Back to school means back to a more regular routine for most families.

I don’t know about you, but for me, routine often becomes rut—especially where cooking is concerned. Breakfast needs to be fast before the school bus and getting to work. Lunch often needs to be portable. Dinner needs to be easy and fit several different eating styles. And I’d like all of it to be healthy, affordable and stuff my kids will eat. Is that too much to ask?

When I was asked to review a few new cookbooks, I was thrilled.

Bravo! ~ Ramses Bravo

I find that many vegan and vegetarian cookbooks are geared for those who like keep an extremely well stocked kitchen with unusual ingredients and have lots of time to cook. While I do love to cook, and like experimenting with new things, on a day to day basis, I need things that are fairly simple and will be well received by my family. Since Bravo was labeled as “SOS Free” or free of sugar, oil and salt, I was a little skeptical.

I was wrong! Bravo would make a great gift for anyone who has health concerns or is looking to add more vegan meals to their week—even my omnivore dad found a few recipes he liked. What I loved about the book was the focus on simple, fresh ingredients and the explanations of how to best prepare different veggies and legumes.

What Are You Doing for Lunch? ~ Mona Meighan Ed.D.

This is one of those cookbooks that you keep handy to refer to over and over. It’s a cookbook, but it’s also a handy guide to how and why bringing your lunch with you is a good thing. Eating lunch out or having the kids get lunch at school is one of those things that would be easy, but ultimately gets takes its toll on both our wallets and health.

Meighan includes everything from breakdowns of cost for each lunch, shopping lists, plans for different lunch “styles,” and nutritional info. As a mom, I found it helpful in terms of planning lunches for the whole family, but it’s geared towards single people as well.

I opted to go paperless for my review copy and downloaded the e-book, but I predict it will be a frequent visitor to my kitchen counter via my laptop.

Anyone have a favorite new cookbook or recipe to share for fall? Write it up and send it in to : [email protected]

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