By Christie Young, news correspondent
The summer after her freshman year at Northeastern, Madeline Heising, now a senior communication studies major, wanted to do what many other students want to do when they’re getting ready for beach season: lose the freshman fifteen.
“That was the first time I started thinking about food,” Heising said. “What I was eating, what was in it and why I needed to eat it in the first place.”
The Virginia nativehad been a vegetarian since the age of 10 and since switching to veganism, she’s never looked back. She cites her first kitchen in Davenport A as the place where her cooking creativity was born. Completely clueless, she created a Tumblr blog to find and share food ideas, and after only a few months she was the one answering questions and sharing her own recipes. Her blog, called The Collegiate Vegan, now has 10,000 monthly viewers and Heising has published her own e-cookbook called “FIVE: 50+ Plant-Based Recipes, Five Ingredients or Less.”
The e-cookbook is completely designed and written by Heising and features 53 vegan recipes alongside photographs of her animal-friendly creations. All the recipes have five ingredients or less, are cheap enough to afford on a college student’s budget and most take less than 30 minutes to make. She also includes several guides to saving money and time, planning meals and transitioning one’s diet to be more plant-based. The majority of the recipes are also gluten-free. And at only $2.99, less than the price of a latte, FIVE is the perfect guide to eating cheap and healthy in college.
Making the e-book, Heising said, “was a really great way to sum up everything I did at Northeastern.”
One of the ways Northeastern helped contribute to Heising’s love for food was by connecting her to a co-op where conversations with her boss helped herrealize that health was something she wanted to focus on in her future career. Then, a health and communications class with Professor Carey Noland solidified Heising’s new passion.
Besides her initial goal to lose weight, Heising says that learning about the inhumane conditions in which animals must live and the environmental costs of eating meat has only made her more confident that she made the right decision to go vegan.
“My favorite one is probably the avocado basil pasta. You blend an avocado with garlic, lemon juice and basil and toss it with pasta or zucchini noodles and that’s it. she said. “It’s so good. You don’t need any appliances for that one, you can use a fork if you don’t have a blender or a food processor.”
Other recipes include a Blueberry Ginger Smoothie, Mango Kale Salad and Cinnamon Candied Almonds, all of which could tempt any carnivore. Heising includes high quality photographs of every recipe, along with nutritional information stating the recipe’s caloric, fat, carb, sugar and protein content.
Alexis Ditkowsky, the communications and social media specialist in the College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD), met Madeline last fall through CAMD’s ambassador program. She says Heising has inspired her to eat more vegetables even though she’s not a vegan. Ditkowsky also stands behind the avocado basil pasta recipe, one she describes as “having everything that I love.”
“I absolutely love her cookbook because, even though I’m not in college anymore, I’m quite busy and it’s always great to have ideas that are on a budget, easy to achieve in a short amount of time and definitely delicious,” Ditkowsky said.
For times when cooking at home isn’t an option, Heising lists her favorite vegan-friendly eateries: Mother Juice (a food truck that recently moved to a permanent location in Kendall Square), Ten Tables (she loves thevegan tasting menus), Pho Basil (for a close-to-campus treat, she recommends the veggie pho) and Border Café in Harvard Square (for cheap veggie fajitas).
“What kills me is that people think food has to be unhealthy and delicious or healthy and tastes like cardboard. Or easy to make and tastes bad, or that stuff is really good has to take a long time. Or that healthy food is expensive and unhealthy food is cheap,” Heising said. “With food, you can have it all. It can be healthy, it can be easy to make, it can be affordable, it can be delicious. It just requires a little bit of planning, so if I can be the person to plan it for other people, then that’s something I’m going to continue doing.”
Photo by Arzu Martinez
