External links
- Official website
- RainbowPlantLife- Official YouTube Channel
- Recipes by Nisha Vora - New York Times Cooking
- Biography from Penguin Random House
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Nisha Vora | |
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| Occupation | Vegan/Plant-based cookbook author |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley Harvard Law School |
| Subject | Vegan/Plant-based cookbooks |
| Notable works | Big Vegan Flavor: Techniques and 150 Recipes to Master Vegan Cooking (2024) The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook: Wholesome, Indulgent Plant-Based Recipes (2019) |
Nisha Vora is an American Vegan/Plant-based cookbook author and blogger. Her second cookbook, Big Vegan Flavor: Techniques and 150 Recipes to Master Vegan Cooking (2024) was nominated for the 2025 James Beard Award. [1]
Vora's parents emigrated from Mumbai, India [2] to New Jersey in 1982. [3] [4] Her father, who is a physician, moved the family to Barstow, California, when he heard that there was a need for doctors there, [3] and Vora grew up in Barstow. [2] [5]
At the age of 14, Vora began to teach herself how to cook by watching chefs such as the Ina Garten and Alton Brown on the Food Network, [3] spending time in the cookbook section of bookstores, [5] and learning from her mother, who cooked Indian vegetarian cuisine. [2] [3]
Vora's family had given her three career paths to choose from (medicine, engineering, law), so she chose law. [5] She continued to cook for her friends in college and law school, [3] and received her degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 [3] and her JD from Harvard Law School in 2012. [6]
After law school, Vora worked in "a big law firm and a smaller nonprofit," but realized that she did not like the legal profession. [3] [5] She used cooking and eventually food blogging as a way to cope with the stress of legal work, and became involved in food photography and recipe development. [5] Ultimately, she left her career as a lawyer in 2016 in order to focus fully on being a vegan food blogger, which was "inspired by documentaries about factory farming." [3]
In 2017, Vora worked for a food startup while maintaining her social media presence. [5] In 2018, she was contacted by Penguin-Random House with an offer to turn recipes from her fledgling vegan cooking blog, "Rainbow Plant Life," into a book (The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook: Wholesome, Indulgent Plant-Based Recipes, 2019). [3] [5] Vora does credit law school with the writing, research, and analytical skills needed for her current work saying that when she "was developing a chocolate chip recipe, I did a mountain of research on ingredient ratios in non-vegan chocolate chip cookies, the percentage of butter, the percentage of fat, the percentage of eggs, so that I could come up with a recipe that tastes just as delicious and is just as chewy and has crispy edges like a regular chocolate chip cookie. I bring this super analytical lens that I think comes from having that background as a law student and as a lawyer.” [3]
In 2024, Gotham named her cooking channel, Rainbow Plant Life one of the "8 Vegetarian and Vegan Youtube Channels That Make Plant-Based Cooking Easy." [7]
Forbes named her first cookbook, The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook: Wholesome, Indulgent Plant-Based Recipes (2019) as one of the "Best Vegan Cookbooks" of 2019, [8] Food & Wine called it one of "The 18 Best Vegan Cookbooks for Every Type of Meal" in 2023, [9] Parade listed it as one of the "Best Vegan Cookbooks to Add to Your Collection Right Now" in 2019, [10] and Good Housekeeping named it as one of the "14 Best Healthy Cookbooks, According to Cooking and Nutrition Experts" in 2023. [11] VegNews listed The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook as one of the "Top 100 Vegan Cookbooks of All Time" in 2024. [12]
Her second cookbook, Big Vegan Flavor: Techniques and 150 Recipes to Master Vegan Cooking (2024) was nominated for the 2025 James Beard Award (Media: Vegetable-Focused Cooking). [1] It was also #3 on The New York Times Best Seller list for the week of September 22, 2024. [13] Kristin Montemarano states in Food & Wine that it is "filled with...essential flavor-building steps you should always be taking," [14] while Washington Post Food and Dining Editor Joe Yonan suggests that it demonstrates how a Plant-based diet "is a distinct cuisine with its own principles and strategies." [15] In addition, New York (magazine) listed Big Vegan Flavor as one of "The Best Cookbooks to Gift This Year [2024]," [16] Chowhound lists it as one of the "15 Best Vegetarian Cookbooks Of 2024," [17] Civil Eats includes it in its "2024 Food and Farming Holiday Book Gift Guide," [18] columnist Avery Yale Kamila listed it among "The year’s best vegan cookbooks" in the Portland Press Herald, [19] and VegNews listed it as one of "The Best Vegan Cookbooks of 2024." [20]
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