Eat like a celebrity: Vancouver personal chef Mikaela Reuben pens plant-forward cookbook
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Mikaela Reuben’s cookbook all started with a road trip.
“I gathered a few girlfriends, one was a photographer, one was a food stylist, and we spent the summer travelling from destination to destination throughout British Columbia,” she recalls of the trip that kicked off in 2019.
Their road trip took them to some of their favourite places in the province, including Hornby, Saltspring and Galiano islands, as well as Squamish and Whistler. When she looks at the book now, she recalls a “lot of laughter and a little confusion at times” during the process.
“I’m so proud of what we created,” she says.
It was a backward way of creating the compilation of eats, considering that she hadn’t yet decided which of the recipes she’s cooked up during her 10-plus years as a personal chef would be featured.
“We were using the markets and the kind of situations we were in to develop the recipes,” Reuben recalls.
Thankfully, the Victoria-born, Vancouver-based food creator had plenty to pull from for her first book, titled
“I was cooking things that I knew my clients had loved, and then I had to kind of go in and tweak after and make sure that each recipe worked,” she says.
With the aim to match maximum nutrition with maximum flavour, Reuben’s recipes are intentionally adaptable to suit preferences and dietary needs, including vegan, dairy-free or grain-free alterations.
“I’ve tried to build out the recipes so that they are usable, or potentially usable, by a wide audience,” she says.
Praise from some of her celebrity clients, such as supermodel Karlie Kloss, Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson, for the B.C. chef’s cooking are peppered on the back of the new hardcover tome.
Reuben also received high praise for her cooking from Vancouver’s own Ryan Reynolds and his wife, Blake Lively, who are clients.
“The care Mikaela puts into every detail is unmatched. From the exciting flavours to the specificities of the health benefits, she cares about it all … and you can taste it,” they said in the book.
The nutritionally focused chef takes a whole-food, plant-forward approach to cooking. That angle is informed by her background in sports, dance, kinesiology, physiotherapy and nutrition.
“I just realized that in all of this body stuff I was focusing on, there was the food aspect missing,” Reuben says of the shift away from bodywork to body fuel. “For me, one can’t exist without the other.”
She found her way into the world of personal cheffing by chance, encountering the late Hollywood caterer and personal chef Wayne Forman in a friend’s kitchen where she was cooking a meal.
Impressed by her dish, Forman and Reuben stayed in touch. One day, she picked up the phone and it was Forman on the line asking if she might be available to cook for a client. That call would change her life.
“The next day at school, I asked for a year leave of absence, and I bought a one-way ticket,” Reuben says. “I ended up never going back.”
Reuben worked with Forman, who catered films and cooked for stars, as well as cooking on the road for bands such as The Red Hot Chili Peppers, for a few years. Busy with his own business, he ended up passing clients along to Reuben to help her create her own roster.
“He really, truly gave me one client that believed in me from the beginning, and I ended up working with him for a few years,” she says. “And to be honest, once I kind of mastered the art of food and healthy food tasting good, I continued to get clients through word of mouth from different communities and networks.”
Spending about six months a year back home in B.C., the rest of her time is spent travelling the world as a personal chef to celebrities or working as a consultant.
“I’ll teach other chefs how to use healthy ingredients if they’re maybe really well trained in culinary but they don’t know a lot about nutrition,” she explains. “Or, if someone’s an aspiring chef, and they know a lot about nutrition because they’ve taken some classes, I’ll go in teach them a little bit about cooking.”
With Eat to Love, Reuben brings that knowledge to other people’s cooking.
“It’s for anyone that is curious about bringing a little more health and flavour into their kitchen,” Reuben explains. The book also includes information such as pantry staples to help readers easily stock their shelves like Reuben does.
“People can reference what’s in my pantry and what I used to create the whole book,” she says.
When prompted to pick a favourite recipe from the collection — a question that makes most cookbook authors cringe — Reuben pointed to a sauce section in the book rather than a single recipe.
“If I were to tell any reader to do one thing, it would be to look at my green sauce section. There’s a cilantro pesto, a regular chimichurri, and a chermoula,” she says. “Just to inspire people to add even more herbs into the cooking …
“Herbs are being neglected a little bit, and they offer so much support to our bodies.”
Lentil Bolognese over Zucchini Noodles
Lentil Bolognese
1 tbsp (15 mL) extra virgin olive oil + more to serve
1½ cups (375 mL) diced red onions
1¼ tsp (6 mL) sea salt + more to taste
1½ cups (375 mL) thinly sliced celery
1 cup (250 mL) dry red lentils, rinsed
1 cup (250 mL) water
2 (14 oz/398 mL) cans diced tomatoes
1 cup (250 mL) roughly chopped fresh basil + more to garnish
2 tbsp. (30 mL) minced drained capers
1 tbsp. (15 mL) pressed garlic (or more if you love garlic)
1½ tbsp. (22.5 mL) balsamic vinegar
1 tbsp. fresh lemon juice
½ tsp (2.5 mL) chili flakes + more to taste (optional)
Zucchini Noodles
8 cups zucchini noodles (about 4 medium zucchini) (see note)
1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
Fresh ground pepper and sea salt to taste
Note: You can cut the noodles to your desired length with kitchen scissors. Instead of spiralized noodles, you can make 8 cups of zucchini ribbons.
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Line two large rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper.
In a medium pot, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the red onions and 1 tsp of the salt and sauté for 3 minutes. Add the celery and sauté for 3 minutes, until the onions and celery are soft and translucent. Add the lentils and water, and bring to a simmer. Stir well, then reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Stir in the tomatoes, basil, capers, garlic, vinegar, lemon juice, chili flakes and remaining ¼ teaspoon of salt. Simmer, uncovered and stirring often, for 15 minutes, until the lentils are tender. Season with more salt or chili flakes to taste. (Store cooled sauce in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 4 days.)
Meanwhile, in a large bowl, toss the zucchini noodles with the olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Arrange the noodles on the prepared pans so that they are lying flat (overlapping is OK). Place both pans in the oven and roast for 5 minutes, until the zucchini noodles are steaming and softening.
Serve the zucchini noodles topped with the lentil Bolognese, sprinkled with salt and, if using, chili flakes, and garnished with olive oil and basil.
Makes 4 servings.
Excerpted from Eat to Love by Mikaela Reuben. Copyright © 2025 Mikaela Reuben. Photographs by Robyn Penn. Published by Appetite by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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Source: vancouversun.com