Easy, Flavorful Vegan Vibes: Inside Jenné Claiborne’s New Cookbook

Jenné Claiborne was 8 years old when she cooked her first meal (Szechuan chicken), and she’s rarely put down the spatula since. Her plant-based journey began in 2011, when the Atlanta native embraced veganism and started sharing vibrant, inventive recipes on her Sweet Potato Soul YouTube channel. While living in New York City, she became a sought-after personal chef for vegan and whole-food, plant-based clients while continuing to grow her online community. In 2018, she released her debut cookbook, Sweet Potato Soul.

Now, as a mom balancing a busy life, she knows firsthand how challenging it can be to get healthy meals on the table every day. “I don't spend a lot of time in the kitchen if I'm not working, because I'm busy, just like everybody else,” Claiborne says. “If I'm cooking just for my daughter and me, it's going to be something quick and easy.” That ethos inspired her latest book, Sweet Potato Soul Vegan Vibes, which hits shelves February 4.

The gorgeous collection of 100 recipes is all about creating big flavors with minimal effort, showcasing Claiborne’s imagination and resourcefulness as a chef.

We caught up with Claiborne about the new book, her ingenious oil-free granola recipe, farmers-market obsession, and more. Read on for the full conversation!

Jenné Claiborne: When I first became vegan, I thought I couldn't be any healthier. I was only 24 years old. I did have a lot of gut issues, but I'd been to different doctors, and they never told me to stop eating dairy. I thought, OK, well, I have a bad stomach, but otherwise, I'm healthy, so if I’m going vegan, it’s just for the animals. I became vegan, and within a week, maybe two, I stopped experiencing all of my gastrointestinal issues, 100%. None of it has ever come back.

JC: I left Atlanta for college in '06 and I didn't move back until 2021. I had been living in Los Angeles for four years, looking for inspiration for my second cookbook, but I wasn’t finding it. When I came back home to Atlanta, I was reminded of how diverse this place is, too, and it's much more laidback, and the people are very friendly. … I go to the grocery store and I see produce from all around the world, and I drive down the street and there are 10 different restaurants from 10 different parts of the planet. That was super inspiring to me.

JC: LA was not my place. It's so far away from home. … What I do miss about LA, though, are the farmers markets. That was my No. 1 favorite thing about living there. I very rarely bought produce at the grocery store in those four years. … I live walking distance to, in my opinion, the best farmers market in Atlanta, and I'm lucky and I'm grateful for it, but there isn’t as much demand, so the variety [of produce] is not as robust.

I’m a farmers market stan. I love them so much. … They [illustrate] the bounty and the abundance of eating plants, of what's possible when you eat plants. My first time ever going to a farmers market was when I moved to Boston for college, and that's kind of how I started eating plant-based, and eating healthier, and expanding my palate, because I was the pickiest kid. I hardly ate any vegetables. I didn't like 90% of the fruits I had been exposed to. But when I started going to farmers markets, I was picking up produce like, “Ooh, what’s this? I’ve never seen this!” That totally changed my life.

JC: Tahini is one of my top-three favorite ingredients (Broccolini and sweet potatoes being the other two) because it is so versatile and it tastes amazing. I remember I lived in New York at the time when I first made that recipe. It was kind of a spinoff of my tahini cookie recipe, which is in my first cookbook, and it's also on the blog. I'd been making that recipe for a long time, and I realized that you don't have to form it into cookies. You can just sprinkle it on the tray and [bake it as] granola, because it crisps up so well, especially along the edges.

JC: I love the essence of rose just in anything. I've got some tea blends with mint and rose. You can put it in your water. You could use rose powder—which is just ground up dried rose petals—to color an icing. I recently [did that] because I don't use artificial dyes in our food, and my daughter and nieces and I were making cupcakes. It made such a pretty pink, and that rose flavor, to me, is one of the best flavors. It's floral, and it's elevated. It's heavenly.

JC: One of my favorite recipes in the cookbook is the Perfect Pea Pesto Pasta. It is so easy to make, but it looks fancy. … It's made with basil, mint, and frozen peas that you thaw and blend into a pesto. You can toss it with any pasta you'd like. I always do a nice short pasta like gemelli. And the Za'atar Cauliflower Steaks would be perfect for Valentine's Day. They would be really nice served with that pea pesto pasta, because the za'atar has all these herbs in it, like parsley, and that pea pesto pasta has basil and mint, so those would really complement each other. Or you could serve the pasta with the Simple Oyster Mushroom Steaks. That recipe is also so easy. If you are doing a Valentine's Day dinner after work, and you need to put something together in under 30 minutes, then that would work perfectly. You wouldn't have to make anything in advance, and it would be beautiful.

JC: Absolutely. The pesto pasta does have olive oil in it, but it's not required. You could remove that, and if you need to thin [the sauce] out, add a little of the pasta [cooking] water. The cauliflower steaks have tahini, so the tahini keeps them really nice and moist, without having to douse them in oil. There is some oil in that recipe, but you can totally take it out. And mushrooms don't require any oil to cook at all. Sometimes I'll sauté garlic in a little bit of oil before adding mushrooms to the pan, but the mushrooms themselves don't need any oil because they’re full of liquid on their own. They’re super hard to burn. Mushrooms are amazing if you're doing whole-food, plant-based and avoiding oil.

JC: Eighty percent of the time, you want to focus on eating wholesome, minimally processed foods. No more than 20% of the time, you can let your hair down, go out to eat, or eat more highly processed foods. What I mean by highly processed is stuff you could never make at home. Tofu is a processed food, but it's minimally processed. Same with tempeh—super easy to make at home. … When you get to Beyond Meat, and Impossible, and all of these replicas of meat and dairy, those are in the ultraprocessed category. We're going to reserve that for 10–20% of the time, if not even less. The reason I advocate this is I think it's helpful for people to transition into eating healthier, understanding that your diet doesn't have to be perfect right away [or ever]. But I do want to encourage people to keep doing better and better, because you’ll feel better.

I also like to mention that if you have a health condition and your doctor has told you you need to avoid all oil, all [refined] sugar, or sodium, then, of course, follow the doctor's advice.

And you can easily fall into the trap of going to Costco, and there's all this easy-peasy, ultraprocessed vegan food. You can tell yourself you’re just stocking the freezer for when you don’t feel like cooking and you’re only going to have it once a week, but then the next thing you know, you're eating it every day because you have a container of 20. If you learn how to make easy, wholesome food that takes no more than 20 minutes, you don't have to rely on those highly processed foods as much.

JC: Sometimes I will get the zoomies, and I'm like, "I'm going to meal prep!" But I don't actually reliably do that on a regular basis. That is once in a blue moon. … But my kitchen is always well-stocked. For example … I always have [cooked] brown rice in the fridge. I have a lot of frozen veggies, so I might steam some frozen spinach and peas together, and then put that all in a bowl and top it with tahini sauce straight out of the jar. If I'm going to be fancy, I'll make a tahini dressing with lemon and miso. …That is how I eat most of the time. Honestly, it's delicious.

JC: She has her own cutting board, knives, all the stuff she would need, but lately, she doesn't even want to slice her own apples. Her favorite thing to do in the kitchen is just mix stuff, which is my favorite thing, too. My nana always let me do that. … I don't throw away outdated spices anymore. I save them for her, and she mixes stuff.

JC: I'm glad you asked me about the adaptations for oil-free, because almost all the recipes in the cookbook, you're able to just [omit oil], with the exception, I would say, of some of the baked goods. For those baked goods, you could replace [the oil]. For example, I've got these chocolate sweet potato muffins—maybe just use a little bit more sweet potato in that recipe instead of the oil.

This cookbook definitely fits in that 80–20 philosophy of mine, where 80% to 90% of these recipes are more wholesome, not a lot of sugar, but [some are more decadent]. … There is a balance of recipes in this cookbook, because I really wanted it to be for everybody.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Photos copyright © 2025 by Jenné Claiborne and used by permission of Rodale Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved.