Cotton - Happy Vegan

I have been a bit nervous to write this introduction. Food is such a personal matter and I know it can cause rifts, judgement and sometimes even emphatic disagreement! But Im going to put that mixing bowl of worries to one side so I can make this book a pure celebration of food. A missive of love, adoration and huge appreciation. A love song to all the combinations and concoctions that fill me with energy and joy.

After all, I can only tell you my truth and share with you my preferences, which in turn I hope youll enjoy and perhaps be inspired by. As the title of this book might have given away, I have found a balanced way of eating that works for me and my lifestyle, and much of this involves cooking and eating vegan. I adore the vibrancy and versatility of vegan food and have loved learning and experimenting over the years with the plethora of ways in which you can create such alchemy without going anywhere near an egg. Cooking like this has given me energy, opened up my eyes to the versatility of vegetables, fruits and legumes, and has led me to research the many ways in which eating vegan can help the planet too. This book is a collection of those recipes that I love cooking for friends, eating with family and snacking on continuously in between.

As many of you might know, I have a beautifully hectic family life with two small children, sometimes two teenage children and always one very hungry husband. So these recipes are family-friendly, easy to bung together, filling to the max and made with ingredients you can bag in your local supermarket. Were not fancy in the CottonWood household, but we do bloody love good food.

Heres the disclaimer bit: whilst this book is 100 per cent vegan, Im not. I am perhaps 90 per cent as I bake with eggs quite frequently, eat the odd omelette and occasionally devour chunks of cheese. My food story begins when I, aged 12, sat watching a Newsroundreport on live animal transportation. Being a pretty strong-willed almost-teen, I encouraged my mum to ditch the meat too and overnight we cruised into vegetarianism. Bear in mind this was the early nineties when there was little in the way of encouragement or supermarket convenience to live in like this. There were a lot of Margherita pizzas for dinner and jacket potatoes for lunch and trips to friends houses after school where parents would look exasperated as they scanned their freezers of chicken nuggets and fish fingers. Tofu was yet to shine in the mainstream spotlight and Im pretty sure if I had heard the word batted about back then I would have assumed it was a breed of small dog.

At 21, I was in the thick of a very high-octane and exciting part of my career where I would often find myself sat in a diner in mid-America whilst filming or living off trays of sandwiches on set late at night. I was tired and finding my vegetarian lifestyle was still not as widespread or as accepted as I had hoped. I started to introduce just a little fish into my diet to help widen my options for much-needed protein, although I felt some real guilt around this switch-up.

More recently I have once again gone back to being a straight-up vegetarian mainly because our seas are being so overfished. But I still cook with meat, fish, dairy and eggs for my children as I want them to make that decision for themselves later down the line, and I also have a very fussy red-headed three-year-old mega babe whose intake of food I really cant afford to limit at this point in time. So while I might cook vegan for me and Jesse a lot of the time, I still cook classic non-vegan family favourites for my kids and stepchildren. Im yet to convince my 17-year-old stepson to get on board with tofu (Ill get there one day!)

I guess the reason Im confessing all this is that I want to say I believe its okay to eat vegan all of the time, most of the time, some of the time whatever! Its a lifestyle choice after all. I am not perfect and am certainly not writing this book to be preachy or pushy with food. I simply want to celebrate the vegan recipes that I so love cooking and certainly adore eating, and I personally believe there are some real benefits to eating this way.

Its also a great time to be giving it a go. Unlike when I went veggie in the nineties, veganism is now so popular that restaurants, takeaway places and supermarkets give us many more options, and whilst some of the posher ingredients have a price tag, for the most part its a cheaper way of eating (considering meat, fish and cheese are some of the most expensive ingredients you can put in your trolley).

If youre a little worried that you wont consume enough protein or iron in your diet by making a fully vegan switch-up youre in good company! Ive always been very aware of this so I have been extremely conscious of including recipes in this book that cover all of our nutritional needs. Recipes packed with the above, plus colour and vitamins and tons of fibre. Meals that will see you pumped with energy and ready for whatever craziness the day throws your way. Eating vegan isnt about cutting loads of stuff out from your diet in fact I really hope this book introduces some new store cupboard essentials to your life.