I occasionally come across a social media account — usually run by a conservative male — claiming to great fanfare that young women these days don’t know how to cook. They’ve been too busy girlbossing to learn.

In my experience, this is wrong. The ambitious women I know are ambitious in every part of their lives. They get the promotion while moving up the Peloton leaderboard, planning their dream wedding and creating flavorful, photogenic meals that Betty Crocker hadn’t dreamed of. For these women, there’s the Ambitious Kitchen.

The Ambitious Kitchen was created in 2011 by a Chicago woman named Monique Volz. It has since amassed more than 700,000 followers on Instagram and a cookbook deal for 2024. Recipes are broadly branded as “good for you”; they emphasize whole grains and seasonal produce and usually include options for vegan, dairy-free and gluten-free dishes. There are a lot of chickpeas. There are a lot of “energy bites.” There are also a lot of photos of Monique in activewear, holding an infant against her trim waist and promoting her affiliate link in the caption. In 2023, it’s Monique, not Shiv Roy, who personifies female ambition.

Seeking to make my own kitchen a little more ambitious, I made the Summer Glow Strawberry Kale Salad with Honey Mustard Chicken — don’t forget to store each component individually for leftovers to avoid sogginess! For dessert, a strawberry crisp with peanut butter crumble that would be delicious with autumn apples. Monique’s recommended recipes for September include a lot of canned pumpkin, which, when decoupled from the sugary additives that tend to come along with “pumpkin spice,” adds a savory backbone and plenty of fiber to pastas and baked goods. We liked Healthy Pumpkin Bread, minus the maple glaze (I ran out of syrup), but served with plenty of butter and sea salt. Spinach Bacon Pumpkin Mac and Cheese uses one cup of cheese with one cup of pumpkin puree for a surprisingly cheesy effect.

Clever substitutions like this are the signature of the Ambitious Kitchen. With simple swaps — almond meal for white flour, maple syrup for granulated sugar, ground turkey for beef — along with additions of mild vegetables like spinach, mushrooms, and zucchini, almost any meal can become more nutritious. The trouble with this “yes, and” approach is the fussiness of preparation: endless chopping, slicing, and grating of veggies, heaps of spices to distract from low-fat substitutions, and expensive ingredients you don’t keep on hand. New York Times Cooking or Smitten Kitchen may be more upscale blogs, judging from their elegant food photography and rare use of the word “boobs,” but many of their recipes are simpler than those of Ambitious Kitchen. Monique’s brand of relentless nutrition-maxing requires tedious prep, endless clean-up, and many, many storage containers.

Though a full week of cooking with Monique was messy and tiring, my husband and I loved everything we tried — even the Chia Banana Bread Energy Bites that gummed up our Vitamix. With a short break to recharge my own ambition, I’ll return to this blog again.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2023 World edition. 

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