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It’s impossible to settle on just one reason for the allure around Shreya of @shreyacookssss. The 30-year-old cooking influencer’s upbeat attitude, earnest enthusiasm, and laid-back vibe make her the encouraging, food-loving friend we all want and need. Her zippy cooking videos on TikTok and Instagram — including close-ups of her glam press-on-nails and comfy hoodies — make you feel like you’re right there with her as she straight-talks you through yet another approachable recipe.
Then there’s the food itself. Shreya’s website tagline — “Simple. Satisfying. Seasoned.” — does an excellent job of summarizing her vegetarian cooking style. She focuses on easy-to-make meatless renditions of comfort foods from around the world, amped up with vibrant spices like Kashmiri chili powder and mango powder (her favorites) as well as furikake and everything bagel seasoning.
With equal parts entertainment and education, Shreya is fun to watch, even when you don’t have time to make what she’s cooking. But it’s really in your best interest to reproduce her recipes, following along as she whips up cheesy-gooey ramen carbonara or hand mashes the dough for her viral fried “bubble potatoes.”
Shreya’s rise to digital fame was as easy and relaxed as her culinary approach. She became a vegetarian when she was 18, “just to see if I could do it,” she says. Her father and grandmother are both vegetarians, so it wasn’t hard to eat plant-forward at home. Though, there wasn’t much home-cooking when she was growing up; they ordered a lot of vegetarian Indian and Chinese takeout. Consequently, she only had to dodge meat during lunchtime at school. It wasn’t until college that she began cooking for herself, borrowing the little she’d learned at home and bolstering it with YouTube videos.
Fast forward to 2020. Shreya was a law school grad who just passed the bar, holing up in her hometown of Seattle, waiting for the pandemic to ease so she could get sworn in as an attorney. With nothing to do, she took to the kitchen in earnest and started experimenting and posting her creations online. Her groove was very much as it is now — a welcoming, honest enthusiasm; a knack for making yummy, quick vegetarian food people want to eat; and a laid-back attitude that makes you want to cook alongside her.
By the time she began working as an attorney, she had the food-blogger bug, squeezing in new, delicious content on weekends and after work. Three years, two attorney jobs, and myriad recipe videos later, she’d garnered 1.3 million TikTok followers, 161,000 Instagram followers, and enough sponsorship deals to inspire her to leave her brief law career to focus full-time on content creation.
Today, the self-described recipe developer, spicy food lover, and desi street food enthusiast spends her time feeding her website, TikTok, and Instagram channels. She shoots videos in a corner of her apartment, her four-year-old Goldendoodle, Charlie, at her feet. She’s also putting the finishing touches on her first cookbook, Make It Meatless. Slated to debut in August 2025, the recipes focus on her popular vegetarian copycat versions of classically meaty comfort foods.
Shreya’s career direction may have changed since her law days, but her culinary sensibility has not. “I want to make food that’s easily accessible and is not going to scare people away from cooking,” she says. “My goal is to have people cook more. You can have a good payoff from basic cooking skills. There’s easy stuff that you can do that everyone should know, so you can make yummy stuff at home.”
Like all of her recipes, the following air-fryer veggie fajita recipe falls into the easy, yummy-stuff category. It also demonstrates one of her favorite time-saving kitchen habits. Shreya explains: “This recipe shows there are different ways to meal prep aspects of your dish throughout the week rather than prepping the whole thing at once. I don’t like to cook one dinner and eat it the same way. I like to meal prep elements of my meal that can be used in a variety of different recipes throughout the week.”
The fajitas are just one example of how Shreya works to make her meals more accessible. “I just want people to enjoy cooking. It doesn’t have to be a chore,” she says. Make this recipe to get a taste of Shreya’s simple, satisfying, seasoned vegetarian fun.
Here’s how she does it.
Recipe: Air-Fryer Fajitas
Ingredients
3 bell peppers
2 portobello mushrooms
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 lime, juiced
Salt and pepper, to taste
2 tsp taco seasoning
Directions
Slice vegetables and evenly coat in oil, lime juice, salt and pepper, and taco seasoning.
Air fry at 450°F until crispy. Work in 5-minute intervals—the time will depend on how much of the batch you cook.
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Shreya Cooks
