Best Free (and Almost Free) Resources to Help You Eat a Plant-rich Diet

By Sofia Adamson

Dietary restrictions can be quite frustrating, especially if you’re used to grabbing food on the go or aren’t the best cook. But, if you want to be healthy, it’s important that you limit your intake of processed foods and fatty meats. Instead, it’s important to eat as many fresh fruits and vegetables as possible. In addition to health, you’ll find that eating a plant-rich diet may help you feel more energetic and may improve your mood.

The beauty of today’s world is that your options in regards to eating healthy have increased exponentially. Not only can you have fresh, ready-to-make meals delivered to your doorstep, you can also learn to cook from the comfort of your own kitchen and at your own time.

Of course, many restaurants now offer fresh, vegetarian and even vegan menu options. Unfortunately, going out to eat gets very expensive, particularly if you want high-quality food. Therefore, learning how to incorporate fresh produce into your meals is ideal. Luckily, there are tons of resources available to get you on the path of eating more live foods. Here are just some ideas on how to get on the path of eating a plant-rich diet.

Cooking Blogs and E-Cookbooks

Many people love to cook as a hobby, and the Internet gives the most ambitious ones an opportunity to make a little extra income from their prized recipes.

Most of the people who self-publish, either on a blog or in an e-book, aren’t professional chefs. They are just hobbyists looking for side hustle ideas to make a little extra income from their creative kitchen endeavors. Therefore, most cooking blogs are ad-funded; thus, offering all of their content for free. You can search any recipe idea in a search engine, or even just general terms like healthy salad or creative vegetable recipe, and you’ll have endless options of what to cook, with step-by-step pictures and detailed instructions.

If you prefer to use a cookbook as your meal guide, then there are many self-published ones available on Amazon for free or are almost free…meaning they will cost you less than $5. To find these books, go to Amazon, and search Free kindle cookbook. Of course, you can search something more specific, like Free vegetarian or superfoods cookbook. There are so many options, the challenge is to actually pick a book or two without getting overwhelmed.

Online Cooking Shows

YouTube is an incredible platform because it allows the average person to become an online personality. Hence, many people who love to cook have started their own YouTube shows that demonstrate how to prepare all sorts of plant-based meals.

Basically, YouTube offers a fun and creative approach to cooking. Most of the shows are quite entertaining, and of course they can be viewed wherever and whenever you’re ready to cook. Some of our favorites on YouTube include The Happy Pear, Laura In the Kitchen and avantgardevegan. All of these YouTubers have a blog, as well, so you have access to all the recipes and written instructions in additional to the videos.

Cooking Classes

If you’re really inexperienced at cooking, watching a YouTube cooking show can be confusing. Or you thing you got it, but the meals just aren’t turning out how they should. If this happens to you, you may need cooking classes.

Usually when people hear cooking classes, they think they’ll need to pay $50-$75 just to learn how to prepare two or three recipes with some well-known chef. Or there’s always community colleges, which offer all sorts of culinary courses, but of course there’s a considerable cost.

Here’s where the Internet once again is an amazing resource. We already talked about YouTube. In addition to cooking shows, there are many instructional videos or How-To’s. Just search for the specific thing you want to learn (i.e. How to Make a Veggie Omelet, How to Chop and Cook an eggplant, etc.).

If YouTube is too overwhelming for you, there are also other free and almost-free online courses for novice chefs. For example, Instructables.com offers instructions and all sorts of free courses. Another website, Udemy.com, offers a plethora of cooking classes. Udemy has lots of discount days; today, for example, most courses cost $11.99. To me, that’s essentially free considering that if you were attending a class at a local junior college, you’d spend just as much on gas over the span of the semester.

What makes virtual cooking classes ideal is that you can follow at your own pace and from the comfort of your own home. You can retake lessons and retry techniques, without slowing down your peers. And finally, you can be very specific on what you want to learn to cook. If you want to eat more plants, then you search for classes that focus on vegetarian cooking, salads, and plant-based meals.

Read more articles from Sofia Adamson.

Sofia Adamson is a contributing writer for Waking Times with a keen appreciation for matters of science and the spirit.

This article (Best Free (and Almost Free) Resources to Help You Eat a Plant-rich Diet) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Sofia Adamson and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution and author bio.

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