Slow Cooker Stew 312
9 DESSERT
5-Ingredient No-Bake Truffles 319
Grapefruit & Basil Granita 320
Summer Peach & Blueberry Crumble with
Pineapple Mojito Popsicles 324
Strawberry Bourbon Ice Cream 328
Banana Peanut Butter Elvis Ice Cream 333
Maple Peanut Butter Freezer Fudge with
Nashville Gooey Butter Cake 337
Vanilla Buttercream Frosting 338
Holy Fudge Black Bean Brownies with
The Best Soft-Baked Chocolate Chip Cookies 345
foreword
We’ve all been at a place where our life is
in the balance; a place where our future is
undetermined and at risk. America is at that
place with food. Many of us have managed to
get into a precarious, unbalanced relationship
with our plate, our table, and our kitchens.
This cookbook will teach you how to find
balance again—and, if necessary, again and
again. Balance is not something you get stuck
in—it must be restored, over and over, bite
after bite, meal after meal. It’s something you
work to achieve. No one does it better than
Laura Lea.
Laura Lea cooks edible poems. Her recipes
break with convention and established food
culture. They express her vision of a lush life:
a life both serene and exciting, a world full
of surprises—all of them good. Simply put,
that is the essence of the recipes in this book
and the theme of Laura Lea’s kitchen—the
surprises will be good for and to you.
Laura Lea creates recipes that work, that
tell you exactly how to create a delicious
dish, but they will not be expected recipes—
they will be Laura Lea innovations. You will
treasure this cookbook. The woman is non-
stop when it comes to recipe development.
Laura Lea and I began working together at
the end of the 20th century. When still a teen,
she was part of a workshop examining the
impact improbable alliances and friendships
had had on the shaping of Nashville.
Ours is one such friendship. I am a black
woman who writes about putting health and
history on a tasty soul food plate, and I am
particularly concerned with great food on a
budget. There are budget and splurge items
in this cookbook, easy- and harder-to-get
ingredients, but Laura Lea and I have a
common cause: food that’s good to you and
good for you; food that sustains by delighting.
I am proud to say, my daughter Caroline
Randall Williams and I put one of Laura Lea’s
chia pudding recipes into our cookbook
Soul Food Love, and cooked that pudding
for food justice workers in Baltimore.
When I was appointed Faculty Head of
Stambaugh House at Vanderbilt University,
one of my first acts would be to hire Laura
Lea to curate a syllabus of food for the
house so that my students could learn
more about the world they lived in—and
about themselves—by eating. That year we
welcomed students to campus with Laura
Lea’s delicious coconut chia pudding with
granola and fresh peaches, and invited them
to engage in hard conversations sustained
by the pure deliciousness of no-bake
five-ingredient truffles. Week after week,
she surprised the house with balanced
deliciousness, with nutrient-rich taste
revelations—things the students had never
tasted before, like sweet potato wontons with
garlic tamari dipping sauce, and sun-dried
tomato and basil hummus.
Laura Lea has embarked on the audacious
creation of an original food culture that I
think of as “Laura Lea’s elegant hippy food.”
Every one of Laura Lea’s innovative recipes