🌱 Vegan Recipes — No Meat or Animal Products
Discover delicious vegan recipes with no meat or animal products. Complete meals, cocktails, and sauces made with only plant-based ingredients.
Espinacas con Garbanzos
Seville's spinach and chickpea stew, Moorish in its roots and eaten through Lent in every tapas bar — the sauce is thickened with bread fried in olive oil and pounded with garlic, cumin, smoked paprika and sherry vinegar.
Pan con Tomate
Catalonia's pa amb tomàquet — toasted bread rubbed with garlic and the cut half of a ripe tomato until the pulp soaks in, finished with olive oil and salt; breakfast and tapa all over Spain.
Caponata
Sicily's sweet-and-sour aubergine stew — fried aubergine with celery, onion, tomato, capers and green olives, sharpened with vinegar and sugar; better the next day and served at room temperature.
Bulgarian Sauerkraut Soup
A Lenten Bulgarian winter soup of home-fermented sauerkraut fried in oil with paprika and simmered with rice, then soured to taste with the cabbage brine — sharp, warming and made straight from the barrel.
Onion Bhaji
Crisp, lacy fritters of sliced onion bound in a spiced gram-flour batter: a rainy-season snack from western India and a fixture of every British curry house, best eaten straight from the oil.
Vegetable Samosas
India's best-known street snack: crisp, blistered pastry folded into cones around spiced potato and peas, fried slowly so the crust stays flaky, and eaten hot with tamarind chutney.
Pimientos de Padrón
The Galician tapa of small green peppers blistered in hot olive oil and showered with flaky salt — most are mild and sweet, but every so often one is fiercely hot.
Homemade Lemonade
Old-fashioned still lemonade — lemon zest muddled with sugar to release its oil, steeped in hot water and finished with fresh juice and cold water, so it tastes of the whole fruit rather than just its sourness.
Elderflower Cordial (Sirop ot Baz)
Elderflower heads steeped for two days in sugar syrup with lemon — the cordial Bulgarian grandmothers make in late May, diluted with cold water as the first soft drink of summer.
Sour Cherry Compote (Kompot ot Vishni)
The Bulgarian summer drink in a jar — whole sour cherries in a light syrup, sealed in June and opened in winter, drunk chilled with the fruit spooned from the glass.
Avocado Toast
The café breakfast that went round the world from Sydney and California — ripe avocado crushed with lime, salt and chilli on thick, well-toasted sourdough, finished with olive oil, radish and seeds.
Homemade Granola
Crunchy clusters of oats, nuts and seeds baked slowly with maple syrup, oil and cinnamon until golden, then mixed with dried fruit — a breakfast that keeps in a jar for weeks.
Roasted Chestnuts
The smell of Bulgarian winter streets — sweet chestnuts scored, roasted until the shells curl open and eaten hot from a paper cone. Five minutes wrapped in a towel after roasting loosens the bitter inner skin so it peels away with the shell.
Roasted Sweet Potato Soup
A thick, sunset-orange soup of sweet potatoes roasted with red onion, garlic, cumin and smoked paprika, then blended smooth and sharpened with lime — roasting gives it a caramel depth that boiling can't.
Green Fig Preserve (Sladko ot Smokini)
Bulgaria's spoon sweet of small green figs — blanched twice to draw out their bitter milk, then simmered in syrup with lemon until glassy and whole, and served by the spoonful with a glass of cold water.
Rose Petal Preserve (Sladko ot Rozi)
The preserve of Bulgaria's Rose Valley — petals of the oil-bearing Damask rose rubbed with sugar and lemon and cooked into a fragrant ruby syrup, made in late May when the roses are picked at dawn.
Homemade Wholegrain Mustard
Yellow and brown mustard seeds soaked for two days in cider vinegar and water, then half-ground with salt, sugar and turmeric — a coarse, sharp mustard that mellows over a week in the fridge.
Bulgarian Plum Jam (Marmalad ot Slivi)
The Bulgarian autumn plum jam — ripe blue plums cooked down for hours with little sugar into a thick, dark spread that won't run off the spoon, used to fill pastries and spread on bread all winter.
Berry Coulis
A bright, pourable sauce of mixed berries cooked briefly with sugar and lemon and pushed through a sieve — the partner of cheesecake, panna cotta and ice cream, made from frozen fruit in winter.
Seville Orange Marmalade
The British breakfast preserve — whole bitter Seville oranges simmered soft, shredded and boiled with sugar to a set, the pips' pectin doing the work. January, when the bitter oranges arrive, is its only season.
Tavče Gravče (Macedonian Baked Beans)
North Macedonia's national dish — large white beans baked in a clay dish with onion, dried red peppers, paprika and mint until a crust forms on top. Made without meat for Christmas Eve, this version is lenten.
Manakish Za'atar (Lebanese Za'atar Flatbread)
Lebanon's breakfast from the neighbourhood bakery — soft yeast flatbreads spread with za'atar mixed into olive oil and baked hot, then folded around tomato, cucumber and mint.
Aloo Gobi
Potatoes and cauliflower cooked almost dry with turmeric, cumin, ginger and green chilli until tender and browned at the edges: an everyday North Indian vegetable dish, eaten with flatbread or as a side to dal.
Chana Masala
The Punjabi chickpea curry eaten across North India, from street stalls to home kitchens: chickpeas simmered in a tangy onion and tomato masala with ginger, green chilli and warm spices, finished with lemon and coriander.