A plant-based recipe journal from Chef Katie — vibrant dishes designed to eat the rainbow, savor slowly, and bring everyone you love around the same table.
I focus on food that heals — vibrant, plant-based recipes built from the full color spectrum of vegetables, fruits, and herbs, designed to nourish the body and the spirit.
Food should be savored slowly and shared often. It's the ultimate tool for building community — and the meal that took an afternoon to make is the one nobody forgets.
Based in Kansas City, I love plant-tweaking recipes from my travels — bringing international flavors home to a Kansas City kitchen without losing what makes them special.
The joy of making the food is just as vital as the act of eating it. I'll never apologize for a smudged page, a tasted sauce, or a kitchen that smells like someone actually cooked in it.
Extra-firm tofu is the quiet workhorse of a plant-based kitchen. Pressed dry and cubed, it barely has a flavor of its own — which is exactly the point. Its dense, porous texture is built to soak up whatever marinade it sits in, and a hot grill or pan turns that same blank canvas into something with real char and bite. Cheap, high-protein, and endlessly adaptable, it's the base we reach for whenever a dish needs something hearty to build around.
Here, it's cubed and marinated in a savory soy, garlic, and herb blend, then skewered and grilled alongside rainbow peppers and zucchini for recipe N° 17. The marinade caramelizes into a deeply charred, almost sticky crust while the inside stays tender — proof that tofu doesn't need to hide, it just needs the right marinade.
See recipe N° 17 →
There's no vegetable that says "summer's here" quite like sweet corn. Its natural sugars caramelize into something almost smoky the second it hits a hot grill, the kernels go from milky-sweet to deeply charred in minutes, and a single ear can go savory or sweet without ever feeling like a compromise. It's a vegetable and a starch in one, endlessly shareable, and it tastes like the best kind of backyard evening.
Here, it's grilled whole until charred and smoky, then shaved off the cob and put to work two ways — folded into the deeply golden, herb-flecked patties of recipe N° 15, and tossed through the brown rice and black bean salad served alongside them. One ear of corn, doing double duty on the same plate.
See recipe N° 15 →
Slow-dried and packed in oil, a sun-dried tomato is a fresh tomato's flavor turned all the way up — its water gone, its sweetness and acidity left behind and concentrated into something chewy, deeply savory, and almost sun-baked. A few slices do the work of a whole handful of fresh ones, and they hold their character through a long toss with pasta or a hot pan without ever going watery.
Here, it's sliced and tossed through cavatappi with white beans, kalamata olives, and sautéed mushrooms for the pasta salad in recipe N° 19, served alongside a plate of seared black bean patties. Concentrated tomato flavor in every bite, no simmering required.
See recipe N° 19 →
Raw cashews are the quiet backbone of a dairy-free kitchen — mild enough to disappear into whatever they're asked to be, with a fat content that behaves like cream when it's blended and like cheese when it's ground fine and dry. Pulsed with nutritional yeast, garlic powder, and a little salt, they turn into a golden, savory dust that melts into a hot dish the way real parmesan does — nutty, salty, and just sharp enough.
Here, it's ground into a snowy cashew parmesan and showered generously over the bubbling rotini, roasted vegetables, and marinara of recipe N° 20 straight out of the oven. One bowl of ground cashews, and suddenly the whole pan smells like a cheese counter.
See recipe N° 20 →
N° 18
Hand-pressed rounds of tender empanada dough, filled with a hearty mix of sautéed mushrooms, creamy white beans, caramelized onion, and roasted sweet potato, all simmered down until deeply savory. Folded, crimped, and baked until the edges turn golden and craggy — a whole afternoon of assembly-line baking that turns out trays and trays of the kind of savory hand pie that disappears before it even cools.
N° 19
Cavatappi tossed with oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives, creamy white beans, sautéed mushrooms, and a tangle of peppery baby greens, all finished with a bright garlic-herb vinaigrette — a pasta salad that only gets better the longer it sits. Alongside it, hearty black bean and oat patties get a deep golden sear on the stovetop and land over more greens with sweet corn, for a plate that's equal parts backyard cookout and pantry-clean-out.
N° 20
A whole sheet-pan's worth of roasted asparagus, broccolini, brussels sprouts, mushrooms, and blistered cherry tomatoes, folded into rotini and a slow-simmered marinara, then baked until bubbling and finished with a heavy snow of golden, nutty cashew parmesan. Made in a double batch, served with a big tossed salad on the side — a full week of Sunday-supper leftovers from one afternoon in the kitchen.
Every recipe here is written to be made for more than one. The lasagna feeds eight, the paella feeds six, the quinoa salad gets better on day two. That's not by accident — that's the point. Food is the excuse for a longer afternoon, a louder kitchen, and a table where nobody's in a hurry.
So pull a chair up. Bring someone with you. Stay a while.