Author of ‘The 40-year-old Vegan’ wants to ‘veganize’ your comfort foods

She can turn cashews into ricotta cheese and ranch dressing, zucchini into spaghetti noodles and chickpeas into a deli “tuna” salad.

She wants to teach you how to do the same and she swears it’s as delicious and satisfying as the home cooking her Grandma Maira and Grandma Sellani stuffed her with when she was a kid growing up in an Italian family near Scranton, Pa.

Comfort foods like lasagna were a cornerstone of life. You talked about what was for dinner while eating lunch and there wasn’t any disappointment or setback a meatball couldn’t fix.

But at 22, Sandra Sellani was diagnosed with colitis.

The disease is an inflammatory reaction in the colon.

“They put me on four medications, and my doctor said, ‘Whatever you do don’t eat any fruits and vegetables,’ ” Sellani said.

Then, a couple years later, Sellani visited California and met a vegetarian named Bobbie, who told her how the animals she was eating suffered.

Sellani gave up meat — and something surprising happened.

Her colitis symptoms abated, flaring up only here and there over the next two decades.

But it wasn’t until her late 40s when she was training to run her first marathon — she runs Balboa Peninsula boardwalk daily — and cut out dairy and all other animal products that her symptoms vanished.

“It’s pretty miraculous,” Sellani said. “They’re gone. I don’t take any medication. No stomach distress of any kind. I feel better than I did in my 20s. I am a firm believer that you can prevent — and in some cases — reverse disease with a vegan lifestyle.”

So strongly did she feel about this new lifestyle that she left her corporate job as vice president of marketing for Nvision and enrolled in celebrity chef Matthew Kenney’s plant-based culinary academy in Los Angeles.

The first thing she learned to do was make lasagna using cashews for the ricotta cheese.

“I realized I can have all the comfort foods from my childhood,” she said. “I took my foods and I gave them a makeover. I veganized them. “

Sellani wanted to share them; some of her grandmother’s recipes are more than 100 years old. So she recruited her twin, Susan, who still lives in Pennsylvania, to help her write them all out.

Then she “veganized them” and put them in a cookbook that came out in April.

“The 40-year-old-Vegan: 75 Recipes to Make You Leaner, Cleaner and Greener in the Second Half of Life” is for sale online at Amazon and at Barnes and Noble — and in select bookstores such as Barnes and Noble at Tustin Marketplace — and on her website, 40YOV.com.

In a couple of weeks, the book may be purchased at 15 Costco locations.

The book includes a 52-week meal plan “to help easily transition to a plant-based lifestyle with old-fashioned, recognizable recipes.”

So that it’s not overwhelming, the Sellani sisters introduce one substitution a week.

“One little change, to make it really easy to lean in to veganism,” Sellani said.

Week one asks readers to find a non-dairy substitute for their coffee.

Week two is to find an egg-free bread.

Sellani credits a push from former KCAL news anchor and national talking head Jane Velez-Mitchell — who wrote the forward to her cookbook — with taking her meal plan to social media.

Mitchell, an animal rights advocate with the website janeunchained.com, has a quarter million social media followers.

Last fall, Mitchell invited Sellani to her kitchen in Los Angeles where she does a “Lunchbreak Live” videocast on Facebook.

One week later, Sellani started doing her own “Lunchbreak Live” every Sunday at 12:30 p.m. from her home off Pacific Coast Highway in Newport Beach.

Viewers can log on to interact with Sellani and ask questions while she prepares recipes like stuffed cabbage and stuffed shells. A recent video, in which she made a Sriracha Caesar salad, has gotten approximately 9,400 views.

“The 40-year-old Vegan” has won a 2017 Green Book Award and International Book Award, and 10% of the sisters’ proceeds go to Mercy for Animals, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing cruelty to farmed animals.

“It has been the most fun ever,” Sellani said. “I’ve got 11,700 followers. People watch from all over the world, so that’s pretty exciting.”

LORI BASHEDA is a contributor to Times Community News.