5-Ingredient Plant-Based Recipe Books

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!

Five Ingredient Vegan is just one of fab short-time cookbooks by Yorkshire’s Katy Beskow. As well as only having a few ingredients, most meals are ready in 15 minutes or less. The 100 recipes all include simple affordable lists and a sweet little tip for each one.

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).

Recipes include:

• Carrot Cake Porridge
• No-Fish Fishcakes (above)
• Spiced Parsnip Bisque
• Country Lentil Pottage
• Cauliflower ‘Cheese’ Soup
• Pantry Minestrone
• Spinach Pancakes
• Zesty Bread & Butter Pudding

I’m a firm believer that a few, simple good quality ingredients can make the most satisfying of home-cooked meals.

Buy the best that you can afford, particularly fresh ingredients such as vegetables, fruits and bread, and aim to buy ingredients in season for maximum flavour.

Katy Beskow grew up in Yorkshire, and learned to cook while studying physiotherapy in London (inspired by the markets of fresh produce, while having to eat on a budget).

Returning to her home county, her blog led to a cookbook deal which led to another, and now Katy has many top-selling vegan cookbooks under her belt.

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.

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

Pea & Potato Risotto

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.

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.

So Vegan in 5 (a bumper book of simple recipes)

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!

So Vegan is a big pink bumper book of recipes, all with gorgeous colour photos. You’ll never run out of ideas in this book by popular London chefs Roxy and Ben.

Recipes include:

• Super-green kale linguine 
• Deep-Pan Pizza
• Banana Flapacks
• Coconut Chocolate Bars