The Little Book of Vegan Student Food is not just for students, but for anyone on a budget, and those of us who prefer simple affordable recipes over big coffee-table books of recipes that often are too complicated or time-consuming or expensive to make. You won’t find pictures of authors in their luxury kitchens in this book, just simple recipes made with simple ingredients (beans!) that you could start making this evening.
Before cooking, read up on keeping people & pets safe in the kitchen.
This pocket-size guide is handy to take with you to university or on holiday and is packed with nutritionally-sound plant-based meal that are tasty and easy-to-make. Spice up your student suppers with recipes easy enough to make on a hot-plate. From comfort food to study snacks and batch bakes, there are also drinks recipes and gourmet dishes, for when you have company.
For example, the recipe for nachos just needs a can of beans and tortilla wraps, a tomato and onion, olive oil, a little vegan yoghurt and grated ‘cheese’, along with paprika, salt and pepper. And a squeeze of lemon. The recipe is simple to fit on one page. And once made, this can become a ‘staple’ for Mexican night in your student digs!
Learning to cook your own healthy affordable and sustainable food is one of the most empowering things you can do. So even if you have to shop at a budget supermarket due to lack of proper local farm shops, you can just buy basics (vegetables, beans, nuts, fruits) to make meals on a budget, and not give profits to the cheap ready-made meal industry.
sample recipes
Mid-Week Mac is a filling one-pot meal, all you need are a few affordable ingredients. While your pasta is cooking, you simply make a roux with plant-based butter (Flora is free from palm oil), mustard and the dry ingredients (onion and garlic powder and cheesy-tasting nutritional yeast, which is rich in vitamin B12) Then add the flour to make a thick sauce, cook up and add your tomatoes and sweetcorn at the end.
Simple Soup makes a nice garlic onion stock in broth, then just add a baked peeled pumpkin, cool and freeze into portions, then season with salt and pepper to taste on reheating.
There are around 88 million vegans in the world today. And 50% of students say they eat plant-based most or all of the time. The good news is that vegan food doesn’t have to be pricey or complicated. And the really good news? You’ll never have to learn how to boil an egg. If you’ve cooked a meal, you can store leftovers in the fridge for up to 2 days, or in the freezer for 3 months (write the date it was cooked on the lid). Defrost everything thoroughly overnight in the fridge, and don’t refreeze or reheat more than once.
Make you have at least one big frying pan and one big saucepan, plus a wooden spoon, a mixing bowl and baking tray. If you can afford a good set of cup and spoon measures, great. If not, a standard mug filled three-quarters of the way is around 250ml of liquid, while a level-ish spoon is about the same as an official measure.
