Vegan MoFo day 12 - my favourite cookbook is the Asian Vegan Kitchen

I don't have that many cookbooks. Well, not that many to me, anyway. Some I return to all the time, some just for the odd recipe or two. But the one I go back to over and over again is The Asian Vegan Kitchen by Hema Parekh. They say you always hurt the ones you love and my copy of the Asian Vegan Kitchen is proof of that - there's a burn mark on when corner when I was using it too close to my gas hob and it caught fire.

The burn mark's on the other side but you can see all the paper markers for recipes that are next on my list to make!

There are two reasons why my love affair with the Asian Vegan Kitchen has been enduring (I bought it years ago as a relatively new vegan). The first is that recipes are incredibly reliable - I don't remember making anything that wasn't tasty or that turned out weird. The second is that it's full of both new takes on dishes I already love, as well as just as many recipes I've never heard of, which require that hard to find ingredients and internet detective work.

The food spans several different countries in Asia - from those whose cooking you might be familiar with (Japan, China, Thailand) to those you might not have discovered before (Burma). Each country is divided into sections, so you get to build your own meal around it - soup, noodles and rice, mains, sides and salads, and desserts.

There are a few colour photos to get you going with the Asian Vegan Kitchen, but mostly it's just black and white text on a page - with Hema Parekh's tips and anecdotes interspersed with the recipes themselves, giving you hints on how to cook the dish as well as a little history on where she picked up the recipe.

The recipes vary in complexity – there are Korean namuls you can knock up in minutes, and curries that require special stocks, and spice pastes, and hunting down ingredients that your local supermarket isn't going to have.

I guess that's why the Asian Vegan Kitchen has a place in my heart – it's a real something-for-everyone cookbook, and it's the one I always recommend if anyone asks for a suggestion for a new vegan.

While over the years a good many experiments from the Asian Vegan Kitchen, there's nothing like MoFo for encouraging me to revisit some old favourites and cook up some new recipes.

From the India section, I made some chole (the chick peas on your right) and some potato and zucchini curry (the er, potatoes and zucchini on your left).

I've made a few versions of chole before, but this one has stormed to the top of my favourites list – the spices are incredibly well-balanced for something that doesn't really take a lot of time to come together. The potato and courgette dish is also surprisingly flavourful considering how quick it is to make. As you'd expect, both taste even better the next day.

I was similarly inspired to go and make a red curry, one of those dishes that always seems easy to make, but hard to make well. Even with a few substitutions (I doubt many authentic Thai curries have some runner beans in), the paste was so full of the different flavour layers working beautifully together, for a brief moment I allowed myself a virtual high-five at for my handiwork.

Of course, it wasn't my handiwork really, it was Hema Parekh's. She's the silent partner in my kitchen endeavours, and I'm really glad to have made her aquanintance all those years ago.