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The Vegan Family Cookbook: Simple, Balanced Cooking for Real Life
A cookbook and culinary toolkit of more than 100 recipes to get affordable, plant-based family meals on the table—in no time flat.
For many years, Anna Pippus found herself exhausted at the thought of coming up with what to make for dinner every night, until finally she changed how she tackled cooking forever. In The Vegan Family Cookbook , Anna shares the approach she developed to eliminate her mealtime daily cooking themes. Mondays are pasta, Tuesdays are bowls, Wednesdays are one-pot meals, and on Thursdays, it's all about stir-fries.
Anna’s simple yet flavourful recipes have short ingredients lists and streamlined preparations. Kids will love Peanut Butter Banana Waffles and Mac and Cheesy with Broccoli (to name only a few!), while adults and parents will appreciate fuss-free takes on classics, such as Corn Soup with Sneaky Red Lentils, Lighter Kale Pesto Pasta, and Crispy Sweet and Sticky Tofu. The Vegan Family Cookbook is also filled with scrumptious ideas for breakfast, lunch, and snack time, to round out this family-friendly collection.
Anna not only shows us what to cook, but how to cook nutritious and delicious vegan food, too. The Vegan Family Cookbook is filled with foundational cooking building blocks, like how to ensure your vegan dishes include enough flavour and texture and how to make soup without a recipe. She shares her mix-and-match approach to building bowls, complete with her family’s go-to combinations. In everyday life, we need practical, adaptable meals that come together easily. With this book at your side, you'll become a resourceful home cook, confidently feeding your family the best of what nature has to offer every day of the week.
For many years, Anna Pippus found herself exhausted at the thought of coming up with what to make for dinner every night, until finally she changed how she tackled cooking forever. In The Vegan Family Cookbook , Anna shares the approach she developed to eliminate her mealtime daily cooking themes. Mondays are pasta, Tuesdays are bowls, Wednesdays are one-pot meals, and on Thursdays, it's all about stir-fries.
Anna’s simple yet flavourful recipes have short ingredients lists and streamlined preparations. Kids will love Peanut Butter Banana Waffles and Mac and Cheesy with Broccoli (to name only a few!), while adults and parents will appreciate fuss-free takes on classics, such as Corn Soup with Sneaky Red Lentils, Lighter Kale Pesto Pasta, and Crispy Sweet and Sticky Tofu. The Vegan Family Cookbook is also filled with scrumptious ideas for breakfast, lunch, and snack time, to round out this family-friendly collection.
Anna not only shows us what to cook, but how to cook nutritious and delicious vegan food, too. The Vegan Family Cookbook is filled with foundational cooking building blocks, like how to ensure your vegan dishes include enough flavour and texture and how to make soup without a recipe. She shares her mix-and-match approach to building bowls, complete with her family’s go-to combinations. In everyday life, we need practical, adaptable meals that come together easily. With this book at your side, you'll become a resourceful home cook, confidently feeding your family the best of what nature has to offer every day of the week.
248 pages, Paperback
Published October 26, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 7, 2021
Beautiful, simple, delicious recipes! My favorite cookbook of the year!
March 16, 2022
Ok, full disclosure: I'm not vegan, but I've eaten no meat or poultry for 10 years. I do love to cook more vegetarian and vegan than not. And for real, The Vegan Family Cookbook spoke to my vegan-recipe-loving soul. I'm just going to say it right up front: I loved this book! I call this "hard-core vegan food" and it's the way I love to eat.
I decided to cook three meals from this book over about a week. It was so hard to choose which recipes I wanted to make. In the end I made:
Breakfast: Oat Waffles and Simple Scrambled Tofu
Lunch: Corn Soup with Sneaky Red Lentils
Dinner: Sunflower Carrot Nori Rolls and a bowl made of rice, Savoury Pan-Crisped Tofu Cubes, Grated Carrot Salad and Citrus-Hemp Sauce.
When all the votes were considered, our family favourite was the Corn Soup in first place! I will make it again and again. The Savoury Pan-Crisped Tofu Cubes were also easy and delicious too. There were several great things about this cookbook that I'd like to highlight:
1) Every recipe was simple to make and worked. Having a Vitamix helped for sure.
2) I discovered kala namak (Indian black salt) that Ms. Pippus said would make the scrambled tofu taste like eggs...and it did! Now I have an entire bag of it in my cupboard, which will probably take the rest of my life to consume.
3) My non-hard core vegan family was dubious about this food, but were game to try. Of the Oat Waffles, my daughter said, "They look like waffles, but these are not waffles." BTW, she only likes white-flour, buttery, eggy waffles, so I take her point. But I liked them.
The neat thing about some books is just how versatile they can be, and this was the case for The Vegan Family Cookbook. I could repurpose so much here. The "not-waffle Oat Waffles" became the next day's delicious oaty "crackers" with peanut butter. They taste like Wasa crackers! The Citrus-Hemp Sauce lives in my fridge and is now my go-to salad dressing. Most cool of all: I had a ton of Sunflower Carrot Nori Roll filling left, and some old frozen won-ton wrappers in my freezer just yearning for something to fill them...and voila, I had made the most delicious vegan steamed dumplings. I love it when two left-overs in the pantry unite to make a new dish.
I hope you grab yourself a copy and cook up a vegan storm! And seriously, try the Corn Soup.
I decided to cook three meals from this book over about a week. It was so hard to choose which recipes I wanted to make. In the end I made:
Breakfast: Oat Waffles and Simple Scrambled Tofu
Lunch: Corn Soup with Sneaky Red Lentils
Dinner: Sunflower Carrot Nori Rolls and a bowl made of rice, Savoury Pan-Crisped Tofu Cubes, Grated Carrot Salad and Citrus-Hemp Sauce.
When all the votes were considered, our family favourite was the Corn Soup in first place! I will make it again and again. The Savoury Pan-Crisped Tofu Cubes were also easy and delicious too. There were several great things about this cookbook that I'd like to highlight:
1) Every recipe was simple to make and worked. Having a Vitamix helped for sure.
2) I discovered kala namak (Indian black salt) that Ms. Pippus said would make the scrambled tofu taste like eggs...and it did! Now I have an entire bag of it in my cupboard, which will probably take the rest of my life to consume.
3) My non-hard core vegan family was dubious about this food, but were game to try. Of the Oat Waffles, my daughter said, "They look like waffles, but these are not waffles." BTW, she only likes white-flour, buttery, eggy waffles, so I take her point. But I liked them.
The neat thing about some books is just how versatile they can be, and this was the case for The Vegan Family Cookbook. I could repurpose so much here. The "not-waffle Oat Waffles" became the next day's delicious oaty "crackers" with peanut butter. They taste like Wasa crackers! The Citrus-Hemp Sauce lives in my fridge and is now my go-to salad dressing. Most cool of all: I had a ton of Sunflower Carrot Nori Roll filling left, and some old frozen won-ton wrappers in my freezer just yearning for something to fill them...and voila, I had made the most delicious vegan steamed dumplings. I love it when two left-overs in the pantry unite to make a new dish.
I hope you grab yourself a copy and cook up a vegan storm! And seriously, try the Corn Soup.
March 30, 2022
WOW! I've only had this for a short time and have already made 3 recipes with a long list of others I want to try. The three that I made were DELICIOUS and EASY! Wonderful, large, yummy-looking pictures too.
The Miso Ramen soup was just as good - probably better - than any soup I've had in a restaurant. I used thin vermicelli noodles instead of the ramen and brown Cremini mushrooms instead of the shitake.
The Corn Soup with Sneaky Red Lentils was also delicious, and nutritious. I just added the cashews to the pot along with the water and then used a potato masher instead of a blender. So, even though the cashews weren't totally smooth, it was yummy.
The Chunky Oil-Free Granola is probably the BEST granola I've ever had and so, so wonderfully easy. I made it into big chunks which is how I like it.
So many other recipes in the book I want to try: Simple Chocolate Almond Cookies, No-Strain Milk, Chickpea Salad Sandwiches, Ridiculously Simple Kids Pasta (for my oldest hard-to-please-food-wise grandson), Basic Cashew Cream Pasta (for my Alfredo-Sauce loving son), Lemon-Garlic Skillet Pasta with Cannellini Beans, Lighter Kale Pesto Pasta, and pretty much ALL the other recipes in the book.
Well done, Anna Pippus!
The Miso Ramen soup was just as good - probably better - than any soup I've had in a restaurant. I used thin vermicelli noodles instead of the ramen and brown Cremini mushrooms instead of the shitake.
The Corn Soup with Sneaky Red Lentils was also delicious, and nutritious. I just added the cashews to the pot along with the water and then used a potato masher instead of a blender. So, even though the cashews weren't totally smooth, it was yummy.
The Chunky Oil-Free Granola is probably the BEST granola I've ever had and so, so wonderfully easy. I made it into big chunks which is how I like it.
So many other recipes in the book I want to try: Simple Chocolate Almond Cookies, No-Strain Milk, Chickpea Salad Sandwiches, Ridiculously Simple Kids Pasta (for my oldest hard-to-please-food-wise grandson), Basic Cashew Cream Pasta (for my Alfredo-Sauce loving son), Lemon-Garlic Skillet Pasta with Cannellini Beans, Lighter Kale Pesto Pasta, and pretty much ALL the other recipes in the book.
Well done, Anna Pippus!
February 3, 2025
It feels a little silly to say that I read a cookbook, but this is really not so much a cookbook as an explanation of one woman’s thought process when making dinner for her family. I really felt empowered to experiment a little more while still keeping my cooking to 20 or 30 minutes a day. For example, I loved the section on making bowls (she lays out different components of a bowl rather than exact recipes). And I now feel more excited to cook lentils and beans for dinner!
I gained a lot of new ideas for dishes (potato corn lentil soup, yum!). I learned a new way to fry tofu to make it crispy. I also learned a lot of techniques that can be applied to lots of dinners: blend part of the soup with cashews to make a creamy base, start with sautéing onions and spices before adding vegetables and lentils, salt doesn’t increase bean cooking time but acid does, add different textures to meals to make them feel complete.
I did roll my eyes a few times at the nutritional advice (like how to make sure there’s not too much salt in the food), but it was mostly no a problem.
I gained a lot of new ideas for dishes (potato corn lentil soup, yum!). I learned a new way to fry tofu to make it crispy. I also learned a lot of techniques that can be applied to lots of dinners: blend part of the soup with cashews to make a creamy base, start with sautéing onions and spices before adding vegetables and lentils, salt doesn’t increase bean cooking time but acid does, add different textures to meals to make them feel complete.
I did roll my eyes a few times at the nutritional advice (like how to make sure there’s not too much salt in the food), but it was mostly no a problem.
February 1, 2022
Wanted to love this so much more. Was very excited to get the book. Have tried a few recipes they are good but just different.
May 23, 2022
Likely a better read for newbie vegans, having been on the vegan train for many years, there wasn’t much new here for me.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews