Time to shake up your veg choices

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut with your vegetable choices – peas with everything, carrot sticks at every opportunity, avocado brunches on repeat.

But between New Year health kicks and talk of ‘veganuary’, you can be forgiven for finding the veg aisle a bit stressful. Take a little inspiration from these plant heavy cookbooks...

Vegan (ish) by Jack Monroe (£16.99, Bluebird)

Food writer and anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe has been prolific this year, releasing two cookbooks: first, the very clever Tin Can Cook, and the latest, Vegan(ish), featuring 100 plant-based recipes intent on helping you cut your food bills and your impact on the planet in one appetising swoop. The dishes are in Monroe’s typically straightforward style, and only use everyday ingredients you will helpfully find in almost any supermarket, meaning you won’t have to resort to tracking down, say, pickled walnuts, on the internet.

Five Ingredient Vegan by Katie Beskow (£20, Quadrille)

Often a veggie meal can look unfinished without a slab of meat on the side, or chefs overcompensate and require you to buy eight different root vegetables and 11 types of lettuce leaves, plus nuts, seeds and two kinds of dairy to load on top - and all that just for a sharing salad. In this book, recipe developer and writer Katie Beskow, pictured above, strips veg-heavy vegan meals back to just five manageable ingredients (plus a few basic store-cupboard items), so you can settle down with a bowl of smoky Boston beans or tomato fritters on a weeknight, and not feel overwhelmed.

The Vegetarian Cookbook by DK (£12.99, DK)

For beginner cooks, and those used to just treating all their veg in a single way (i.e. boiled and you’re done) this

50-recipe haul provides stepby-step instructions and new ways to treat classic veg drawer favourites. Turn cucumber into sushi bites and sweet potato into homemade falafel balls – your taste buds will appreciate it.

7 Day Vegan Challenge by Bettina Campolucci Bordi (£15, Hardie Grant)

Just because January has now also been rebranded as ‘veganuary’, doesn’t mean you have to unceremoniously ditch all animal-products entirely, and immediately. But if you are looking to transform your home into a safe space for vegans a night or two a week, vegan chef Bettina Campolucci Bordi’s latest offering - which shows how anyone, regardless of skill level or diet can be fully plantbased for seven days – could you get you off to a good start. Guaranteed you won’t miss beef when you’re slicing into one of her turmeric spiked cauliflower steaks, bejewelled with pomegranate seeds.

Simply Good For You by Amelia Freer (£22, Michael Joseph, available December 26)

Not wholly vegetarian or exclusively vegan, Simply Good For You is instead focused on nutritious fare, whatever your dietary requirements. Nutritional therapist Freer has also slotted in numerous kitchen hacks to help you and your family save time and costs when it comes to planning what to have for dinner. Her ‘bottom of the fridge’ vegetable stew will be a total crowd-pleaser.