Like carrots? You’re going to love this carrot soup recipe. It’s luxuriously creamy and full of incredible roasted carrot flavor.

This classic carrot soup is a wonderful soup to serve with your favorite winter salads, sandwiches, and even holiday entrées. Since carrots go well with so many other flavors, it’s a versatile soup to keep in your repertoire.

You might be pleasantly surprised to learn that this creamy soup is actually made without cream. It’s a light and healthy soup, not to mention budget-friendly, too.

I tried making the soup with sautéed carrots instead of roasted, but roasted carrots give this soup magical powers. If you’re a fan of my butternut squash soup or cauliflower soup, the method for this recipe will be familiar already.

Since I can’t help but play around with flavors, I came up with three fun and simple variations—carrot ginger soup, curried carrot soup, and Thai curried carrot soup with lime. You’ll find details in the recipe notes. It’s about time this food blog had a proper carrot soup recipe, and it’s really four in one!

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Think of these sunny mango bowls as a Thai spin on your favorite burrito bowl. They’re refreshing and hearty, sweet and savory, and my new favorite summertime dinner.

These bowls were inspired by my Thai mango cabbage wraps, which are such a fun appetizer. I’ve added rice and shredded the cabbage to turn them into a more hefty dinner.

These bowls feature perfectly cooked brown rice and shredded cabbage topped with crispy baked tofu, fresh mango salsa and peanut sauce. None of the components are difficult to prepare, and the combination is irresistible.

You could make these bowls on a relaxed weeknight, or save them for the weekend. Invite friends over, or keep your leftovers for tomorrow’s lunch. You can’t lose with this one.

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Have you had panang curry yet? Panang curry is rich and creamy, spicy yet balanced, with underlying notes of peanut and coconut.

I make my panang curry with lots of bell peppers and carrots, and optional tofu for extra protein. It’s a perfectly satisfying weeknight meal for cold days.

Panang is one of my favorite Thai curries, right up there with red curry and green curry. If you haven’t ordered it at your favorite Thai restaurant yet, you’ve been missing out!

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I’m jet lagged from my trip to Greece, so I made one of my old favorites to share again! It’s comforting and packed with nutrients, which is just what I need right now.

In fact, I enjoy this recipe so much that it inspired a recipe in my cookbook, the colorful coconut fried rice with edamame on page 182. If you haven’t tried that one yet, you’ve really missed out.

This dish is a relatively quick weeknight meal and a fun alternative to my go-to extra vegetable fried rice. This recipe has some Thai flavors, including sriracha, lime and cilantro.

I added coconut flakes, too. The big, toasted coconut flakes are savory and remind me of bacon. We all know that bacon and eggs belong together, so today, I present to you a healthier, vegetarian option.

For some reason, when I shared this recipe four years ago, I called it a stir-fry. It’s fried rice, not a stir fry! This is a stir fry. Moving on.

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One of my favorite parts of my job is meeting and befriending other food bloggers. Melissa of The Faux Martha and I started our blogs around the same time. We commented on each other’s blogs for a while and then I reached out to Melissa way back when she was living in Chicago.

That’s how you know you’re headed in the right direction—when “networking” feels so natural and easy. Melissa invited me over to her home and out to dinner. We’ve been buds for a while now.

Last summer, when I was in Minneapolis for Lindsay’s photography workshop, Melissa invited us over for dinner. I got to see her amazing modern farmhouse in person, finally. We ate homemade pizza in her backyard under those big, round Christmas lights I love so much. Someday, I’ll have a proper backyard and I’ll “borrow” some of Melissa’s design elements.

Melissa is a designer. She worked as a graphic designer when I met her, then she became a blog designer, then she designed her home, and now she has made a cookbook. Melissa is a very thoughtful designer and everything she produces is beautiful, practical and functional at the same time. Those are the hallmarks of great design, right?

In her backyard, we talked about Melissa’s upcoming cookbook, The Minimalist Kitchen (affiliate link). Her book is here, finally! It’s everything that I knew it would be—beautiful, practical and functional, with Melissa’s honest and manageable approach to home cooking.

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I tend to keep to myself, especially in yoga class. It’s not a very social form of exercise, you know? Last year, when I walked into my usual Tuesday evening yoga class and my instructor shouted, “COOKIE AND KATE,” I froze. Kim, a regular in the class, had learned about my blog through her co-worker, and she said, “I know her! I go to yoga with her!”

Then Kim told Kristina, the teacher, and then everyone found out. Including Amie, one of my favorite instructors, who is great friends with Kate Kasbee of Well Vegan. Kate lives in Chicago and was working on a cookbook called Frugal Vegan at the time.

Through the Amie-Kate connection, I got a sneak peek at Frugal Vegan and wrote a blurb for the back cover. “Frugal Vegan offers an incredible array of fresh and simple vegan recipes. Every single one of them manages to be easy to make, affordable and accessible, too.”

Kate came to town for Amie’s birthday party, so I met her for drinks, and a giant green bug landed in her herbed green cocktail. Are you still following? I can’t make this stuff up.

Kate and I bonded over the trials and tribulations of cookbook-making, our love for our funny-looking pups (meet Rex), and the green bug experience. We practiced our half-moon poses at Amie’s backyard birthday party the next day. Maybe I shouldn’t be so shy about my work, since it opens so many fun doors.

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I’m slowly working my way through the veggie options at the sushi restaurant that opened near me. The other day, I ordered a side salad to accompany my sushi. I was intrigued by the dressing—carrot ginger. How had I not tasted carrot-ginger dressing? The dressing was a little more lumpy than smooth, but the flavor was amazing.

I added it to my list to recreate and I’ve enjoyed every rendition so far, but this final version is my favorite. It’s bright and zingy and fresh, and I want to drizzle it on everything. Homemade dressings always taste a million times better than store-bought.

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Is it too soon for soup? When I had a full-blown cold last week, soup sounded like just the ticket. I flipped through Angela’s new cookbook, Oh She Glows Every Day, and landed on this creamy, plant-based soup bursting with vitamin A and other goodness.

Carrots, sweet potato, and warming Thai curry blended with an unexpected ingredient—almond butter—made it a sweet and spicy, rich soup. I wish it could say it cured me for good (if only soup could), but it definitely made me feel better that evening. And the next morning, when I heated up leftovers for breakfast. Thank you, Angela!

Fans of Angela’s first book, The Oh She Glows Cookbook, will find tons of new favorites in her new one. Fun vegan breakfasts, smoothies, salads and soups, hearty plant-based dinners—this book has it all, with beautiful, bright and light photos by the lovely Ashley of Edible Perspective.

Blogging has a lot of perks, and meeting wonderful people through the blog is the best one. I’m so glad to have gotten to know Angela and Ashley over the years. I emailed Angela for cookbook advice a couple of years ago, and I’m so thankful for her generous advice and support. She’s a really hardworking lady, and I know that every recipe in this book has been tested over and over again to make sure it works. I hope you’ll get a chance to pick up her new book soon.

Watch How to Make Creamy Thai Carrot Sweet Potato Soup

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Summer came on with a bang. Our weather went from pleasantly warm to blazingly hot. Every year, I relearn what 100 degree weather feels like. It’s shocking, isn’t it? At least in Kansas City, it cools down a bit at night, so Cookie and I can go on our long walks as the sun sets.

Now that summer heat is here, I find myself craving more light, fresh and green meals. Enter this salad with Thai flavors, which satisfies all three at once. I basically took my Thai mango cabbage wraps as inspiration, and reimagined them as a salad.

The salad features butter lettuce (feel free to substitute your favorite green instead), sweet diced mango, red bell pepper, and jalapeño. Then I tossed all of it in an addictive, spicy peanut dressing. This salad would make a great side salad for any of my other Thai recipes, or could pass as a light dinner. For more substance, just add some crispy baked tofu.

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I can’t help but draw a comparison between making a cookbook and having a baby. Now I have never had a baby, but hear me out. They are both very big endeavors, with long incubation periods. Once combined with everyday duties, keeping up becomes about twice as difficult.

I’m nearing my “due date,” and can hardly believe that I’ll have a finished cookbook someday. I’m scrambling and struggling and suffering from frazzled cookbook brain. I can’t wait to be done, but I’m also a little scared of what may come.

Watching friends produce cookbooks is also similar to watching friends have babies. They’re both stressed and excited, overwhelmed and hopeful. You don’t get the full picture of what they’ve been making until it’s all done and you are so very, very proud of their good work.

That’s exactly how I felt when Jeanine and Jack’s cookbook (they’re the couple behind the blog Love and Lemons) appeared on my doorstep. I think I texted her about ten high-five emojis in a row. The Love and Lemons Cookbook is just perfect—it’s overflowing with colorful photos, gorgeous high-contrast typography, creative recipes, and cooking variation charts that are as helpful as they are beautiful.

It’s truly “an apple-to-zucchini celebration of impromptu cooking,” as the front cover suggests. I flipped through the book and found this amazing Brussels sprout recipe, and I just happened to have everything in my fridge to make it.

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