Rachel Mansfield’s career in food started with a pink slip. While working in public relations, she was let go because her recipe blog was deemed a conflict of interest. Within months, the side project she had been nurturing began to look like a viable path forward.
More than a decade later, Mansfield has built an audience of more than 1.5 million followers around what she calls “healthyish” recipes. Her new cookbook, More, Please!, is designed for busy families, drawing on her experience as a mom of three boys and her husband’s celiac diagnosis.
From Fired to Food Brand
Mansfield admits the early days were uncertain. “I never expected my passion for making healthy recipes would turn into a full fledged career – I just loved bringing people along as I tested and tinkered with the recipes I was making in my spare time to feed myself and my husband at the time.”
She gave herself six months.
“I hustled like crazy over the last 10+ years and have said yes to a lot to get me here today,” she said. Looking back, Mansfield considers the firing a turning point. “Getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”
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The shift from cooking for two to feeding a family changed her approach entirely.
Recipes now have to work on a Tuesday after sports practice.
They need to be preppable, use limited dishes, and still deliver on nutrition. “If it’s a meal from me – it has to be convenient and delicious,” she said.
That kind of pivot is familiar in the creator economy, where many food influencers started as hobbyists before realizing their side work could replace a salary. The difference often comes down to adaptability, and Mansfield’s focus on practicality over perfection seems to have carried her through several platform shifts.
Recipes Designed for Real Weeknights
The cookbook’s structure reflects what Mansfield hears from her community.
Instead of traditional chapters, it answers specific questions like “I have a box of pasta…now what?” or “I have ground meat in the fridge and only 30 minutes. What can I make?”
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Mansfield points to the One-Pot Chicken Pot Pie Pasta as the dish she makes most at home. “It’s basically impossible to mess up and everyone loves it,” she said.
The Kinda Thai-ish Steak Noodle Salad is another staple.
It has a sesame ginger dressing that Mansfield keeps on hand. For something sweet, the Chocolate Chip Cookie Granola is a fridge staple that stays fresher longer than store-bought versions.
The Thai Turkey Meatballs with Coconut Curry surprised her.
“I knew my family loved it, but I had no idea it would blow up and become one of my signature recipes,” she said.
Her most personal dish is Mama’s Ooey Gooey Apple Blondies, which she describes as the hardest recipe in the book. It connects to childhood apple picking trips and her husband’s early days of dating her. “No big family meal is complete without them,” she said.
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Kitchen Staples and Honest Advice
Mansfield’s refrigerator typically holds cottage cheese for sneaky protein boosts, homemade dressings, DIY ketchup, and apples. Her pantry relies on full-fat coconut milk, gluten-free pasta, bone broth, and crushed gluten-free crackers used as breadcrumbs.
For cookware, she recommends investing in sturdy sheet pans. “A sturdy sheet pan heats more evenly, helps ingredients roast better and won’t warp after a few trips to the oven,” she said.
She also created her own snack brand, cadootz, after struggling to find packaged snacks with clean ingredients. “I kept cringing at what I’d find out there (even snacks billed as healthy) and eventually my husband and I looked at each other and said, ‘I guess we’re going to have to make this ourselves!'”
Her freezer always has homemade meatballs and breakfast sandwiches for chaotic nights. “We are 100% a breakfast-for-dinner kind of crew,” she said.
For Mansfield, the book’s title is about mindset. “I hope this book gives people recipes they’ll come back to again and again, but more than that, I hope it helps make feeding themselves and their families feel a little less overwhelming,” she said. “If I can do that, then I’ve done what I set out to do.”
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