The Plant-Based 5-Ingredient Cookbook
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!
The Plant-Based 5-Ingredient Cookbook is packed with easy recipes that only need 5 ingredients, that cut down on food waste and are super-affordable. Most of these recipes are Italian-based with fresh vegetables and natural foods like lentils (there are no ‘fake meats’). There are also a few Asian dishes, but no desserts.
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).
Base your meals around core ingredients like pasta, beans, legumes, mushrooms or squash. Each recipe has a beautiful colour photo. This is a real find! Recipes include:
- Pasta with Basil Cream.
- Sun-Dried Tomato Pasta with Corn
- Ravioli in Ginger-Fennel Broth
- Thai Basil Chickpea Salad
- Creamy Dijon Chickpeas & Mushrooms
- Saffron Butternut Squash Lentil Bowl
- White Acorn Squash in Charred Fennel-Tomato Broth
- Tahini-Miso Shiitake Broth
- Mango Cauliflower Curry
As an example of how easy and tasty these recipes are, the first recipe (sun-dried tomato pasta with corn) uses oil from a jar of sun-dried tomatoes for double-tomato flavour and fresh veggies (corn, cherry tomatoes and fresh basil). Pasta is obviously the main ingredient, then flavours are lifted with salt, pepper and oil.
Once made, you’ll never go back to a jar of watery Dolmio sauce.
This recipe for roasted gnocchi & onions (Exploring Vegan) is on the author’s recipe blog. It makes use of ready-made gnocchi (potato pasta) that only takes 3 minutes to cook (when gnocchi rise to the top of the pan in boiling water.
But to make things tastier, this recipe bakes the gnocchi (Italian for ‘knuckles!) in a pre-heated oven, drizzled with oil, salt and pepper. Then combined with with a sauce made from cherry tomatoes, veggie stock, caramelised roasted shallots, crushed red pepper flakes and capers. And served with wilted greens.
About the Author
Kylie Perrotti was a ‘meat and potatoes’ girl, until she wrote a plant-based cookbook. Originally a challenge, she was so in love with the recipes created that she now eats them most of the time. She posts more 5-ingredient recipes at her blog Exploring Vegan.
