Let the Delicious Recipes from Habit Fire Up Your Wonderful Adventures
Anyone who has ever put on an apron has a different story about why they first entered the kitchen. Some people grow up with family recipes or food as the main course of their cultural upbringing. Many see cooking as a means to sustenance, a task to check off. Moving out throws others into the deep end when they have to fend for themselves, and some have no other choice; medical concerns, dietary restrictions, finances or lifestyles limit dining out. Habit, a cookbook by outdoor enthusiasts Josie Boulding and Ryan Stuart, was born from a blend of these stories.
Ryan, the writer and “eater” as he self-describes in the cookbook, met Josie at her family’s resort on Vancouver Island where he had taken on outdoor guiding. He has been a full-time freelance magazine writer for decades, with regular contributions to explore as field editor. He is constantly outdoors, adventuring and testing gear to review for our print magazine. He grew up feasting on his mom’s cooking and warm memories of breaking bread at family dinners. He is active on the ground, in the water, on the mountains and up the cliffs of Comox Valley in BC, where the couple now resides, so naturally, he has an active appetite too.
Josie, photographer and host of the Restless Josie TV series has celiac disease and has been following a gluten-free diet for more than a decade. She went back to university in her forties for a Bachelor of Arts and Science in nutrition and psychology and she’s the chef in the duo.
Their relationship and lifestyles have always centered around their shared love of food, but as they raised their daughter Paige who has several food allergies, cooking took a larger share of the pie in their lives. Rather than letting their intolerances damage their relationship with food, the family embraced the challenge to learn more, read nutrition labels, cook and build a simple routine they could sustain.
“If it’s something you have to do every day, why not make it fun? Why not make it a habit you enjoy doing because it’s such a huge part of most people’s lives,” Josie said in our interview. “Nutrition is important to us, but that wasn’t the whole reason for the book. We also found [when] talking to people that there was this barrier to entry, in the sense of being intimidated by the kitchen and finding it such a chore. And we were like, how can we make this easier for people so that they want to lean into the good habit?”
Josie and Ryan started filming their cooking over the pandemic to help their friends who didn’t know how to cook and slowly, the sidequest grew into an online community of foodies. Habit is the fruit of the labour they’ve poured into their nourishment and their desire to inspire people like Paige, who is now 20 years old, to glide into the kitchen and build a routine of cooking with flexible recipes, easy instructions and accessible grocery lists.
In a culture that often demonizes ingredients with fast-changing trends in diets or even how food is described, finding a cookbook that doesn’t perpetuate “clean eating” or villainize sugar and carbohydrates can be rare. Habit offers recipes that are low in dairy, gluten-free and made with whole foods, with little judgmental language towards ingredients.
“I really thought about modelling good behaviour in that way for my daughter. We don’t talk about dieting in our house . . . Also because of my background, because I have done television and modelling, I obviously am aware of the industry and how much it’s pushing all these toxic body images on people,” Josie told me. “It’s really important to remind people that food is fuel and can be enjoyable too. It’s not one or the other . . . So we really tried to incorporate that kind of belief system, a healthy relationship with food, in this book, and maybe not in a real direct way, but definitely when you start reading it, you’ll notice it.”
A different path led Ryan, whose lifestyle has always revolved around his outdoor activities, to the kitchen and building positive reinforcement through food.
“You’re eating what you’re eating because you’re surviving and then you realize . . . you’re out on a run or a mountain bike ride, . . . ‘Wow, I have no energy today.’ Or, ‘I spiked and then I crashed,’ or ‘I got really hangry at the end of the day because we were having dinner a little later than normal.’ When I started to think about ‘Well I want to be a faster mountain biker,’ or ‘I want to be able to travel further in the mountains,’ [the question] was what is holding me back in this situation,” Ryan said. “You start thinking about . . . what you’re putting into your body [and] realize that [food] is the fuel, and the quality of that fuel matters to how I feel when I’m out there, and the amount of fun I’m having. Whether I’m racing or whether it’s just a day with some friends . . . it made a difference.”
The book starts with six base sauces—Caesar, Teriyaki, Cashew Cream, Miso, Lemon Preserve and Salsa Verde—which then sprout into a handful of recipes from appetizers to desserts and even a Tequila Sour cocktail. Each sauce can be kept in the fridge for about a week and is freezable so they can make for great condiments, salad dressings or toppings on any camping meal. There are also recipes from the cookbook, like their Mushroom Tacos with the Teriyaki base, that will wink at you from the second you flip through the book and would be delicious camping meals with just a little planning and preparation.
“Because they’re liquid and heavy, the sauces are not something that we would take on a backpacking trip where we’re weight conscious. But [on] any other camping trip, where weight and refrigeration are not such a concern, we love to bring a jar of our pesto or teriyaki base,” Ryan recommended in a post-interview email.
“We like pesto because it’s super versatile, which is important when space is tight in the cooler. You can put it on pasta or rice, a sandwich or salad. As an aside, the Pepita Croutons are a wicked trail mix alternative, if you want the crunch of. . . granola bars, but prefer a savoury flavour to the usual sweet. When refrigeration is more of a worry, the teriyaki base is better. Because it is cooked and quite acidic it can keep out of a cooler for a couple days. A go-to camping meal with it is a big old stir fry. It’s easy, everyone likes it, you can use pretty much any veggies and, with a pot of rice, it can be super filling.”
When life gives you lemons…
On a chalet trip with a few friends, I tried Habit‘s recipes with the Lemon Preserve base. We had a vegetarian, two Mexican friends and three gym bros who felt very strongly about their steak and protein intake in the group. I found the Lemon Preserve recipes to strike a good balance of veggies and meat, without having any Latin-inspired dishes that would add pressure to the already tense attempt at pleasing eight people with limited kitchen appliances away from my typical home base.
As soon as you put together a grocery list for the cookbook’s recipes, you can appreciate how most ingredients are repeated across dishes with the same base and are easy-to-find kitchen staples. With rising food insecurity across the country and inflation, experimenting with aspirational or sophisticated recipes that often have ingredients you may only use a few drops of can be both costly and wasteful. For Josie and Ryan, this added another layer to consider when designing their recipes.
“In that process of trying to simplify our recipes and our instructions, we thought about the ingredients we were using and were very purposeful about the ones we chose. If we were going to choose something that’s a little out of the box, and usually, for the most part, it was these thickeners and stabilizers [because Josie has celiac], we were very, very conscious about ‘why are we choosing this?’ Why can’t we use something that’s a little bit more generic,” Ryan explained. “So we made that choice very consciously and very purposefully, and tried to explain that in the book, and then at the same time, we have a whole page or two that talk about substitutions.”
For the chalet trip, I made the potatoes, fish and grilled eggplant with the help of another travel companion. From the moment we returned from our grocery run to when dinner was served, it took only around two hours, despite the multiple dishes including the base that we started at once and the chaos that brings to a kitchen.
I made a few errors during my attempt from using vanilla yogurt to forgetting to wipe off the salt from the eggplants, which led to a whiplash of flavours with the balsamic vinegar, pistachios and the lemon base. However, the fish (which I made with salmon instead of halibut) and the potatoes were chart-topping favourites amongst the group.
Habit perfectly lives up to its tagline “Inspired. West Coast. Gluten Free.” It offers a wide range of beginner recipes for anyone first stepping into the kitchen or the practice of creating a grocery list for meal prepping. The recipes are easy to tackle and the cookbook is the perfect choice to elevate your camp cooking skills, show off at a picnic or bring a delicious dish to a backyard potluck. If you are confident in the kitchen and desire a deeper culinary challenge, Habit may not be for you, but twisting its recipes with your experience level, knowledge and cultural background or tweaking them for your next outdoor adventure is an endeavour I’m sure Josie and Ryan would welcome.
Thank you Ghazal for the great coverage of our cookbook. It really means a lot to get Canadian support🫶