What kind of cookbook is Your Daily Veg

Joe Woodhouse became a vegetarian at 10 years old. Since he didn’t want to bother his parents with this choice, he taught himself how to cook the vegetable dishes he craved. In this cookbook – his first – he shares all his knowledge and experience to create wonderful satisfying vegetable dishes for us.

The vegetables really take centre stage in each recipe. It’s not a collection of vegetarian pasta dishes or vegetarian taco recipes. No, the vegetable IS the dish. But each time cooked, baked, grilled, or roasted in a different way. Combined with a great variation of surprising flavours and supporting ingredients as beans or cheese. 

Recipes in Your Daily Veg

There are 9 chapters that each focus on a different vegetable or set of vegetables grouped together. Such as Potatoes, carrots and beetroots. Or Aubergine and peppers. And Onions and leeks. There’s something there for all seasons, both warm and cold. There’s salads, soups, stews, sauces and sides. 

Most of the recipes are not complete main courses I would say. So you can use this book as inspiration for side dishes. Or of course: combine different vegetable recipes to create a multi course dinner. 

Difficulty of Your Daily Veg

As I said: the recipes are truly very accessible and no fuss. Joe doesn’t use a lot of difficult techniques and most ingredient lists are nice and short. Which is quite amazing, because despite the simplicity, the food in this book all tastes very rich and flavourful!

The book does feature some more special and showstopper dishes, such as the Beetroot terrine with wholegrain mustard cream, the Flame roasted jalapenos stuffed with ricotta and the Pancakes stuffed with creamy mushrooms.

What I cooked so far

Roast butternut squash, tahini, pickled red onion & mint

We ate this wonderful dish as part of a vegetable dinner. The warm and sweet flavour of the pumpkin is really lifted by the pickled red onion and lemony tahini. Equally beautiful and delicious.

Broccoli and barley with blue cheese

This is a risotto style recipe, but made with grains instead of rice. We used farro for this, and goats cheese instead of blue cheese (because that’s what we had in the fridge). You start with an onion and leek base, stir in the grains and add white wine – similar to making risotto. But then you add all the stock at once. You cook the broccoli in a different pan and bring it all together at the end with the cheese and some lemon juice. Very easy to prepare and it has a wonderfully nutty flavour.

Sweet potato salad with herbs and pink peppercorns

This was the first recipe I cooked from this book and what a gorgeous start it was! The sweet potatoes are just roasted in the oven, but the addition of fresh herbs, sumac, garlic yoghurt and pink peppercorns makes this sometimes ‘mushy’ vegetable sing!

Green beans with shallot, garlic cream and breadcrumbs

This is so delicious! There’s something about shallots, garlic, mustard and cream that you just want to lick your plate clean! Combined with the crispy bread crumbs, it’s a way of preparing green beans that totally elevates this (in my opinion slightly boring🙈) vegetable.

Miso aubergines

Loved them. You make a lovely marinade for the aubergines, by mixing miso, rice wine vinegar, miso, ginger and garlic. Then you pop them into the oven and sprinkle them with sesame seeds, chives and chillies. A really great Asian take on one of my favourite vegetables.

Conclusion

If you want to bring fresh variation to your vegetable game: I really recommend this cookbook. And good to know: it also has a sequel, More Daily Veg.

Other sources of information

• Joe Woodhouse on Instagram and on his website
• Wonderful podcast interview with Gilly Smith from Cooking the books 
• Watch this conversation between Joe Woodhouse and fellow cookbook-author Anna Jones on YouTube