Sparks and Squeaks - Our favourite vegan cookbooks
Our favourite plant based cook books
A kindle is great for reading, but there's nothing like working through a great recipe from a cookbook that's balanced on your worktop, with dogeared corners and ingredients stains on your favourite pages. Plus they make a great gift because you can never have too many vegan cookbooks!
I love to cook vegan dinners from scratch and try to avoid too many processed meat alternatives, but I don't always have a lot of time. And like many of us, I struggled to master the art of cooking tofu without some help. So I'll share some of my favourite plant based recipe books which can make life easier, and maybe a bit tastier too.
Some of these recipe books we use on weekends or holidays - because they're recipes that you can take your time over, perhaps with a glass of wine or juice, with some music playing or your latest audible book. But some of our favourite recipes are those that are quick and easy enough to cook after work when we're hungry and tired.
'BOSH! Simple recipes, amazing food, all plants' by Henry Firth and Ian Theasby, is an all time favourite of ours you can buy it here from Amazon. Its from way back in 2018, but has some recipes we still use fairly regularly. And the boys from BOSH! have been such an inspiration to us and to so many vegans, we couldn't possibly leave them off our list. Some of the recipes are more of a faff than they describe in the book (better cooks than me may feel differently!) so we tend to use it when we have plenty of time and we've checked we have all the ingredients in advance, as they can throw in some curve balls.
Another favourite is 'Ooh, that's vegan' from Maya Leinenbach. Nearly every vegan I know follows Maya's fabulous fitgreenmind Instagram account. She makes tasty and different recipes, that are often quick and easy enough for someone with limited skills like me, and often the ingredients are ones I already have in the cupboard. She even has some great ideas for tasty tofu. You can buy it here from Amazon.
And who doesn't love homemade soup! At the Sparks and Squeaks HQ we have soup for lunch almost every day when it's cold outside. As we're based in Scotland that can mean autumn, winter and spring - and sometimes in summer too. We like Superfood Soups: 100 Delicious, Energizing & Plant-based Recipes' by Julie Morris, that you can buy from Amazon here. (Incidentally she also has Superfood smoothies and Superfood Juices!) It brings some new ideas which helps me switch up my soup game - at Sparks and Squeaks HQ our go-to soup is a fairly standard lentil, so this book really helps push us out of our soup comfort zone! The pictures in this book are so good, they make all the soups look delicious too.
Published 2 January 2025
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