Making Vegan Italian Accessible
Vegan cooking, she admits, can intimidate even seasoned cooks. “Every time I looked at other vegan cookbooks, there were recipes that required three other recipes before you could make the dish you actually wanted,” she said. “I overthought that part a lot.”
Her solution was structure: “The first section is all the cheeses,” she explained. “Because a lot of the recipes use those, and we’re making everything from scratch. But all of the ingredients are super accessible throughout the United States. I intentionally didn’t put anything with truffle or anything incredibly expensive because that’s not what I wanted the focus to be. This isn’t a fine dining cookbook—it’s comfort Italian food for your family, and it happens to be vegan.”
The recipes, she added, are generous. “They’re not small recipes. These are for groups of people,” she said. “And they’re ways you can maybe get kids to eat vegetables and cleaner foods without them realizing that’s what they’re eating.”
A Soundtrack for the Kitchen
Music has always been Punzone’s second language. “Music, I think, is my first and biggest passion,” she said. “Food and music, individually and together. I make food for all the musicians that I love, which I can’t believe I get to do.”
Her playlists range from Louis Prima and doo-wop—“my dad was a doo-wop singer, so I kind of got brainwashed with that as a child”—to metal, punk, and 90s hip-hop. “It kind of depends on what I’m cooking, who’s coming over, and what mood I’m in,” she said.
She laughs when asked about including a playlist in the book. “I wanted to include a song for every recipe, but it just got too crazy,” she said. “There was too much to do already. But a playlist would be an excellent idea. I should definitely do that.”
