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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and I am here today with an old friend who has a new cookbook. I’m here with Danielle Walker. She had a nearly sold out national book tour that has featured all kinds of guests and names that you would know. She’s a five times New York Times bestselling author and her new cookbook is called Make It Easy. And I love this because it really focuses on bulk cooking, batch cooking, meal prepping, and all the things that save time and money. And she has quite the incredible story of recovery from autoimmune disease, which is what led her into this health world to begin with. And she has now written multiple cookbooks and I’ll link to those in the show notes as well. That help anyone who is looking to eat more nutrient-dense foods or avoid some of the common ingredients that we might want to avoid in a lot of common foods and do it in a way that is delicious. I really enjoyed getting to catch up with her on this episode. She shares some helpful bulk cooking tips, some meal planning strategies, her favorite kitchen tools, and a lot more. Always a joy to get to talk to Danielle. So let’s jump in now. Danielle Walker, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Danielle: Thank you so much for having me. It’s so good to see you.
Katie: It’s so fun to get to catch up. And I would guess most people listening are already familiar with you because you’ve had so many cookbooks that have been so helpful to me personally, and that I feel like many people have probably already benefited from your work. And in this episode, I would love to really dive deep on some strategies related to meal planning. I love your new book and how you kind of break this down by type. But before we jump into that, I would guess people have maybe a familiarity with your story. But for those who don’t, can you kind of walk us into how you got into this health world, how this became such an important part of your life and kind of your amazing story for anyone who hasn’t heard it?
Danielle: Yeah, of course. Yes. So gosh, I started a blog called Against All Grain back in 2008, 2009. And I did that because a couple of years before that, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. It’s called ulcerative colitis. So my husband and I, high school sweetheart, dated all through college, got married, and literally I got diagnosed, I think, two months after our wedding date. I was already starting to feel kind of off before, but just kind of felt, you know, we graduated college, we moved, we are planning a wedding. You know, there’s just a lot of life events. So I figured things would just resolve after the wedding and we kind of got into our normal pace of life. And things just started to get worse and worse.
And so I ended up in the ER one night. It was like October of 2007. And ultimately, after seeing lots of different specialists, it took a lot to be able to actually get the diagnosis and to really get the testing done that I needed to get done was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. So I was 22 years old, was not really given any sort of education around the disease itself, but also autoimmunity. I think at that time, you know, I think that was still somewhat new. And they didn’t even tell me that ulcerative colitis was an autoimmune disease. So it took a lot of me just researching on my own to really try to understand kind of what the disease was and why it was happening and that it was inflammatory based. They basically just said, it’s not curable. You’ll have it forever. Here’s a prescription that, you know, most people live a totally normal life.
And I realized pretty quickly within the first six months or so after leaving the hospital that normal, at least the normal that I had planned as like a young newlywed, just graduating college was not at all the normal that I wanted for the rest of my life. The medications were really debilitating. They added so many extra, you know, symptoms and side effects to what I was already experiencing. And so I started just doing some of my own research. Every doctor that I saw in the San Francisco area told me that food couldn’t help cure or cause the disease. And just because mine was in the colon ulcerative colitis, it’s somewhat similar to Crohn’s disease, just different parts of the digestive tract. But there was just something intuitively in my head that said, there’s got to be something that I’m eating or not eating enough of, that might be making this worse. You know, maybe it didn’t cause it and maybe it can’t be a cure, but certainly can it help my day-to-day symptoms?
So I dove in with the specific carbohydrate diet, which is similar to the GAPS protocol and saw pretty immediate relief. And then further, you know, after a bit of time, started doing more of kind of a paleo autoimmune protocol and saw my symptoms drop by 75, 80% within the first couple of days. It was pretty drastic and enough to really kind of grasp onto at that point. We fast forwarded quite a bit, but at that point I had a nine-month-old son, our first, and I just really wanted to be present for his life. So I really kind of grasped onto that and then started developing recipes because of that, knowing pretty quickly that this would be a lifestyle for me, not just a quick 30 day thing. And then I really wanted to be able to enjoy the food. And so it really just kind of pushed me into my kitchen and I started creating recipes and created Against All Grain and started sharing blog recipes and on Facebook and got my first cookbook contract a couple of years after that. And I’ve now written six. That’s a very, very shortened timeline there.
Katie: I feel like the overlap in our stories is I was also told about Hashimoto’s that I would have this for the rest of my life and that medication would help and that things would be, quote unquote, pretty normal, but also that there was nothing I could do that obviously was definitely not related to food or lifestyle and have been on my own journey of uncovering my own path for that.
And I think what both of our stories speak to is like there are some universal things that are sort of beneficial or not to humans. And then beyond that, it really is also that experimentation of figuring out for you specifically what’s going to be the most beneficial. And that’s what I love about your work, because I feel like you build on the universally good aspects of what’s good for humans and then give people ways to experiment and also in a way that tastes great. Because I know when I first was doing AIP years ago, your recipes were not first available. When they came out, I was so excited because none of it tasted good. And I was like, I’m never going to eat food that tastes good again.
Danielle: Yeah, I had that similar sentiment. I think we all go through a period of grief when we’ve been diagnosed with something, first of all, and our kind of understanding of what our life will look like changes. But then when you cut out a lot of those foods, you really do go through that period of grieving of like, I’m never going to enjoy food again. I’m never going to be able to enjoy holidays, never going to be able to have people over. You know, there’s this this whole period. And that’s really what I’ve kind of constantly fought against.
And again, you know, like you said, everything is not a one size fits all. I know there’s a lot of people that follow that can’t have nuts. And I use almond flour. And can’t have eggs, you know, and things like that. And I’ve gone through those periods as well. So I really do try to give as many substitutions as I possibly can, which is difficult, you know, to be able to accommodate everybody. But certainly trying to just make people feel like they’re part of the community, like they can enjoy food. And like there is something for everybody, you know, maybe not all of the recipes work for the way that they’re needing to eat at the time. But there will be at least some.
Katie: And before we jump into the specifics of meal prepping specifically, I would love to hear also a little bit about the community aspect, because I know from knowing you that this is a really important piece for you and that you’ve sort of curated this amazing healing, supportive community for anybody who might be also navigating this journey that both of us have been through. So can you speak about that a little bit?
Danielle: Yeah, my gosh. I mean, not only do we go through a grieving period on our own, you know, when we’re diagnosed and have to cut out foods, but then we just kind of feel really isolated and you feel like you’re the only one, especially when you’re in your young 20s or you’re a young mom like we both were, you know, and I just didn’t know anybody around me in my circle of actual friends and community that had anything similar to what I was dealing with. And my husband actually went through a really similar thing. You know, we just both felt very isolated, very alone, very uneducated on what the disease was.
And so really the first time that I saw a comment on my blog, you know, that was not my mom, my sister, my grandma Marge, I realized like, oh my gosh, I’m doing this for more than just my immediate family. I was just blogging because people were asking me for the recipes I was creating, or they were asking me about my health updates. And I was kind of tired of giving the same rundown every time. And so I really didn’t start the blog with the intention of it, A, becoming a business ever, or B, becoming this community-centered thing.
And I started to see these comments from other women, mostly, that were around my age and that were saying things like, I have Hashimoto’s, or I have rheumatoid arthritis, or I have MS, or I have a child on the spectrum. You know, just all these different things that at 23, at 24 at that point, I wasn’t even familiar with all of those different diagnoses and names of all these diseases. I really just knew mine. And so it started to just create this sense of community for me, almost, of, you know, wow, I’m not in this alone. Maybe they don’t have the same disease, but they’re echoing a lot of the same sentiments that I have. They’re feeling isolated. They’re feeling alone. They want to enjoy food, they want to be able to make chocolate chip cookies with their kids.
And so it’s really just grown over time. And it’s honestly, it’s invaluable. People have become friends. I just got off of a 10-city book tour. It’s the first time I’ve been out with my community in over four years. And women that took my course during 2020 that don’t even know each other flew to Chicago to join each other to become part of that book tour stop, which I just think is incredible. Maybe we may not have somebody that lives next door that gets what we go through. We may not have a friend or a sister that’s in our actual life, you know, on a day-to-day basis. But when you can find that community online, it’s so rare, especially given that online can be, you know, kind of a double-edged sword.
So to see everybody just really kind of bound together over the last 15 years or however long it’s been since I started, it’s incredible. They give each other encouragement. They come in, they talk about their substitutions if they’ve made them. When we talk about, you know, not every recipe works for everybody, they’ll come in and say, like, I subbed in, I don’t know, whipped gelatin for the egg and it worked or I did this or this, you know, or if somebody is newly diagnosed, they’ll come and leave a comment, you know, and everybody’s just so encouraging. They understand what it’s been like, you know, to go through that. And they’re really supportive of each other.
And they’re really supportive of me. I mean, you know, when you’re out online for as many years as we’ve been, you go through a lot. And so they walked with me through the loss of our daughter after birth. They’ve seen me, you know, go on to have two more kids and have been there, you know, been there, quote unquote, for the births. They’ve gone through health setbacks with me. I was in the hospital in 2019. And I’ll never forget feeling like I was an imposter and that I didn’t belong in the health space anymore because I was in the hospital after 10 years of not needing to be and feeling like, oh, this is the end for me. Like, nobody’s going to trust me anymore. Nobody’s going to want my recipes. Nobody’s going to believe that they can heal because I couldn’t. And the support after that, you know, when I posted about that was just incredible. It made me cry for two weeks in my hospital bed. And it really got me through it because I was like, okay, you know, they still they still believe that they heal because of my recipes. I still have this background in this history of healing through my recipes. And just because I have a setback doesn’t mean that it’s all gone. And they really helped me remember that and like remember all that I had been through and all that I’d learned about the microbiome and about my health and about autoimmune disease. And they’re just really incredible. Yeah, they’re amazing.
Katie: That is incredible. And I will say like your recipes, your blog and your cookbooks are still go-tos for me just because they’re delicious. Even if I don’t have to be in any particular category of eating for health anymore, I still love the recipes because they’re delicious. And I feel like your recipes really are like micronutrient dense, which is something I talk a lot about on here. Like even if we don’t need to avoid certain ingredients, most of us are not getting enough micronutrients. And because of all the diverse ingredients you use, yours are like hyper nourishing, which I love. And I love your new book. And I want to really delve into the personas you talk about, because this was really helpful for me to understand of like how to kind of figure out which category you’re in that might make meal planning a lot easier for you. Like if you’ve struggled with that, there might be a reason why, and it might not just be because you’re not organized. So can you talk about that?
Danielle: Yes. So I identified six different meal prep personas. And it’s funny because in my head, I see them as these little kind of like cartoon women that, you know, I felt like when I identified them, I could be that different type of persona from any given week, as especially as a mom and somebody who runs a full-time business, our life goes through lots of ebbs and flows. And when we back up and talk about, you know, we go through grief, we go through loss, we go through lots of personal things and things in our business or kids, you know, go through difficult seasons.
And so I think often with meal prepping, we feel like failures because the persona on the internet is like very put together and they go home from the grocery store and they put all their things in these bins that are labeled with exactly what you’re making for the week. And they use up everything in their fridge and they have no waste. And, you know, they’re snapping the tops of the containers because they just spent a whole day prepping like six dinners for the whole week.
And sometimes that’s me, but a lot of times it’s not. Sometimes in different seasons, I do have time to take a Sunday, you know, but a lot of times we’re running around from sports or I’ve got a stressful season with work. I’m launching a book. We’ve got, you know, things at school that are going on. And so I really feel like we kind of just change, you know, it depends on who we are at the time. And I wanted to write a book that really worked for anybody who just wanted to be able to eat healthy but wanted to do it in kind of a smarter fashion. You know, whether you’re a single person that works a full-time job and you’re only cooking for you, or maybe all your kids have flown the nest and it’s just two of you at home and you’re, you know, wanting to eat healthy meals, but you don’t want to spend hours and hours and hours in the kitchen when you’re not feeding a big family. There’s really recipes kind of for everybody.
So as I started to identify those and wrote the meal plans, I wanted to make sure that there were recipes and meal plans that kind of worked for that different season in your life as you jump around from those different people. And that also that you could really kind of utilize them all with the meal prep and make ahead and prep ahead steps, even if you’re not, you know, fully committed to being, let’s call it like the freezer meal prepper or the, we’ve got a semi-homemade meal prepper, which I found as me a lot of times these days, just with the kids, you know, grabbing a bottle of sauce instead of making it homemade or getting a short, a store-bought shortcut, you know, to kind of speed things up.
I really love to be a batch meal prepper, a batch cooker, but it’s not always the case. But when I do, you know, I’m able to do, we have these freezer kit meals in the book. We basically, the recipes are written so that you’re doubling up on something so that you’re making something right then and there. You’re putting it in the slow cooker, in the Instant Pot, but then you’re also creating a second kit just by kind of eyeballing the ingredients, honestly, because you already have it all out and then you’re throwing it into the freezer. And it’s just something that you can pull out on one of those more chaotic days where you don’t have the time, you know, to do a whole bunch of meals all in one day.
And so, yeah, I wanted to make sure, you know, I did a lot of research when I wrote this. I was kind of asked to do it in like 2021 and meal prepping was kind of all the rage on social media, but a lot of those were, you would make, you know, two dinners and then portion it off into all these little containers and kind of eat the same thing throughout the week. And you have a large family. I have three kids, but they, you know, they don’t want to eat ground beef with roasted vegetables five different ways throughout the week. They want a little bit of variety. They want to have things that taste good and they’re exciting. And I’m the same way. And so I wanted to write it for families, but also that it could be conducive for somebody who is a single person too.
Katie: Yeah, I love how you broke it down in this one. And I would probably fit more of the batch cooking mentality just because I’m cooking for an army all the time.
Danielle: Right.
Katie: I learned so much from that. And I feel like the freezer kits are so genius because I’m already going to be spending all that time batch cooking anyway. So it was a way to sort of like multiply my time.
Are there any other tips that come to mind for that? Because I’m a big believer that like anybody who’s cooking, especially for a lot of people, it helps so much to meal prep in some form. But I love that you kind of gave a choose your own adventure so that everybody can figure out what works for them.
Danielle: That’s right. That’s what I keep saying. The choose your own adventure is really the way to go with the book. Yeah. You know, I think people overlook how much time it actually does save you to batch or to double things. When you think about creating, well, the grocery lists are created for you in the book. But if you’re doing it yourself, you think about creating the grocery list to be able to cook, you know, all those things. Then you’re compiling it. Then you’re putting it into the fridge. Then you’re going back and kind of shopping your fridge when you’re ready to make that. You’ve got your cutting boards. You’ve got your knives. You’ve got mixing bowls, whatever it is. If you’re already pulling all that out and you’re putting the mental load into kind of finding the things and prepping it, it really doesn’t take that much longer to double, triple, quadruple, if you need to with a large family and throw those into the freezer.
And the meal kits, the freezer kits are something I fall back on all the time. Most of them are written in that you don’t even cook them. You just like put them into a big bag or a container, throw them into the freezer. You can pop them into the Instant Pot afterwards. And they’re also written in that you don’t really have to stand and measure every single little thing, especially if you’ve already built one and you kind of have like a gauge as to what, you know, how many spices were in there or the broth and things like that. You can kind of just stand and like dump it all again. But even if you measure, you’re not washing the measuring spoons, you know, three times by making that dinner three times over the month, right? You’re doing it all at once. And so those are the really little things.
Some of the other things that I think are often overlooked when we talk about meal prep, you don’t have to do the full day in the kitchen making, you know, six different meals. You can come home from the grocery store and you can peel and chop your sweet potatoes, or you can wash your herbs, or you can, you know, shred your lettuce and throw it into the fridge. You can even do, you know, you can chop up a whole thing of garlic or onions. You can throw it in the food processor if you want, if you’re not have good knife skills, and that saves even more time. I think it’s a lot of the small things, especially when we talk about cooking whole real foods from scratch, you know, not taking some of the store-bought shortcuts of pre-cut vegetables, which you can do, but obviously it comes at a cost.
And so just kind of chipping away at some of those smaller things, I think actually really saves you time and a lot of stress during the week. If you’re cooking, you know, four or five, six nights a week, you get all those little things done and then you really can just kind of dump. It almost like becomes a little cooking show in your own kitchen where it’s like all your ingredients are already kind of prepped out. And all you have to do is really dump them in, throw it in the oven, put it in a slow cooker, whatever it is. Sauces, you know, if you have time, make up a couple of the sauces on a Sunday, or you can do the store-bought shortcuts. That’s going to save you even more time.
But I think really just planning. And I, and that’s really what the book was, you know, about was trying to take the planning, the guesswork, the mental load out of it, for everybody. Everything’s really planned for you, but for going to the store and cooking the things. But you go to the store with a grocery list that’s already compiled and it’s comprehensive. It combines all the things. It’s broken down by, you know, grocery store department, because a lot of time that’s wasted going through the store and like trying to figure out, you know, what your plan is, what you’re buying, where everything is. So when you go in with the plan, not only does it save you so much time, but it also saves you a lot of money too.
Katie: Yeah, absolutely. And I actually, even though I batch cook relatively often, I had a great reminder last week of just how much of a time and money saver this is because we were in the path of the hurricane. Thankfully we had no damage, but I realized if the power goes out, we can eat food that’s cold. We cannot eat food that’s raw. So I pre-cooked everything I had in the fridge thinking I don’t want it to go bad, which meant I had all these pre-planned meals. And even though we didn’t lose power and there thankfully wasn’t any damage, it has been the easiest, most fun week with my kids because I haven’t had to cook at all.
Danielle: That’s right.
Katie: And so, you give a strategy for like, if you want an entire week off cooking, I feel like your cookbook is the place to start. And you can just from that, give yourself more bandwidth when it comes to cooking, at least the other parts of mom life still exist, but.
Danielle: Totally, yes. You still have lots of snacks and breakfast and things to prepare. But when you, I kind of like call them little freezer gold. There’s two bonus meal plans, but if you kind of follow everything through chronologically, you’ll have almost two full weeks of meals in the freezer. And you don’t have to follow the meal plans chronologically, but if you do, they’re really great to find, and it’s like a whole week. Or if you’ve got a particularly stressful week with work or you’ve got a ton of sports or whatever it is, it’s so nice to be able to find those and just pull them out instead of grabbing takeout or whatever it is, or just staring at your fridge at six o’clock being like, I don’t know what to make.
Katie: Yeah. And like I said, yours actually tastes good because sometimes I’ll get in the rut of like, I’ll just either in the Instant Pot or the slow cooker cook a ton of chicken. And then everything that week is like chicken omelets, chicken salad, chicken quesadilla, whatever. But you give so much more variety, even if you’re kind of concentrating on the same base foods, you take it in so many amazing directions.
Danielle: Thank you.
Katie: I’m also curious, what are your kind of like go-to recipes? I know you must have thousands after all these cookbooks, but what are the ones that are like the default for your family?
Danielle: Oh, yeah.
Katie: Because you’re extra busy.
Danielle: Yeah, I was going to say, sometimes it’s not a bad thing to just have a ton of chicken and to be eating that. I don’t, you know, it’s not as sustainable for my kids. They’ll be like, again, but I do. I do morph meals is what we kind of call them. So it’s like making a huge thing of shredded beef or whatever, but trying to really make it different throughout the week. So whether it’s like putting it into tacos, you know, breakfast tacos or like putting it into a wrap and kind of making like a quick au jus.
But, you know, my go to, is my Granny Sorella spaghetti sauce. It was in my very first cookbook, but it’s in this book now multiplied, because my first book, I only had one child and a part-time job. Now I’m like three kids, one that’s 14, my son who eats a lot. So I go to that a lot. It freezes really, really, really well. And so I use it not only just for, you know, spaghetti with like brown rice pasta for them or spaghetti squash for me. But then I sometimes will use it in the lasagna or I’ll throw it into like if I’ve got just a little bit left, there’s a cheese minestrone soup that we call it where you just kind of use the leftovers of the sauce and make this like quick minestrone soup.
We do a lot of lettuce wrapped burgers. Like I keep burger patties formed and ready in the freezer kind of at all times for when we just need something faster or I don’t want to turn on the oven. I live in California and it’s crazy hot here right now. We do, let’s see what else. And like tacos. I mean, we do at least once a week. We do taco night, whether it’s chicken in the Instant Pot or like a ground beef with my taco seasoning. Those are kind of our like family go-to favorites. I also have a French dip recipe. That’s not in this book, but it’s in one of my past books that my family loves. And it’s just a big, huge chuck roast that you throw into a slow cooker with a bunch of different sauces and seasonings. And I grew up kind of like making the roast beef version with the packet of au jus. And so that was my answer to a childhood favorite that I missed. But yeah, those are a few of the ones that we continuously return to.
Katie: I can vouch for the French dip recipe. It’s amazing. I’m curious because I’m thinking back to when I wrote my cookbook and how some of the recipes, thankfully, like only took a couple of tries and then they were super dialed in. And then a few of them I felt like took endless, endless, endless just tweaking to get the details right. Did you have any of those in this book that just like almost drove you crazy with how much you had to work on them?
Danielle: Yeah, this one, not as many because they’re dinner recipes. And I’m sure you kind of can have similar story there, right? It’s like the dinner recipes I tweak, you know, in terms of, oh, it maybe needs a little more broth in the sauce or maybe a little salt and pepper. And so I don’t feel like they went through as many renditions.
What took more time was the giant jigsaw puzzle of making sure that the recipes work together. So every chapter, you know, you see that quadrant. That was the harder part for me with this book because I wanted to choose recipes that utilize similar ingredients so that we had reduced waste and also less time at the grocery store.
There are some baked goods. The baked goods are always what take me the most time. And I created three different cake mixes for this book. The recipes in the book use a store-bought shortcut of buying a grain-free cake mix. There’s a few different brands that make them. But I also wanted people to be able to make up a big jar on their own because it’s more cost-effective or if they needed to kind of, you know, change different ingredients, that way they could do that. And I did a nut-free version. And I wanted to make sure that it worked one-for-one for the almond flour one, the boxed one. And that one took me, I think, 19 renditions. And we finally tested it in like an Ina Garten coffee cake. And I was able to sub it in one-for-one for her cake flour. And I was like, okay, we got it. It’s going to, like, this works. It’s great. But that one took a long time. It was a lot of cakes, a lot of testing.
Katie: Yeah, I’m with you. I am not a baker. I like measure with my heart and baking doesn’t lend itself to measuring with your heart. But thankfully, my oldest daughter is very detail-oriented and has now become the baker of the family. So I’m like, that’s my life hack. I had a child who likes to bake.
Danielle: But you’re like, I will batch cook and feed the family. You do the treat.
Katie: Exactly. Speaking of that, though, as far as like kitchen organization or when it comes to batch cooking, meal prepping, all of this, what are some top tools and/or like appliances, things that are invaluable in your kitchen? Like if you had this sort of 80-20 year kitchen, what 20% is staying?
Danielle: Okay. Well, that’s a good question. I use my Instant Pot all the time. I mean, it’s like out on the counter practically nonstop because I even use it to heat up things, especially if you’ve got a frozen container of a soup or chili or stew or whatnot, you can throw it in frozen, which you can’t do, you know, on a slow cooker and really can’t really do stove top either because it tends to kind of burn. So I use my Instant Pot all the time. That would stay.
I use my food processor as a prep tool. I chop things. I mean, it’s not going to be a perfect, you know, dice, but if you want to save time, just pulsing vegetables, onions, garlic, in your food processor, I would say I use that a lot. And then all of my containers, my, my container drawer is overflowing. I’ve got every single size, all glass containers, and I use those nonstop. So I would say those have to stay too, because I use, I mean, even like, you know, reused ghee jars, something I freeze like individual soup portions in. I use my silicon muffin molds a lot to freeze a lot of things too. So yeah, I would think those three things would be my, I mean, and then you’ve got to have a good knife because if you don’t have a good knife and it’s not sharp, you’re going to spend triple the amount of time in your kitchen. So that would be the other one.
Katie: Good list. And I know you have links to some of the kitchen side of this stuff too on your blog. I’ll make sure I link to those. Before I forget though, you also have an app that I have not used yet. So I would love for you to tell me about it so I can use it.
Danielle: Oh, yeah. Okay. So it’s called Shop the Book and it’s free. As of right now, it’s just my book, but the eventual hope is that all of your favorite cookbooks are on the app. I actually have a husband who happens to be a techie. So he designed and developed the app during COVID with me. We would just sit at night after the kids went to bed and he would work on it. And I would be like, can we add this? Can we add this? And really it came from so many DMs and emails and questions and comments over the years of, you have three books now. And I know I saw a peach cobbler in one, but I can’t remember what book it’s in, what page number, this, that, and the other. Now I’ve got six cookbooks. And so it started as more of a database of the cookbook recipes. On a blog, you can search for something and it comes right up. But in a book, you’d have to thumb through them all and figure out where it was.
So it was more of a cookbook companion app where you could really just search and find which book it’s in, what page number. And over time, and especially as I said, started writing this, I wanted it to become more of a tool to make my cookbooks more useful. And so when I was writing, Make It Easy, I just said to Ryan, is there any way that we could incorporate the meal planning and grocery list aspect into this app? And he was like, yeah, let’s do it. And so he did it after hours. He has a full-time job.
And I really wanted to do it mostly because as we talk about, it’s not a one size fits all. Some people have different allergies or intolerances. My biggest fear with writing this book was what if somebody can’t use five of the meal plans because they’ve got pork or they have a nut or whatever it is. And I was like, then this book is going to be useless to them or they’re going to buy it and feel like in the 90s when we’d buy a CD and we’d skip through six of the tracks and you’re like, oh, I just wasted $18.
And so I really wanted to make sure that all the recipes could still be used and still be used in a meal planning, meal prepping fashion. And so he updated the app so that you can go through and at the tap of a button, make your own meal plan. All you do is just tap. I want to make the roasted salmon sheet pan dinner. I want to do the breakfast tacos. I want to do this, that, and it’ll auto-populate your meal plan, but then it also auto-populates your grocery list and it combines everything. So if it’s using a pound of ground beef and three pounds here on Thursday, it combines all the quantities. And you can go through and add your own if you just need toilet paper or whatever it is, you can add your own things there too.
So you can really just take your phone or your iPad to the store as opposed to spending the time writing things out. And now you can also make meal plans and grocery lists across all six of my cookbooks. So if you’ve got like family favorites from Meals Made Simple, but you also want to do one from Celebrations, you want to do the Cheez-Its from Eat What You Love, whatever it is, you just go through, tap all the different recipes you want. It makes your meal plan, it makes your grocery list, and then you can just kind of go to the store.
And so, yeah, it’s a huge just resource and tool just to make the cookbooks even more usable for people. And again, just to kind of take a lot of that mental load of the planning. The grocery lists take forever. I mean, when you’re making your own grocery list, it takes forever. And there’s always room for error. You go to the store, you grab everything you think you need, but then you forgot something, then you have to go back, then you end up buying way more than you should. And so it’s a really great tool that I’m just so happy to be able to give my community.
Katie: Well, that’s awesome. I’m excited about this. I’ll make sure I link to it. As we wrap up though, unrelated to meal planning, I’m curious if there is a book or number of books that have profoundly impacted your life and if so, what they are and why.
Danielle: I know I saw that question in advance. I will say, I wish I could say like, oh, there was this amazing business book or the spiritual book or something that like changed my life. I was thinking back to it. I think the book that changed my life just because it got me back into reading was The Nightingale. I know that’s like such a weird answer, but I wasn’t much of a reader for a long time. And then I got into it, but then I had kids. And then anytime I would try to read, I would fall asleep like within five seconds. So I never finished a book.
And I think back in 2020, I read The Nightingale and it like has put me onto this giant reading track over the last four or five years that now I feel like I’m reading a new book every single week. And it’s kind of become just my little place to go as a mom and as a business owner where I can kind of like lose myself in a book. I love historical fiction, but I’ve also read a ton of biographies over the years, a lot of just different educational pieces. And especially just given the state of the world over the last few years, it’s kind of what I’ve focused on. It’s just trying to read books to educate myself and to become more aware of a lot of things around the world and injustices.
And so, but that book just got me back into like my love of reading, I guess. And also kind of like gave me the permission to be able to read a full big novel, even though I’m a mom and a business owner. And it was kind of this point where I’m like, oh, I can turn my brain off for like a little bit of time and just kind of go inward and enjoy this book. So that one got me back into reading.
Katie: I love that. And I would guess, like I said at the beginning, a lot of people are already connected to you, but for anybody who isn’t, where is the best place to find you and connect and keep learning from you?
Danielle: Yeah, well, so I’m on Instagram @daniellewalker. I spend the most time on my Substack. That’s where my community kind of loves to hang out and we do Q and A’s and comments. And I post a brand-new recipe there every single week and I do tutorial videos there. So that’s like my favorite little corner of the internet at the moment because I can teach and do videos again.
And then my books are kind of everywhere books are sold. I have a memoir that catalogs my whole health journey and just kind of how I got started blogging and my cookbook’s called Food Saved Me, but you can get all of the books anywhere. Books are sold, Amazon, Target, Barnes & Noble, your local independent bookstore.
Katie: Well, and I’ll link to all of them in the show notes. Like I said, if any of you guys are on the go, all that’s at wellnessmama.com. Danielle, it’s so much fun to get to catch up with you. I have loved watching your work and your community grow over these last years and I’m so grateful we got to reconnect and I’m super excited to dive into these recipes in your new book. So thank you for that and thank you for your time.
Danielle: Thank you.
Katie: And thank you as always for listening and for sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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