David Flynn - The Veg Box: 10 Vegetables, 10 Ways

Photography by Maja Smend

Vegetables are extraordinary miracles. You sprinkle a few seeds and allow Mother Nature to do her thing with sunlight and water, roll on a few weeks, and you have food: delicious fresh produce cucumbers, tomatoes, pumpkins, kale, to name just a few. This book is a celebration of that miracle.

Growing up, we used to think of veg as boring and bland. When we changed to a plant-based diet twenty years ago it was like going through the keyhole into a whole new world, a world exploding with colour, abundant in flavour, succulent and sweet, tender and decadent. Veg have a language of sorts that we have decoded since our love affair began: how best to accentuate a certain vegs unique properties, how best to enhance its flavours, whether to steam, to bake, to grill, and what to season it with.

To say we are veg enthusiasts is an understatement. Veg has been our life for the last two decades, central to all that we have done. This book is a love letter to veg, our tribute to all the wonderful veg that have nourished us and satiated us over our lives. Whether you are newly interested in eating more veg or if you have had a lifelong affair with veg, this book has plenty in it for you.

Each of us has our favourite veg which we tend to gravitate towards many of us have emotional relationships with potatoes, and maybe you feel comforted by mushrooms or happiest cooking carrots. We all have our go-to veg, ones that we know a few ways to make shine, and us in turn. In this book, we have chosen 10 of our favourite veg that are also most common in the UK and Ireland, and we have put together 10 delicious recipes for each one, all using no more than 10 ingredients.

Having a veg shop has forced us to really push these 10 veg to their limits, as there are often surplus supplies or gluts of produce. We have explored most of the conceivable and delicious iterations of what you can do with these 10 veg in these chapters, doing our best to include a breakfast, lunch, dinner and sometimes, where possible, even a sweet option! But instead of organizing the chapters by mealtime, as most cookbooks usually do, we have organized them instead by veg, with a full chapter of recipes for each one.

So if you find yourself with too many leeks or are wondering what to do with a beetroot from your veg box, this book is for you. Or if you have three carrots at the bottom of the fridge and need some inspiration for what to do with them, well, we have 10 great recipes using only 10 ingredients for you to try, from carrot and maple granola, to carrot and sesame burgers, to easy carrot cake cupcakes we have you covered!

We all know that in order to eat well we should eat more veg and less processed, calorific food, but its not always that easy. We know just how hard it can be to find inspiration to cook when youre faced with those three carrots at the bottom of the fridge. So we want this book to make eating healthy, mood-boosting veg easier, tastier and more inspiring than ever before. We have designed each chapter to show you new ways to cook these 10 incredible veg and to share ideas for how you can eat better food, both for your body and the planet. We hope they bring joy to your kitchen and change your relationship with veg for ever.

We love fresh veg. For the first five years after we set up The Happy Pear, we got up at 4.30 every morning to drive into the Dublin fruit market in Smithfield in our little red van to pick our produce for the days trading ahead. We remember hunting around the market for the freshest cauliflowers, and our excitement when the first of the Irish strawberries would come in. It was a world of its own, a secret society of early-morning veg enthusiasts.

Dublin fruit market was a bustling, vibrant place back then, overflowing with action and life, with farmers delivering freshly picked produce to wholesalers, chefs and shopkeepers like ourselves, who were in search of the freshest veg and the best bargains. It was here that our love of veg was nurtured into the passion that we hold now. Seeing the fresh produce arriving from the surrounding countryside each morning made us feel so connected to the world around us and put us at the heart of something special.

Unfortunately, the market has pretty much closed down over a number of years, as our food system has fewer small independent shops and has become centralized around supermarkets and monopolies controlling the flow of our food. The problem with buying fruit and veg in supermarkets is that we have lost touch with that sense of what is fresh, seasonal, and what is local. We take it for granted that we can buy raspberries, tomatoes, swedes and pumpkins all year round, but they are being shipped from all over the world to supply that demand. The excitement for the taste of the first summer strawberries, or that autumnal hearty stew with the flavours from fresh root veg, has been lost as a result of convenience.

Whether you decide to sign up for a veg box and have a random selection of local, seasonal fresh veg delivered to your door, or simply select your shopping in the supermarket more consciously, we hope that the variety of veg in this book and the advice on when its in season will help you connect again to the growers of this food and where it comes from, and bring an added appreciation to how you shop and eat it, all year round.

As fathers, we are worried. We worry that unless we start to address our current environmental crisis, to become more sustainable in our food choices, it is just a matter of time until the climate and soil change to such a degree that our children and future generations may not be able to grow food on this planet. According to landmark research from Oxford University, eating a plant-based or plant-centred diet is the single biggest thing you can do for the planet in terms of helping to reverse climate change. Better still, the more we shop locally for that veg and support smaller producers who grow diverse veg and care properly for their soil, the more sustainable the food system becomes.

Climate change can often feel like that overwhelming job that has been on your list for weeks you know when there is that one thing that you just dont want to face and cant even imagine how you are going to start it, and you would much rather turn your back and hope it sorts itself? We think climate change and the current state of the environment are like that its a bit like the gorilla in the middle of the room that you have just got used to living with and working around. However, we are at a tipping point right now, and it is time to face the music and start to dance. The gorilla you have been ignoring is not happy and is crying for your attention.

But it doesnt need to feel so intimidating how you eat is the single most important thing you can do to slow climate change. You dont have to throw everything away and transform overnight; eating more veg and less meat or fewer processed foods is a simple choice you can make every day you just need to know how to cook it in a tasty and easy way that works for you.