Welcome to Kitchn’s series My Healthy Morning, where we show you how one person greets the day in a way that makes them feel their best. Each post will chronicle how that person defines healthy for themselves, and the habits and recipes that make their morning a little bit better.

Photographer, food stylist, and cookbook author Leela Cyd is a longtime friend of Kitchn. If you’re a regular on our site or have a copy of The Kitchn Cookbook, chances are she is a longtime friend of yours, too. Maybe you’ve made her beet-pickled deviled eggs? Or maybe her simple but quirky kitchen has inspired you to add a little whimsy to your space? Her gorgeous photographs and smart tips have likely been helping you make life in the kitchen just a little bit better.

This year, she’s been especially prolific with not one but two new cookbooks. The first, Cooking up Trouble: Recipes to Nourish Women, came out this summer; her latest, Tasting Hygge: Joyful Recipes for Cozy Days and Nights, is here just in time for comfort food season. We’re obsessed with recipes like almond sourdough pancakes, braised lentils with apricots and olives, and German-style lemony cheesecake (which is proof that German cheesecake is the best cheesecake).

Oh yeah, and did we mention that Leela is also a new mom to Izador Cosmo? We checked in with Leela to see how she keeps it all together (a strong cup of black tea is key) and how the meaning of “healthy” has changed for her in this exciting chapter of her life.

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Emojis make social media so much more fun. We can even write recipes with emojis. We’ve come so far since the emoticons of the 1990s, made with strings of punctuation that resembled faces if you looked at them sideways. The smiling, winking, and sticking-tongue-out faces were fun, but there was no way to send a sushi roll or a slice of pizza. Now we can send our friends little pictures of food whenever we want, and it turns out that’s really useful.

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I’m not sure how it happens, but every time I travel elsewhere I seem to forget that I live in a place that has food. I leave Brooklyn with my backpack basically empty and return with a bag that is bursting with baked goods and coffee beans and chocolate bars. Such was the case this past Sunday, when I came back from a weekend trip to the Bay Area. Here’s what I toted home with me.

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Everyone knows Thanksgiving is all about the side dishes. People like to fuss over how they cook the turkey and whether or not it will be juicy enough and blah blah blah, but the bird doesn’t have a chance in the lineup when there’s mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and green bean casserole to be consumed.

So let’s forget about the bird for a second and talk about what sides you’re having this year for the Big Day. Do you go with the classics? Do you like twists on familiar recipes? When it comes to the most popular green bean casserole recipe on Pinterest, for example, it may look familiar, but it’s anything but. Have you tried this recipe?

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Some weeks the meal plan just flows out. Monday through Friday gets filled out in about 10 minutes. But other weeks, like this one, when I feel uninspired or bored by meal planning, I take requests from my family to fill up our week.

I consulted my favorite diners, my husband and two kiddos, for their meal requests this week and used them to plan a week of fall-feeling, family-friendly dinners for the last bit of October.

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Although my family’s annual celebration is reasonably organized after years of practice (and my mother’s borderline pathological attention to detail), my pals and I are still trying to turn Friendsgiving into a smooth, stress-free operation. Our first year we learned that yes, it is possible to have too many sweet potato side dishes, and last year our gluten-free friend realized that she couldn’t eat anything except the salad that she’d prepared.

Even though the setup looked halfway decent, I think everyone wished that we’d just ordered pizza instead.

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As someone who eats entirely plant-based, I’ve found that one of the most “clutch” meal prepping techniques for a week’s worth of headache-free meals is batch cooking beans and grains ahead of time. From here you have the building blocks for a variety of dinners, and it saves you precious energy come dinnertime to get a little creative too!

Now that it is fall and the temps have dropped a bit, I’m craving comforting food in the evening. So this week I chose to cozy up to some of my favorites, each making extra-tasty leftovers for lunch the following day as well.

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Here’s a weekend project for you: Make turkey gravy! It takes a few hours, but you’re left with a bounty of good food. There will be shredded turkey meat for sandwiches, extra turkey stock for stuffing or for slurping, and the golden stuff itself: thick, savory turkey gravy stashed in the freezer for Thanksgiving Day.

When your Thanksgiving turkey is roasted and the guests are seated, you don’t have to worry about your gravy. It’s already done. Here’s a step-by-step recipe to show you how.

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Welcome to Kitchn’s series My Healthy Morning, where we show you how one person greets the day in a way that makes them feel their best. Each post will chronicle how that person defines healthy for themselves, and the habits and recipes that make their morning a little bit better.

Here at Kitchn, we confess to being one part bewildered, one part obsessed with all the latest wellness trends. $200 coconut butter? Totally ridiculous, but possibly worth it? (Okay, okay, probably not.) So, when we heard that a health cafe from Miami was opening outposts all over New York, we had to go check it out.

The Dr. Smood cafés are everything you’d hope for if you wish upon a Goopdust star. You’ll find green juices and spirulina boosters, white coffee and “health bread” in an environment that makes you feel zen, but focused. Yes, it’s a little bit wooey, but it’s also easy and delicious — which is exactly what Dr. Etti Ben-Zion, the brand’s Senior VP of Research and Product Development, intended.

A holistic nutritionist and psychotherapist, Dr. Etti is known in South Florida as the Juice Goddess. She’s also a mother of four children and one dog. Here’s what healthy means to her.

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Chrissy Teigen is a supermodel, TV host, and the reigning queen of Twitter, and she’s also an award-winning cookbook author with a second book on the way. She really knows her way around the kitchen, and if she says she’s eating the best pancakes in America, she’s probably right.

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