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Given the success of cookbooks based around popular movies, shows, and entertainment entities, the idea of Insight Editions’ Pixar: The Official Cookbook was a no-brainer. Of course, transforming that initial idea into a finished product proved to be a little more difficult, especially when author Tara Theoharis was tasked with coming up with recipes for movies that have nothing at all to do with food… or even characters who could eat, in the traditional sense.

“We wanted to create a recipe for every single short, every single feature that was out on the market at the time, and there obviously are some movies that have a lot more recipes: Ratatouille, Luca, even things like Toy Story with Pizza Planet. Pixar is really good about using food as a storytelling device because it's so held with nostalgia, it's held with emotion; it’s a part of love, it’s a way people show their love. So even like bao, there's multiple mentions of bao between Turning Red and the actual short called Bao,” Theoharis explained during the Making of Pop Culture Cookbooks panel at Emerald City Comic Con 2025. “Some of those [Pixar projects] are very, very easy. And then you have some properties like Cars.”

Unsurprisingly, a movie where there are no people, but a lot of talking vehicles, isn’t the kind of thing that offers immediately obvious suggestions for foodstuffs — which didn’t mean that Theoharis didn’t try.

“I can't make a lot of cocktails with gasoline. [The editors] won't let me, it's weird,” she joked. “We had to get pretty creative with it, especially because Cars is a more preschool oriented thing. I couldn't just make cocktails. I played around a lot with, what does gas represent? So we have a coffee drink because gas gets you going. We have a green smoothie to go as the organic fuel. And then I just started getting really creative: We have little wheel pasta in there. In Cars 2, there's this whole oil plot line in Italy and so I was like, ‘I’m going to do something with olive oil,’ because, any excuse I have to use olive oil! So, I was like, ‘We're making a lemon olive oil cookie,’ and it's delicious. And it's now a Cars recipe!”

Pixar: The Official Cookbook is available now.

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