Zest!

Zest! Food that's fun to make & good for you is an ode to life, energy, vibrancy. It is written in a personal, conversational style as if the reader is sitting in Laurie's kitchen. More than a cookbook, Zest! offers guidance and tips about creating healthy, full-flavored, delicious meals while enjoying the process of meal preparation. The book is organized in 7 sections with recipes for soups, fish dishes, salads/sauces/dressings, chicken dishes, veggies, and egg dishes. Laurie draws upon global flavors using ingredients the cook may already have on hand and she introduces ingredients that may be new to the reader, but easily accessible. She provides advice about what to stock up on to make meals that can be made quickly and are anything but boring. The recipes are designed to bring out the "inner creative cook." Each contains ingredient options for cooks to feel confident trying new things and improvising their own recipes. The Salad Inspiration piece contains more than a million possibilities for different salad combinations from the traditional to the more adventurous. The Parade of Pesto offers the reader/cook a variety of 5-minute magic sauces to dress up meals. Zest! will appeal to a wide range of cooks from the novice to the well-seasoned cook.

Zest! Food that's fun to make & good for you is an ode to life, energy, vibrancy. It is written in a personal, conversational style as if the reader is sitting in Laurie's kitchen. More than a cookbook, Zest! offers guidance and tips about creating healthy, full-flavored, delicious meals while enjoying the process of meal preparation . The book is organized in 7 sections. The first section provides the reader with guidelines for becoming a more creative cook, how to turn leftovers into "love agains," how to stock the pantry, fridge, and freezer with ingredients to make mouth-watering, healthy meals quickly. The sections that follow contain tips and specific recipes for soups, fish dishes, salads/sauces/dressings, chicken dishes, veggies, and egg dishes. There are no recipes here for red meat as Laurie chose to eliminate that from her diet decades ago. Laurie draws upon her experiences gathered in travels, her work as a market researcher and consultant in the foods and other industries and feedback from her Zesty Cooking workshops with cooks of all levels and interests. The recipes are designed to bring out the "inner creative cook" with lots of ingredient options for cooks to feel confident experimenting and improvising their own recipes. The Salad Inspiration piece contains more than a million ideas for different salad combinations from the traditional to the more adventurous. The Parade of Pesto offers the reader/cook a variety of 5-minute magic sauces to dress up meals. Zest! was written during the age of COVID and grounded in research when so many people Laurie spoke with bemoaned how difficult it was to put a tasty, different meal on the table every night since they had limited options for dining out or take out. Making delicious meals that are good for body and soul has been a lifelong quest of Laurie's. COVID was the catalyst to bring this new cookbook to the public.

It probably started in the womb of a mother who loved listening to opera, going to Broadway theater, dabbling in oil painting, and cooking delicious foods. Laurie grew up in a household where creativity was cherished and nurtured, so there was little doubt that she would craft a professional life that would integrate the arts and her personal passions. While genetics and family encouragement played a critical role, good fortune and wonderful business mentors made their mark on a career that began in direct marketing, where she was grateful to learn from the pioneers in that industry and was given latitude to be an "intrapreneur" before that word was even coined. A taste of facilitating creative meetings provided by training at Synectics added new tools to Laurie's repertoire, and she joined the firm as an Associate/Consultant for three years. She left to co-found IdeaScope Associates, and for twelve years headed up Consulting for this boutique strategic visioning firm which had a staff of 25, and offices in Cambridge, MA, and San Francisco. In 1995 Laurie reframed her professional world, launching Practical Imagination Enterprises® (PIE), an Innovation and Qualitative Research Consultancy with a network of outstanding colleagues. Clients come to Laurie and PIE when they need to recharge their thinking—look at their business differently, create future vision, generate, and develop new strategies, new products, and positioning ideas. Laurie has worked with clients in categories from advertising to zoos and has particularly relished her work in the foods industry. Laurie is a Thought Leader and active member of the QRCA (Qualitative Research Consultants Association), a frequent presenter at industry conferences in the US and overseas, and author of dozens of articles which have appeared in market research journals. Her business book, formatted as a recipe book, Stir it Up! Recipes for Robust Insights & Red Hot Ideas was published by Paramount Market Publishing in 2011. It is still a best seller. Laurie's 1997 self-published cookbook: Creating the Creative Cook: an almost vegetarian cookbook for almost brave cooks merged her concepts of cooking and creativity. It was way ahead of the time. Laurie builds off those concepts with Zest! Food that's fun to make & good for you. She loves good conversation and cooking with friends and family and she shares her philosophy and recipes in Zest! workshops online and in person. Though she downsized a few years ago she continues to grow vegetables and herbs and is ever amazed by the magic process of planting seeds which turn into those mouthwatering juicy, ripe, homegrown tomatoes.