Ella Mills knows we all want to eat healthier. But the English food writer and businesswoman also knows we’re busy and we want everything to taste good. And she understands many of us are nervous about the idea of committing to no meat.
“I know I used to think eating this way would be just like nibbling on sad and soggy carrots and rabbit food all day long,” she says. “But you suddenly start cooking and you realise it’s actually super-flavoursome and textured and interesting and just not what you thought it was.”
Mills is ready to guide us as through this with a line of healthy products and her latest cookbook, Healthy Made Simple, featuring over 75 plant-based recipes, from lemony pea and broccoli pasta to a creamy leek, spinach and butter bean bowl.
“It’s about taking these familiar ingredients that are often seen as a little bit bland, a little bit boring, and trying to give them gentle twists, to make them feel really exciting and rejuvenated,” she says.
Healthy Made Simple contain dishes Mills eats at home with her husband and two young children. She aims to have the recipes take less than 30 minutes to make, use no more than five simple steps, and need ten ingredients or less.
“I just found that was essentially the sweet spot where action and reality merged closer together,” she says.
“We know we need to eat less ultra-processed food. So this is a hand-holding resource to help you do that.”
Mills took a hard look at some of her favourite dishes and tried to create a better balance between flavour, practicality, nutrition and speed.
“What I found was that oftentimes there was an extra step or an extra pan in there, or like two or three extra ingredients. And it probably made it five per cent nicer or ten per cent nicer,” she says. “But I’d end up not making the recipes anymore because it was just that little bit more effort.”
Healthy Made Simple celebrates whole foods and uses proteins from things like nuts, tofu, lentils, beans and chickpeas. The flavours are global, with ingredients including harissa, udon, satay, miso, pesto, tagine and curry.
“As you start to look around the world, there’s so many places where not necessarily the whole society is vegetarian, but vegetables are the hero and they’re treated with a lot of TLC,” she says.
Take her one-pan peanut and cauliflower stew, which combines peanut butter, ginger, coconut milk, garlic, rice and curry powder with simmering cauliflower florets. It’s got heat, crunch and tastes indulgent.
Lauren Whelan, the publisher for Yellow Kite, the lifestyle and cooking imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, says Mills’ creativity shows the versatility and simplicity of plants. Mills’ sweet potato brownies revolutionised the way that vegetable is used in the UK, Whelan says.
If Mills is an evangelist for vegetarianism, she says she’s proof of its benefits. At 21, she was diagnosed with Postural Tachycardia Syndrome, which affected her nervous system, and was put on a variety of medications.
She chose to overhaul her diet and started document
