Yumna Jawad's White Zucchini Pizza Is a Summer Delight

Welcome to The Pioneer Woman Cookbook Club! This month, we're featuring Yumna Jawad, known online as Feel Good Foodie from her blog and social media presence. Her new book, The Feel Good Foodie Cookbook, explores everyday, nutritious meals with a Mediterranean spin. Read on to learn more, plus get the recipe for her white zucchini pizza with garlicky labneh.

You may know Yumna Jawad as Feel Good Foodie—the blogger, recipe developer, and social media force whose Mediterranean-inspired recipes have attracted a whopping 8.5 million followers in the past decade. Now the online star is taking her talents to print with a new cookbook worth adding to your summer reading list. In fact, the recipes found in it will inspire a whole new way of indulging in the season's best ingredients.

Picture eggplant caramelized on the stove and served over a bed of creamy mint yogurt or clippings from your herb garden transformed into fragrant tabbouleh. Venture to a farm stand during the height of summer and you'll be greeted by a kaleidoscope of colorful fruits and vegetables: The Feel Good Foodie Cookbook is just what you'll want waiting at home with fresh ideas to enjoy them!

Yumna found her love of food early on, but her passion for cooking came later. She lived much of her childhood in Sierra Leone, a country in West Africa, where her family ate many of the very dishes you'll find in her cookbook. "Our kitchen in Africa always had the best smells coming out of it," Yumna says "Freshly chopped parsley, sizzling garlic cooking on the stovetop, the smell of floral rose water: Those scents remind me of childhood." Local markets were more geared toward essentials, so her mother cooked all of family meals. And it was a lot of work. Admittedly, Yumna had no desire to follow suit. "I hated the idea of cooking because I'd see my mom in the kitchen laboring for hours, even making her own yogurt from scratch and tomato paste from scratch," she says.

But then, when Yumna was 11 years old, her family moved to the United States and discovered the multitude of convenience items found in American grocery stores. Soon her mom was spending far less time in the kitchen, "but we still had these amazing Mediterranean-inspired meals," says Yumna. Her mother even started making more Midwestern meals like pancakes and spaghetti, "using little swaps that just made them a little bit special," she says. "If she didn't have any Italian seasoning, she'd throw seven-spice into a meatball recipe and we loved it."

When Yumna began cooking as an adult, she adopted a similar style. "I realized I wanted to bring in that homemade feel to dinnertime, but I didn't want to have to spend hours making it," she says. "So I started using these swaps my mom taught me." Using seven pantry and fridge staples detailed in her book, Yumna elevates things like banana bread by adding tahini and pancakes by swapping the vanilla for rose water. She transforms chicken dinners and sweet potato wedges with sumac and shows you tons of different ways to use seven spice. More than 100 of the recipes in The Feel Good Foodie Cookbook are vegetarian and all but one (Yumna's crispy falafel) can be made in under 30 minutes. Each recipe also includes at least one "feel good" ingredient.  

The recipe we’ve shared here is the epitome of Yumna's famous feel-good food. First of all, it's pizza—and who doesn't love pizza? The base is creamy labneh, one of her seven must-have Mediterranean ingredients. Along with plenty of mozzarella, it creates a "white pizza" base that's a little lighter and healthier than other versions. The pizza is topped with fresh squash and zucchini, making it the ultimate summer dinner.