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    Book one of the Out of Office series

    Out of Office

    Back to Healthy Roots — A Mediterranean Diet Guide & Cookbook: 61 Recipes, Real Science, and One Burned-Out Executive's Escape

    By Leo Novak · Out November 10, 2026

    The cover of Out of Office by Leo Novak: a plate drawn as a pie chart of vegetables, legumes, olive oil, fruit, fish and nuts on a tomato-red background.

    Most Sundays at two, my wife’s family sat down to a lunch on the Greek island of Crete that ran past midnight. Most Sundays at two, I was on a work call, eating out of a paper bag.

    So I started cooking their way. Not on the island: in a city kitchen on the thirty-first floor, with ingredients from an ordinary supermarket and my mother-in-law on a video call. Out of Office is that year, and everything I learned.

    • 61 traditional recipes from Crete and the rest of Greece, in metric and US measures, each with a City Kitchen note for ordinary supermarkets
    • The real history and the honest science of the Mediterranean diet, every fact sourced
    • A 7-day meal plan with a shopping list, a pantry list, and the house rules from our fridge door

    Formats

    • Kindle ebook

      Pre-order from October 23, 2026; delivered on release day, November 10, 2026.

      Pre-order opens October 23, 2026

    • Paperback

      Full color, 8 × 10 in, with an index of recipes and an index of ingredients.

      By November 24, 2026

    • Hardcover

      Full color, 8.25 × 11 in, the gift edition.

      By November 24, 2026

    The Island Pantry Starter Kit

    The Island Pantry Starter Kit

    A free starter kit from the book: the pantry list, the no-label rule, city shopping tips, and a first week of meals. Leave your email, confirm it, and the kit comes with my first letter. Then you’ll hear from me when the next book is ready, and not much in between.

    Occasional letters. No volume. Double opt-in, unsubscribe anytime — privacy.

    From the prologue

    The lesson was fasolada, the bean soup Greeks have been making for longer than anyone wrote down. It went badly, in four acts. I chopped the onion, I was told, “like an accountant.” I salted the beans too early. I could not find the bay leaves, because we did not own bay leaves, because until that week we had not owned anything that wasn’t delivered in a paper bag. And then I measured the olive oil with a teaspoon.

    Evi, at the other end of the counter with the carrots and the celery, was trying not to laugh. She had grown up with this soup and hadn’t made it in years either. Then she saw the teaspoon. There was a silence on the line so long that she checked the Wi-Fi.

    “Leonida,” my mother-in-law said at last, very gently, the way you’d talk to a man standing on a ledge. “Pour.”

    So I poured.

    The first pot: fasolada

    Greek white bean soup, the first recipe in the book. Serves 6. Prep 20 minutes, plus an overnight soak; cook 90 minutes. Olive oil goes in at the start and again at the end. Not a drizzle. A pour.

    Ingredients

    • 400 g (2 cups) dried white beans: cannellini, Great Northern, navy (UK: haricot), or Greek medium white beans
    • 160 ml (⅔ cup) extra virgin olive oil, divided, plus more to serve
    • 1 large yellow onion (about 225 g/8 oz), finely chopped
    • 2 medium carrots (about 170 g/6 oz), sliced into 6 mm (¼-inch) rounds
    • 2 celery stalks with their leaves (about 115 g/4 oz); slice the stalks and chop the leaves separately
    • 2 garlic cloves, sliced (optional)
    • 1 bay leaf
    • 2 liters (8½ cups) water
    • 2 tbsp tomato paste
    • 240 ml (1 cup) grated fresh tomato or canned crushed tomatoes
    • 2 tsp fine sea salt, or to taste
    • Freshly ground black pepper
    • ½ tsp dried chili flakes or Aleppo pepper (optional)
    • 15 g (¼ cup) chopped flat-leaf parsley
    • To serve: lemon wedges, olives, bread, thinly sliced raw onion, and crumbled feta (optional; leave it out on fasting days)

    Method

    1. Put the beans in a large bowl, cover with plenty of cold water, and soak overnight. Drain.
    2. Transfer the beans to a large pot (at least 5 liters/5 quarts), cover with fresh water by 5 cm (2 in), and bring to a boil. Boil hard for 10 minutes, skimming off the foam, then drain.
    3. Return the beans to the pot with the onion, carrots, celery stalks, garlic (if using), bay leaf, and 60 ml (¼ cup) of the olive oil. Add 2 liters (8½ cups) of water and bring to a gentle simmer.
    4. Simmer, partially covered, stirring occasionally, for 45–60 minutes, until the beans are just tender. Do not add the tomato or salt before this point.
    5. Stir in the tomato paste, grated tomato, salt, a few grinds of pepper, and the chili, if using. Simmer uncovered, stirring now and then, for 20–30 minutes more, until the beans are creamy, some have started to split, and the broth has thickened slightly. For a thicker soup, mash a ladleful of beans against the side of the pot and stir them back in. If it gets too thick, add a little hot water.
    6. Remove the pot from the heat. Discard the bay leaf. Stir in the remaining olive oil (100 ml, a scant ½ cup), the parsley, and the celery leaves. Taste and adjust the salt. Let rest for 10 minutes.
    7. Serve hot or warm, with lemon wedges for squeezing, olives, bread, and raw onion, plus feta if you're not fasting. Put the olive oil bottle on the table.

    The book has the canned-bean shortcut, the City Kitchen note, and sixty more recipes.

    The fine print

    Leo Novak is a pen name, and the narrator of Out of Office is a semi-fictional version of me: some people and scenes are composites or invented. The history, the science, and the recipes are real, and every fact is sourced in the book. This is my own book, so treat this page as the author talking, not a review. More about me on the author page, and the rest of the shelf is on Books.