Vegan Recipe Cookbook Celebrates 70 years of Vegan

Business, Lifestyle

Vegan Recipe Cookbook Celebrates 70 years of Vegan

London based health and nutrition consultancy Foods for Life celebrate 70 years since the word ‘vegan’ was first used by UK Vegan Society with ‘The Vegan Cookbook’ in paperback and Kindle format.

2014 is a year of anniversaries for executive development chef Tony Bishop-Weston at Foods for Life health and nutrition consultancy.

It’s 20 years since Tony first went vegan, wrote his first cookbook, ‘Rainbows and Wellies, The Taigh Na Mara Cookbook’ and won a string of awards at his Scottish Highland vegetarian guesthouse that specialised in gourmet Scottish farmhouse vegan cuisine.

It’s 10 years since Tony got married to leading London Nutritionist Yvonne Bishop-Weston, spearheaded the Vegan Society Diamond Jubilee celebrations as PR manager and helped Tim Barford of YAOH start The Bristol Vegan Festival (that grew into Vegfest UK with massive exhibitions in Brighton, Bristol and London Olympia) and changed the UK perception of veganism.

It’s 70 years this November since Donald Watson founded The Vegan Society at a club in London after taking the begining and end of the word vegetarian to make a new word, vegan.

Meanwhile google trends shows interest in a vegan lifestyle continues to grow worldwide with an impressive array of musicians, TV celebrities, politicians, physicians and hollywood filmstars no longer embarrassed to publically champion a vegan diet.

Perfect timing for The Vegan Cookbook by Hamlyn with over 80 deliciously ingenious groundbreaking healthy recipes.

Vegan Chef Tony Bishop-Weston admits the cookbook was a little ahead of it’s time 10 years ago. “We lived in London and Yvonne had worked in Health food retail before she had worked for Cranks and then become a Nutritionist. Ingredients that were easily available for us, many other people found strange. 10 years on the south American pseudo grain quinoa is easily available in every supermarket, even in ready cooked satchets like microwave rice. Agarve syrup is now a standard alternative for non vegan honey and even tamarind is easily available.

Also chefs such as Jamie Oliver have enthused people to get back into their kitchens and make food themselves instead of an over reliance on highly processed pre prepared chemical laden TV Dinners.”

The cookbook features many dairy free and egg free dishes such as vegan herb omelettes, vegan chocolate and walnut ice cream, black forest chocolate cake with a range of breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner party recipes. Many vegan cookbooks skipped the photography back then but this book set a new standard.

The best news is that despite inflation The Vegan Brunch Washington DC Cookbook is now on sale for less than half it’s original price at less than a fiver, with the new electronic Kindle version even less!

Behind the scenes Tony has been busy working with companies such as Plamil and their omega 3 sugar free chocolate, supporting Fry’s Foods increase availability of their award winning vegan beef and chicken alternatives, pioneering the world’s first vegan EPA DHA Omega 3 alternative to fish oil and helping Vegusto to market their award winning dairy free vegan cheese alternatives.

“There seems to be nothing you can’t get a vegan version of these days” says Tony “The world seems to be awash with vegan cupcakes, Vegfest UK festivals are a hedonistic frenzy of vegan cocolate eclairs and dairy free iced cream buns and chocolate bars. My passion is more one of not just trying to achieve the same intensity of enjoyment of food but to make it functionally healthier too. My next book ‘Plantarian – out of the box’ will be mainly raw food as raw food chefs are now ingeniously recreating everything without the need of a frying pan or oven gloves, that excites me”

The Vegan Cookbook – A5 Paperback £4.79 online