IF THE growing interest around Veganuary has given you a taste for trying vegan dishes, then a Woking-born food blogger’s cookbook could be the recipe for a new lifestyle.
Aimee Ryan, who grew up in the Knaphill/Goldsworth Park area and later moved to the town centre with her family, wrote Great British Vegan after an agent spotted her blog, which at one stage had one million views a month.
The book has more than 80 recipes for traditional British food such as cooked breakfasts, Sunday roasts and sticky toffee pudding. It has been highly rated in lists of cookbooks and featured on Sunday Brunch on Channel 4 where the chef Rick Stein called it “very approachable” and a good way in for people not familiar with vegan cooking.
It has also been praised by food writers in The Daily Telegraph and The Independent.
Aimee told the News & Mail that she has tried to make the recipes accessible for anyone with ingredients they can buy at their local supermarkets.
She became a blogger about seven years ago when she had a long illness and had to give up work.
Her blog is called Wallflower Kitchen and grew out of a sense of wanting to do something while recuperating.
Around the same time she became a vegan, partly as a wish to live more ethically and also to improve her health.
“I thought I’d try it for a month and found it so easy,” Aimee said.
“That was years ago and it is really dead easy now. I felt better in myself and saw no reason to go back.”
Aimee’s blog and passion for vegan food blossomed with hundreds of thousands of viewers.
The book took about two years to put together with Aimee having to try out each recipe and tasting the results.
“I didn’t realise how much work and pressure would be involved but it was very rewarding and I’ve had a lot of very good feedback,” she said.
Aimee said that when she has recovered from the effort involved in writing Great British Vegan, she might consider a follow-up.
For more information, visit http://wallflowerkitchen.com/great-british-vegan/.