Kathy Hester is the author of five vegan cookbooks (more if you count the Halloween ebook), including the new Easy Vegan Cookbook: Make Home Healthy Cooking Practically Effortless and OATrageous Oatmeals: Delicious & Surprising Plant-Based Dishes From This Humble, Heart-Healthy Grain.

I discovered to my delight that she’s also a neighbor, and now, after a lunch date, an interview, and a family dinner gathering to which she brought an amazing dessert, she’s become a friend.

Jill McKeever is not an introvert, I suspect. I began to form this suspicion when we started our video Skype conversation and I noticed she was wearing fuzzy bunny ears.

Plus she hollers “Woot Woot” every time she speaks or hears the words “Instant Pot.”

Good thing Jill is preaching the message of healthy cooking and delicious eating!

If there were a Nobel Prize for food, Miyoko Schinner would be rehearsing her Oslo speech right now. Committed to human health and happiness, environmental stewardship, and animal welfare, her activism tends toward the decidedly delicious.

She’s a return guest, having shared her cheesemaking secrets with the podcast a couple of years ago.