[Gaby]

I read it cover to cover and that goodreads goal is approaching quickly ok

[Toni NB · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m looking forward to trying many recipes. Nice collection of mostly plant based recipes. Few tofu recipes, I wish there were more. But that’s what my Instagram is for.

[Luke Hillier · Rating 4 out of 5]

The algorithm introduced me to Justine's Instagram account (@justine_snacks) and I was really impressed with how her recipes simultaneously felt creative and even a little elevated while ultimately remaining very approachable and comforting. She's also got a more mellow, earnest personality and style that contrasts nicely with some of the bigger personalities in cooking right now (all love to Alison and Molly lol). I was excited to give her first book a shot and was not disappointed! This is exactly what her online presence had led me to expect -- recipes that are clever, tasty, accessible, and written in her winsome, down-to-earth voice. It's already spurred a few firsts for me, including buying a blender (her endorsement of a single-serving one was appealing!) and baking bread (the bright pink beet brioche, which required said blender). The beet brioche is a great example of the ways she takes a traditional recipe and incorporates some innovation to make it more fun and intriguing, often to the eye and the taste buds. There are a handful of dishes that seem a bit too straightforward and others that aren't especially enticing to me, but overall this is the sort of cookbook I could see people wanting to cook all the way through and note which favorites make it into their rotation of staples. Unlike Doiron, I'm not a pescatarian and so I did miss the meat a little at first, but I'm happy to give some of her tofu and fish dishes a go alongside the array of vegetables and starches. And although I haven't gotten to them yet, I'm actually most excited about some of the desserts featured here (tiny tiramisu cookies!) and would be 0% surprised if she comes out with a full baking cookbook sooner than later.

[Michelle Adamski Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m counting this in my 2024 reading challenge because I just spent the last few days savoring it, reading it front to back. And now I plan to cook all day.

[Sydna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm always on a quest for inventive ways to add more vegetables to our diet. Some days I fail miserably and others I nail it. I really love the creativity and the varying textures and balance of flavors in each of these recipes.

[Sophie Schott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fun. Will be cooking through it!

[Kaitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've found my food ethos soulmate. 💕

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

12/10
Absolutely love everything Justine makes,
Just made the matcha coffee cake and wow, new favorite cake!!

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got it from the library, had to buy it for my own. I’ve made a few recipes and they were outstanding

[Paula Jinbo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have tried 2 recipes so far and am sold on the book. I have become a fan of beans and her tomato dressing. I love the mix of ingredients and her fresh approach to mixing spices in her dishes.

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book was as enjoyable as watching Justine’s videos. She’s inspired me to change my relationship with food.

[AChef · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hum.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous, interesting food perspective, and accessible recipes 🧡

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a huge fan of @justine_snacks so I’m biased but I can’t give her any less than 5 stars, right? My husband preordered a signed copy that I got to open on Christmas, which was a lovely surprise (the autograph, not the fact that I was getting the book).

Anyway, I love that pretty much every recipe fits on one page and the book spine lays flat! These are both super practical and thoughtful things that make it easy to use in the kitchen. It does mean that you have to assume some knowledge and some steps are explained less than you’d think. (i.e., it’s not a total beginner-friendly book, IMO)

Some flavor combos don’t jive for my tastes—sorry, I’ll never try oysters and you can’t make me!—but there are some unique and delicious flavors in here, I’m certain. She might inspire me to finally try my hand at a sourdough starter!

Some of the vegetable dishes are more like sides, not full meals, but that’s okay. I’m a farmers’ market girl, so I look forward to coming home and seeing how to use the [insert produce here] with these recipes.

My one nitpick is that some ingredients are divided use but it’s only written that way in the method/steps (e.g., in the squash cake it calls for 1t of cinnamon but in the instructions it says add 1/2t to the batter—the other half is saved for the whipped cream but you wouldn’t know that unless you read the entire recipe first. Which you should always do! I always do. Just something to look out for.)

[False · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of reviewers who purchased this book complained about the quality of print and the construction of the book (poor.) I would expect better quality, as well. However, my copy came from the library. One reviewer complained of the recipes being parallel to another well-known blog site. I have no interest in pursuing things that far.

There isn't a whole lot of protein in any of these recipes with the exception of tofu. The one thing about Justine's recipes that stood out is that you either need or will end up with a pantry of exotic and expensive odds and ends if you don't use these ingredients every day (ex. tahini, chili oil, chili crisp, saffron, etc). Luckily (or not,) I live in a large city so the ingredients are not hard to access, like miso or ghee. The question for me is that at my age, and the way I eat (small portions of healthy ingredients) would be just how compelled am I to want to creat miso butter pancakes or Earl Grey granola with poached pears or lentils with sticky shallots and dukkah.

[Lauren Chipman · Rating 1 out of 5]

These recipes are beyond unappealing; the dishes are almost inedible. She reuses the same components over and over without any variation leaving everything tasting the same. Strange combinations of textures which can be described kindly as “challenging.” To add insult to injury, none of the recipes are intuitive and take far too long to make for what they are.

I am an extremely experienced home cook and am ashamed to even give this cookbook away to a friend because I wouldn’t want to subject them to any of this food. If you are looking for an Internet personality that has a decent cookbook, look to Molly Baz, Gary Dalkin or Alison Roman.

Shocked by all the good reviews - but you can’t account for bad taste!

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this cookbook! Lay-flat binding, and almost all of the recipes have a photo, which are two of my biggest "wants" in a cookbook outside of amazing recipes! Justine is pescatarian, and I'm always trying to reduce my animal protein intake, so I really appreciated the wide variety of flavors and preparations here. Solid mix of gluten free, vegan, and dairy free, as well as a well rounded rotation of plant (and seafood) based mains. I do feel like her recipes often feel a little complex, but I think that's because she often utilizes ingredients that are not the most common in all kitchens; but she uses those ingredients throughout, so you'll get use out of them! Excited to dig into the many, many recipes I bookmarked!

[Petra Jung · Rating 1 out of 5]

Utter garbage. The author is a poseur in the cookbook community and her recipes are poor imitations of the work of other authors, mostly BIPOC. Instead of admitting she knows nothing, and has ripped her recipes from books penned by real cooks and chefs, she makes pathetic attempts to stylize the recipes as her own. Her commentary about recipes are meaningless with no relevance to anything but her own self-absorption. She is boring, soulless, and astoundingly banal. There is no book I recommend less.

[Kuster]

Need to return to the library before I've had time to test any recipes! So no rating yet until I get it signed back out!

TO TRY:
- Stewed apple oatmeal with torn dates
- Miso-butter pancakes
- Celery salad with hunks of parmesan
- Tamari heirloom tomatoes
- Spring peas & edamame with greeny tahini
- Chilled chili potatoes, tomatoes, olives & cucumbers
- Roasted potatoes with olive & red onion dressing
- Brown butter tahini on any noodle
- Boyfriend salmon
- Scooped pear sticky toffee pudding in mugs
- Tiny salted tiramisu cookies

[Madeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only allow myself one shelf of cookbooks, so I’m incredibly choosy on which ones I invest in. This was money well spent.

I’ve been following Justine on Tiktok for years and this book lives up to the hype. The recipes are clear, well reasoned, and stunning. I can’t gush enough about the chocolate chip cookie table on page 252.

I’m excited for spring when a lot of produce will be back in season. 💜

[Abbigail · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first cookbook I have read in awhile that made me want to try almost every single recipe. It helps that this cookbook is "mostly plants" but still! I read plenty of plant-based cookbooks that don't inspire me to cook as much as this one does. I also loved the different chapters/categories she had (bread, snacks, breakfast, etc.) -- I felt like these categories (and many of the flavor combinations) spoke to my cooking sensibilities and taste buds.

[Sarah Heck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic! Thank you, Justine, for writing my all-time favorite cookbook. I have been following Justine online for a while and immediately connected with her style of cooking— whole food ingredients, simple but interesting flavor combos. Her recipes are all relatively healthy and refreshing, but don’t seem as though they were created to be “healthy recipes”. The Sliceable Balsalmic Tofu, Boyfriend Salmon, and Crispy Sage & Fennel Eggs have all become staples in my house!

[Genevieve Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never before have I ever cried while reading a cookbook. Nor have I ever immediately messaged the author after reading through a cookbook. It’s not only incredibly beautiful and thoughtful, I also can’t wait to make the recipes! And I had to resist marking every page. High number of recipes I want to read.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Justine is so delightful online, it was easy to hear her voice in every recipe. And they inspired a new creativity in my girl dinners, particularly when I am feeding kids chicken nuggets and want to at least show them something to aim for on the side, gustatorily. My only complaint is the weirdly small print! I blame the publisher.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you’re on social media, you are probably very aware of Justine Doiron & her cooking videos. She has a blog. NPR listed this cookbook as one of their favorite books of 2024. Justine is not a vegan. She eschews meat. Her recipes are very plant based forward and she uses eggs, dairy products and seafood in her recipes. Most recipes are accompanied by a photo.

[Cook Memorial Public Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

A 2024 Staff Nonfiction Favorite for Erica! For readers of Milk Street Simple by Christopher Kimball and Veg Forward: Super-Delicious Recipes that Put Produce at the Center of Your Plate by Susan Spungen.

Check our catalog: https://encore.cooklib.org/iii/encore...

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

After A LOT of looking through this book I finally landed on one recipe to make: oven-baked zucchini gratin.

Very straight-forward and easy to alter to your preferences. I added garlic and Parmesan because how could you not include those in a gratin? Plenty of other recipes I’m curious to try due to their flexible creativity, accessible challenge, and vegetarian/pescatarian forwardness.