Cook This: 3 nourishing recipes from Eat to Love, including zucchini Parmesan egg muffins

National Post

13 hours ago

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Our cookbook of the week is Eat to Love by nutritional chef Mikaela Reuben.
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Nutritional chef Mikaela Reuben has cooked for some of the world's biggest celebrities, including Ryan Reynolds, Brie Larson and Woody Harrelson. For more than 15 years, she's toured with rock bands, joined movie stars on location and worked with high-performance athletes. Writing her cookbook debut, Eat to Love (Appetite by Random House, 2025), Reuben realized that as skilled as she is at nourishing others, it hasn't always been easy to do the same for herself.
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As she worked on Eat to Love, the title took on different layers of meaning. It started with how food represented love in her family. Reuben's paternal grandparents were concentration camp survivors and passed down the idea that eating together, sharing food and recipes was love.
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'In the world where only the grandchildren had the grandmother's recipes, where generations were preserved in mouthfuls, where the culture moved from person to person, that, to me, was such a beautiful story to see and to learn,' says Reuben.
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'In the process of creating the book and in my time as a private chef, I had to really focus on what self-love and self-nourishment looked like for me, and feeding myself was one of those things.'
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Reuben, who grew up in Victoria and divides her time between Vancouver and New York, is certified as a holistic nutritionist, sports nutritionist and raw food chef. In Eat to Love, she features more than 115 plant-forward recipes. Travelling the world with her clients, she's accustomed to cooking on the fly and adapting to the situation — an approach that extends to the book.
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'Being able to work with what you have became a metaphor for my life and a metaphor for how we made the book. Really, truly, make the recipes work for you,' says Reuben. Realizing that some cooks prefer clear direction, 'I tried to make precise guides for those who need that guidance. Then, go rogue.'
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Reuben weaves her nutritional knowledge throughout the book, explaining the building blocks for healthy eating and categorizing each recipe by health benefit. Though she cooks with animal products, plants are at the heart of the book.
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'I cook plant-forward because of fibre and because of nutrients. You can come to me and say, 'I'm vegan, I'm keto, I want all the meat in the world, I want low-carb, I want whatever.' I will still cook plant-forward food for any client that I have. All that changes is whether I choose starchy or non-starchy vegetables, or how I do the mixing, or what their goals are.'
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Reuben says that much of her confidence has come from someone showing her how to do something, from kicking a soccer ball to making crêpes, and then building on it.