Recipe for Disaster — this vegan life

Still, parting with the old cookbooks felt hard because I’d be parting with memories. But now, I have two year’s worth of recipe books full of plant based recipes and two year’s worth of margin scribbles. And these scribbles are in books much more in keeping with new me.

Recently, I gave one of the old cookbooks to my friend Lucy. It was the Deliciously Ella cookbook which is actually plant based, but not to my liking, for I found the recipes frustrating. Lucy took the cookbook home then wrote to tell me how much she was enjoying my annotations. Her favourites were: “Shit!” and “Dad asked ‘is this a meal?’” It makes me smile to think that she might add her own notes too and I might have saved her from bothering to try something I have officially declared to be shit.

Perhaps it’s okay if my meaty, milky cookbooks are released back into the world via charity shops. My notes will be too. Perhaps they’ll help people avoid the shit recipes I wasted my time with. Maybe I’ll write a foreword in each book, lecturing the recipient on their lifestyle choices. Yes, that always goes down well, no doubt I’ll turn a few omnivores vegan via a passive aggressive Oxfam donation.

Enjoyed this? Try the sister piece, Recipe For Success!