A Vegan Guide to Local Sustainable Eating
Learning to cook your own food is empowering, as you no longer have to rely on expensive plastic-wrapped ready-meals and takeaways. Master your favourite cuisines at home. Then every night is restaurant night!
Ripe From Around Here is a corker of a book (the debut book Get It Ripe is also excellent). The book is almost 15 years old but never dates, because it’s all about local sustainable eating (the intro is worth the price of the book alone) followed by oodles of amazing recipes and meal plans.
Before cooking, read up on food safety for people and pets (many ingredients are unsafe near animal friends). Bin allium scraps (onion, garlic, leeks, shallots, chives) as acids may harm compost creatures (same with tomato/citrus/rhubarb scraps).
If growing food, read our posts on pet-friendly gardens and wildlife-friendly gardens. Avoid facing indoor plants to outdoor gardens, to help stop birds flying into windows.
What Foods to Eat (and when?)
- Spring – asparagus, spinach, peas, radishes, rocket, kale
- Summer – tomatoes, sweetcorn, strawberries, courgettes, peppers
- Autumn – carrots, apples, pumpkins, parsnips, squash
- Winter – collards, squash, kale
Arguably, the best recipe books are those that use local natural and seasonal produce. Not only better for the planet with less food miles and less packaging, but the ingredients are easy to find, and more affordable.
Jae has since given up writing cookbooks, but these two books are her legacy, and worth reading and cooking from. A woman ahead of her time, she was writing about all the things we’re now discussing (food waste, organic food, community supported agriculture) over a decade ago.
Recipes include:
- Mushroom Asparagus Risotto
- Wild Rice with Wild Leeks
- Roasted Fiddleheads with Garlic
- Pear Parsnip Soup
- Strawberry Shortcake
- Plum Upside-Down Cake
- Blackberry Peach Cobbler
- Sweet Cherry Pie
- Lavender Blueberry Ice-Cream
- Ginger Peach Ice-Cream
About the Author
Jae Steele trained as a vegan baker, became an expert on organic community lifestyles, wrote best-selling cookbooks, and now has ‘changed hats’ to become a midwife and now a psychotherapist. Obviously a woman of many talents!
