The Kitchen Commune is like a food lover's hug, showing how cooking is an act of love for yourself and your people. Chay shares a fantastic cookbook packed with easy, delicious, and allergen-friendly recipes for all seasons.

The book is a feast for the eyes, with stunning photos and clever tips. Chay's recipes are flexible and inspire you to get creative. From vibrant sauces like Chay’s House Chimichurri to morning delights like Fluffy Silver Dollar Pancakes, the options are deliciously endless. Dive into colorful salads, mouthwatering mains, and sweet treats like Caramel-Pear Galette.

Chay makes cooking a joy, proving that whipping up fantastic meals with wholesome ingredients can be easy and delightful for everyone. "The Kitchen Commune" is your go-to guide for flavorful, inclusive, and joyous meals.

Special diets are the norm today, and it is certainly a challenge to keep up with them and still feed your family and friends good meals. The Kitchen Commune: Meals to Heal and Nourish Everyone at Your Table by Chay Wike is loaded with ideas that conform with special diets and still taste good. The first chapters are dedicated to stocking the kitchen and other organizing tips to make it easier to prepare the recipes.

This is a well-written cookbook and interesting to read. Many of the recipes are appealing to everyone – those on regular diets and also those on special diets. The recipes are mostly easy, and they are presented in the traditional manner with the ingredients listed first, followed by step-by-step instructions. The author has also added notes, tips, and helps at the beginning of each recipe.

Many of the recipes do call for specialty ingredients which may require shopping for ingredients at specialty and/or health food stores. Most families with special need diets already shop for those items.

One of the best things about this book is that there are beautiful, professional photographs of most of the recipes, which helps cooks decide what to make next.

All told, this cookbook is great for healthy cooks and those who cook for people on special diets.


Special thanks to NetGalley for supplying a review copy of this book.

This cookbook is like the go-to for the need-to-please-all-that-are-eating cookbook. Such a user-friendly and mouth-watering set of stories and recipes, I was excited to go through a well defined book. When I paged through and want to make almost every single thing, I knew this was one of the good ones. And the pics - yeah, it worked well to attract a cook like me!

There are recipes that are vegan, grain-free, dairy-free, anything really that has some sort of restrictions, you can find a recipe to make. Creative dishes alongside basic you-should-know items, like simpler breads or just tortillas, this book's got you. I'm so ready to make the gochujang wings. Food porn, I tell ya.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

The Kitchen Commune by Chay Wike. I received a free digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Excellent, straightforward recipes for people with food sensitivities and the people who love them. My family is going vegan with some gluten issues, and nearly every recipe in this book was a hit! Easily adaptable, tasty and filling dishes with the home cook in mind. A great start for a healthy new year!

A fairly good addition to the world of niche diet cookbooks, The Kitchen Commune has a wide array of recipes. Many are unique to Chay Wike's personal diet; there is, for example, much more ghee used in this than any other "dairy free" cookbook I've ever encountered. If you happen to have a similar diet to Wike's, it is doubtless a helpful book; but I, personally, was less than wowed.
*I received an eARC in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions herein are my own.*

Chay Wike ís a genius in the kitchen. In the introduction to this book, she promises a way to get dinner on the table while respecting everyone's allergies and sensitivities. A way to commune over the dinner table while staying healthy at the same time! And I must say, she delivers. I absolutely loved the variety of the recipes, prep tips, ease of execution and above all, the commitment to health and wellness. I can't wait to stock my kitchen with more of her books!

An interesting book with lots of cool recipes. I liked that this book focused on allergen free cooking but that each recipe was easy to substitute if you wanted to use other ingredients or make simpler. 4/5

Great recipes, lovely photos, and easy to find ingredients make this a visually appealing cookbook. I was genuinely excited reading this book deciding which recipes were must-tries for me. Also appealing is that these recipes are allergen-free, but not boring and easy to substitute ingredients. Especially great is the chapter on sauces---so many options for adding a special zing to your recipes.

Thank you Netgalley and Flashpoint for the ARC!

The Kitchen Commune is a well written tutorial guide and recipe collection with allergen-friendly cooking (including gluten-free, dairy-free, paleo, vegan, and others) written and curated by Chay Wike. Due out 9th Jan 2024 from Flashpoint, it's 256 pages and will be available in hardcover and ebook formats.

Most people's social/family lives are spent feeding and breaking bread with the ones they care about. Inclusiveness and genuine hospitality invites readers to make an effort to find delicious, healthy, appealing food which they can share with their friends, even the ones who are on restricted diets because of allergies, autoimmune issues, diabetes, or other self-imposed diets (paleo, vegan, low-carb, etc). This book is a bit of a mix and match, with all the major diets at least mentioned.

The layout is accessible and the recipes are logically arranged: sauces & staples, mornings, salads & small plates, soups & stews, pasta & noodles, veggies, seafood, poultry & meat, and bread baking & sweets. The recipes contain an intro, bullet list of ingredients, and step-by-step preparation instructions. Recipe measurements are given in imperial (American) units. Most of the ingredients will be readily available at any well stocked grocery store. Some few will require specialist retailers or health-food stores.

The photography throughout is plentiful, professionally styled, and appetizing. The author has also included lots of tips for managing groups with multiple dietary considerations.

Well written healthy recipes, none of which are too complex. This would make a very good choice for public library acquisition, home use, and gift giving.Worth noting: there is no nutritional info included in the book, which was a trifle odd.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

I hadn’t heard of the author or her blog prior to reviewing this book. I will definitely be checking it out because this was an amazing cookbook. My goal for the year is to work in cutting down/out inflammatory ingredients from my diet. This book is a great resource! Honestly it doesn’t feel like it is any sort of special diet (until you look at the ingredient list) from the pictures. You definitely won’t be missing anything by trying these!

This cookbook is a culinary treasure! The recipes are not only easy to follow but also yield delicious results. The diverse range of dishes caters to various tastes, making it a go-to guide for both novice and experienced cooks. The vibrant photos add an extra layer of inspiration, making this cookbook a delightful addition to any kitchen.

I like the idea of this book and that it offers recipes suitable to many eating-styles. I was disappointed that many of the recipes use very expensive and hard-to-find ingredients like almond flour, avocado oil. I understand the author encourages people to have an "alternative pantry" but this is not a reality for most either due to financial constraints or they do not live in a large city or a whole foods.

I appreciated all the realistic, bright photos for the dishes; that was helpful. What I didn't appreciate was the authors opinions and lectures. I am sure she means well but it was really grating and felt inappropriate in a cookbook to tell me to check my ego or to stop apologizing. It might be a better approach to include all of these "shares" together in a "manifesto" at the back and without titles telling ME what to do but rather just her sharing her experiences without offering unsolicited advice.

Although the book advertised itself as vegan-friendly I didn't find many recipes that were actually vegan except for sauces (which I don't count as recipes since they aren't a meal) so I won't be recommending this to my readers; they are predominately vegan and also like to use "normal" ingredients.

The recipes in this book seem fabulous and the photography is great, but what really interested me was the intersection of hospitality foods + allergies/preferences. I love hosting and bringing meals, and we have a number of friends with allergies or certain food lifestyles. I had hoped this would be a book where I could quickly find a dish that was egg free + dairy free, or vegan, or gluten free, or all of the above! If that information is in the recipes it was not immediately clear - I was still googling certain ingredients to see if they qualified, and at that point I could have just googled those recipes specifically.

If each recipe contained some sort of icon to show how it can be categorized - and it doesn't have to be the official symbol, like the vegan leaf, since I know that costs money to license - that would make discerning the use of the recipes so much easier. I'd also happily take a second table of contents that divided the recipes by their allergy/preference.

This is a must-have cookbook! It is full of great recipes, advice, and easy to implement ideas. This is one I'll return to again and again. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the advanced copy of the book.

Delicious sounding recipes great photography a guide to cooking healthy appetizing meals.Will be trying many recipes from this lovely cookbook.#netgalley #flashpoint

This took me a long while to read as my ARC did not translate to kindle well, but I am so glad that I persevered. We ,as a family, have a number of food related issues and this book had just made my life so much easier and given me so many ideas of new recipes I can prepare. Can't wait to buy a hard copy.

I enjoyed reading about the author. There were many healthy recipes that appealed to me, but my favorite is the sauces. They can be used to dress several proteins. The vibrant pictures are beautiful.

Lots of good recipes. Beautiful photos. Nothing seemed too complicated. The recipes look so flavorful and colorful.

I was not impressed with this one. It says recipes for everyone, but I didn't see that.

Also that is a lot of butter and there are no nutritional informations.