With year-round harvests and incredible seasonal variety of crops, Florida offers a wealth of homegrown foods that make it easy to cook local and fresh. Food journalist Dalia Colón and The Florida Vegetarian Cookbook is your guide to discovering flavorful dishes that showcase Florida’s bounty of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and grains.

The Florida Vegetarian Cookbook includes more than 100 recipes using local ingredients and the recipes are accompanied by 12 essays that offer the stories behind some of Florida’s most cherished food traditions.

Colón and Michelle Stark, editor for the Life & Culture team at the Tampa Bay Times, will be in conversation about this colorfully illustrated cookbook that will take you on a delectable journey through the many ways that vegetarian and vegan foods are woven into Florida’s history and culture.

The event will take place at Coastal Creative located right across the street from the bookstore at 2201 1st Ave South. PURCHASE YOUR COPY OF THE BOOK HERE!

Dalia Colón is an Emmy Award–winning multimedia journalist. She is executive producer and host of The Zest podcast from WUSF Public Media and the NPR Network, and associate producer and cohost of WEDU Arts Plus on Tampa Bay’s PBS station. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, and Gravy, the journal of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Michelle Stark is a Florida native and journalist at the Tampa Bay Times. She loves to cook at home and indulge at local restaurants in equal measure. She became the paper’s food editor in 2015 and is now an editor on the Life & Culture team, where she manages reporters who cover food and culture and occasionally writes about those topics, too.