Once upon a time, Sarah Michelle Gellar was best known for slaying vampires. Now she kills it in the kitchen on the regular. When we met up with Gellar this time last year, she'd recently released Foodstirs, a collection of all-natural baking kits meant to bring kids into the kitchen. And when we caught up with her again earlier this week at a cooking class in The Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen, Gellar had even more exciting news: She's a cookbook author. Stirring Up Fun With Food has even more likeminded recipes, meaning they're good-for-you, fun to make, and so, so Pinterest-worthy. Here's what Gellar had to say about staying healthy through the whole thing.
She keeps it all in the family.
Gellar's a native New Yorker, and she's the first to admit she spent more time making reservations than making dinner for the first half of her life. The problem is, you can't know the ingredients that go into every dish when you're eating out. Now, she and husband Freddie Prinze, Jr. commit to making more food at home. He's culinary school-trained — she's not — but as of this week, they're both cookbook authors, and their recipes are in constant rotation come mealtime. "I love his pulled pork, and his Brussels sprouts are really good," she told us. "And he does this pasta that's one of my favorites!"
She sees cooking as a teachable moment.
For kids that learn how to use an iPad before they can ride a bike, the fact that food doesn't come from a phone is revelatory. It's how we buy groceries and order takeout. Gellar is hyper-aware of this, which is why she tries to make the kitchen a no-phone zone. (Her baking kit company Foodstirs even has the motto, "Put down your phone, pick up a whisk!"). It's a time for her to connect with her kids, sneak in some math lessons, and teach them about the food they're eating. "We have to be aware of not just what we put in our body but where it comes from and what it's doing to our planet," she says. Another plus she writes about in her book: "I learned quickly that to get my kids to be adventurous in their choices, I had to involve them in the process of preparing food."
She eats with her eyes first.
You're not likely to find a legit definition for "food crafting," anywhere but in Sarah Michelle Gellar's new cookbook, but it's not for lack of trying on her part. (By the way, she defines it as taking basic food preparation and elevating it to a level that is both fun and creative.) In fact, before Gellar decided to organize her cookbook by month (heart-shaped strawberry skewers in February, orange Jack-o-lanterns in October), she had it laid out differently: a chapter for muffin tin recipes, one for skewered food, another for food served in jars. "The more aesthetically pleasing something looks, the more likely we're going to want it." It's how she tricks her kids into eating fruit — by putting in on a sweet pizza — or how she makes spaghetti squash seem just as appetizing as actual spaghetti — by baking it in cupcake shape.
She riffs on classic junk food.
Find us someone who's never craved a French fry in their life, and we'll pay you a million bucks. There's not a living, breathing human on this planet who doesn't love to chow down on a not-so-healthy snack every now and again, including Sarah Michelle Gellar. So she developed versions of them that feel just as indulgent but don't come with as much regret. "I love the asparagus fries," she told us of the recipe in her book. They're crispy, like the real thing but sneak in veggies and are baked, not fried. The same goes for cauliflower popcorn, another one of Gellar's go-to recipes. She tops the stuff with nutritional yeast, a common cheese alternative for vegans that's loaded with B vitamins.
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