Welcome to Spinach & Chips! My name is Karl and I want to (hopefully) show that vegan cooking isn't the arse of the culinary world that many seem to think it is. Thankfully there are many fantastic vegan food blogs out there that dismiss this notion and I want to join the party. I write this blog, and while I'm generally the main cooking person in the house, my girlfriend, Cathy, helps out a lot, especially when baking.
I'm not fully vegan myself; I've been fully vegetarian since late 2009, around the same time Cathy became vegan. It started with some idle chat with a friend of a friend and she decided to try out vegan month. I didn't think she would carry it on but it stuck. I'd never considered myself much of a cook and now I was in a world of tofu and quinoa!? From that point, everything we've made has been vegan, with my weakness being the occasional pack of biscuits.
We live in Cornwall, England, having moved from London in 2007. It seems that the majority of vegan food blogs are based in the US, so I'm hoping to provide a resource for the UK community. I'm sure there are others about that I just don't know about and I'm hoping to meet you along the way!
As I mentioned, we never cooked much previously, preferring to make pasta most of the time and heavily relying on the microwave. Neither of us had peeled an onion before and I hated most vegetables growing up, but after a year of making one pot bean/tomato/potato stews and simple soups we slowly realised that there was more to vegetables than boiling the life out of them. Butternut squash was a revelation to me; I'd only seen the word on a can of soup before and I remember thinking that it was the most ridiculously named soup I'd ever seen. Then there was the challenge of peeling one (I don't recommend trying to peel it like a potato!) but it tasted incredible! It was a similar story with sweet potatoes (a sweet potato!?).
To cut a long story short, our cooking skills have come on a long way, but we're not masterchefs by any stretch of the imagination. I hope that the recipes we put on here will provide inspiration to those who don't feel so confident in the kitchen, or don't have food processors and pressure cookers and the like. We know what it's like to live as a student and the cost of eating well, so the majority of recipes won't break your wallet, though sometimes it's worth splashing out or spending a bit more time in the kitchen. We hope you'll find something to your liking, stick around and maybe even comment from time to time!
Thanks for reading,
Karl
