A kitchen notebook for people who read the label before the menu.

This is a collection of plant-based recipes, written for people who need to know exactly what is in their food before they cook it.

Why this exists

Most vegan recipe sites assume everyone is cooking plant-based for the same reason. In practice the people reading this are a mix. Some have a dairy or soy allergy and no choice in the matter. Some are cutting animal products for ethical or environmental reasons. And plenty are not vegan themselves at all, but are cooking for someone they love who is, which often makes them the most careful label-reader in the house. The food does not need to be different for any of those groups, but the labelling does. That is the whole idea here. Every recipe declares what it contains, so you can screen out what you or the person you are cooking for cannot eat, without reading a method twice to hunt for hidden ingredients.

What the recipes are

Vegan food is not a salad, and it is not a watered-down version of a real dish. A dal cooked properly, a fermented dosa, a mushroom risotto finished with good olive oil instead of butter. None of those are missing anything. The recipes here are the kind you would make on an ordinary weeknight, written out in enough detail that they work the first time rather than the third.

The cooking leans towards what is close at hand. The site is run from India, so a good deal of the collection is Indian, which is the food I know best. The rest ranges across the cuisines that happen to be naturally friendly to plant-based cooking, from Middle Eastern mezze to Thai curries to Italian pasta.

How recipes get checked

Every recipe is screened for animal-derived ingredients before it is published, including the ones readers submit, and then reviewed by hand. Allergens are recorded against each recipe based on its actual ingredients, with a notes field for the cases that need a word of caution, such as shared equipment or an ingredient that some people react to even when it is not one of the five we formally track. If something here is wrong, I would rather hear about it and fix it than leave it standing.

Submit something

If you cook something worth sharing, send it in. Recipes go in with their ingredients, method, cookware and allergen information, and join the collection once they have been reviewed.