Labours of Love: How to cook vegetarian food well

"What on earth do you eat if you don’t eat meat, fish, eggs, or processed food?” is the question I’m most often asked. This book, with over 750 recipes, is my lifetime’s experience; it's what and how we cook and eat at home daily. There is a huge range of regional dishes and ways of cooking rooted in tradition which coalesce into a repertoire to feed both the body and the senses with satisfying nutrition. Labours of Love is unillustrated. Please enjoy the videos on YouTube @laboursoflove Labours of Love is divided into breakfast, savoury, soup, salad, desserts, tea time, and drinks. Woven in is how to bake lots of different bread and many different ways to make pasta, rice, and other staple building blocks of a good diet. It guides you how to cook well from first principles and will inspire you to put in the time and effort to do so. Today for breakfast we had yoghurt, tsampa - barley porridge favoured by the Dalai Lama, amasake - sweet fermented rice, bread, chocolate spread, and coffee. For lunch we had aubergines in a miso and tahini sauce with quinoa, a birthday cake made with cream mousse, a light sponge, and slow baked apricots. For supper we are having red pepper soup, freshly baked bread with durum wheat, and sesame blancmange with shortcake biscuits. Yesterday, for breakfast we had waffles and tea; for lunch we made tamales with homemade cheese and pickle, and ended with an oozing dark chocolate pudding; for supper we had silken tofu, and clafoutis for dessert. For tomorrow I’m preparing idlis - steamed rice and urad dal dumplings - and fennel vichyssoise, fruit cordial, and mizu yokan - a chilled Japanese dessert made with aduki beans. You can probably also smell the plums we picked a few days ago slowly being transformed into jam. That’s chickpeas soaking on the side because I’m planning on baking, making a dessert, and cooking quadrucci e ceci, an Italian pasta dish. In the depths of winter Yorkshire pudding and a sweet and sour tagine are as likely to be perfuming the kitchen as leek and rosemary tart and sticky toffee pudding, toasted tea cakes, persimmon cake, and mostaccioli. Most months have a festivity - Christmas, Easter, Diwali, harvest festival - and we celebrate those in style too: panettone, mince pies, halwa, moon cakes. The greatest compliment is the food being memorable not for what it is perceived to be missing, but the impact it has on all levels. You too can make all of these. ...It's the last days of a long Indian summer. Yesterday I found three baskets of freshly picked grapes by the gate, no doubt a gift from the local vineyard owner. I juiced them and bottled them ready for the winter as drinks, puddings, and biscuits. I'm making a chocolate pudding with what's left, for sure he'll stop by for a coffee later served with this traditional harvest treat. A large pumpkin is roasting. This week we'll have it in risotto, ravioli, pie, and bread rolls. It's too early for chestnuts, but when they arrive, they will be used to stuff a small pumpkin and a rolled up dessert. ... For All Saints' Day I've made cassoni alle erbe - leafy green parcels - and pumpkin and red lentil soup, and baked pears with chocolate dipping sauce. Today is the day to bake piadi dei morti, an Italian regional speciality made with chestnut honey, dried fruit, and walnuts whose origins are lost in time. There's a reason it's been made every year since time immemorial: these traditional cakes have to nourish all souls, and sweeten the sadness of loss.