HELLO AND WELCOME TO MY BLOG!

I’m Deborah, the creator of Vegan Hot Stuff. I’m the recipe developer, writer, food stylist and photographer behind everything on this blog. I have a deep-rooted love for good food and created this little corner of the internet to bust the myth that vegan food is boring, expensive or lacking in nutrients.

I launched Vegan Hot Stuff in November 2022 to share delicious, restaurant-worthy vegan recipes for home entertaining that will delight whoever you invite for dinner. Here, you’ll learn how to recreate sensational dishes with bold, daring flavours, interesting ingredient combinations, and an incredible variety of colours and textures. Each recipe is made with passion, with a focus on whole, healthy, seasonal ingredients that are sustainably sourced wherever possible.

What kind of recipes can I find here?

My focus is on Mediterranean cuisine, especially Italian, because I’ve lived in Italy and the Italian part of Switzerland all my adult life. You’ll find everything from the great classics of international fame to lesser-known regional specialities. Some traditional Mediterranean dishes are naturally vegan; others have been creatively adapted with plant-based ingredients to be just as tasty and satisfying as the originals.

But my love for food doesn’t stop there! I’m also on a mission to prove that British food doesn’t deserve the bad rap it gets – so you’ll find some fantastic British dishes here, along with amazing Indian recipes inspired by the flavours I grew up eating in England.

I’ve also included some interesting Swiss specialities – how could I leave those out? Switzerland has been my home for the last 40 years. Most of these recipes originate from the German-speaking regions, where I spent my first eight years. Now, I live in the Canton of Ticino, where the language, culture, and culinary traditions are distinctly Italian.

Italian cuisine is renowned as one of the best in the world, and each region has its own specialities. Italians prepare their food in a simple manner, letting the ingredients speak for themselves rather than using strong flavourings and heavy sauces. Italy’s cucina povera is a rich treasure trove of naturally vegan recipes.

My recipes are designed for those who follow a vegan diet without additional dietary restrictions.

What will I learn here?

You’ll learn that creating healthy, nutritious plant-based meals from scratch isn’t difficult at all (when you know how!). All my recipes have detailed step-by-step instructions with photos that anyone can follow.

You’ll learn how to master vegan cooking at home. On Vegan Hot Stuff, you’ll find a variety of flavour-packed vegan recipes that you’ll want to incorporate into your rotation for both weeknight meals and special occasions. You’ll learn how to use vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds to recreate your favourite comfort foods in inventive and indulgent ways. You’ll pick up vegan cooking tips that will give you confidence in the kitchen and the ability to make tasty and satisfying meals that the whole family will enjoy. There are also vegan lifestyle tips, like how to plan meals ahead, how to make sensational dishes with just a handful of ingredients, and how to stock a plant-based pantry. 

You’ll learn the principles of flavour, ingredient pairing, and vegan cooking techniques that will make you a better cook and, over time, enable you to create your own meals without necessarily following a recipe. 

Transitioning from an omnivorous or vegetarian diet to a fully plant-based one can seem daunting and drastic. Actually, I was one of those people who said, “I can’t go vegan – I love cheese too much.” The trick is to replace those foods with something even more scrumptious and mouth-watering than cheese! Yes, I assure you that IS possible! Try my vegan tunacado, vegan tuna paté, baba ganoush, guacamole, vegan smoked salmon

In the beginning, try not to think about what you’ll be giving up but focus on all the new discoveries that you’ll make – of food so delicious you’ll be really surprised! You’ll discover that vegan food can be truly hot stuff – from spicy bean chili and fresh summer salads to decadent desserts and flavourful curries. Try my showstopping meatless moussaka, aubergine parmigiana, and vegan chicken tikka masala! Plant-based dishes can be equally as delicious as their meat-based and dairy-based counterparts – without taking anyone’s life.

There are so many benefits to be reaped from a plant-based diet, starting with your health! So dive in and discover – for the animals, your own well-being, and for the planet!

A little about me

I was born and raised in Nottingham, England. Luckily for me, my mother was a great cook, and I was always happy to hoover up everything that was put on my plate. I was interested in cooking and helping out in the kitchen from an early age. In the beginning, this was usually an excuse to taste the food because I was always hungry – I was a competitive swimmer and gymnast so I burnt off a lot of calories! Loving good food usually leads to wanting to learn how to make it, so I quickly progressed to experimenting and making meals for the family.

After school, I did an OND in Hotel and Catering Operations at Clarendon College in Nottingham, where I learnt the basics of the profession.

I love travelling, animals, spending time in nature, and keeping fit and healthy. When I’m not in the kitchen or with my animals, you’ll probably find me hiking, kayaking on the lake or sailing in summer, and skiing in the winter. When it gets too hot to do sport, I love to head for the beach and go snorkelling.

Whenever I have the opportunity, I love to travel and the food I’ve eaten on my travels has inspired me to create many of the recipes you’ll find here on Vegan Hot Stuff. I love experimenting in the kitchen and I enjoy the challenge of creating healthy plant-based dishes from fresh, seasonal produce. I was born in England so you’ll find lots of English dishes on my blog. I’ve lived in Italy and the Italian part of Switzerland all my adult life so many of the dishes here are Italian. I adore Indian food too, and Mexican, and Greek, and Middle Eastern… so you’ll find recipes from those places too! I’ve veganised many traditional recipes that are big favourites with people everywhere, like lasagne, Parmigiana, pizza, moussaka, fish and chips, quiches, pies, pasties, chili con carne, burgers, chicken tikka masala, fajitas, shepherd’s pie, to mention just a few, as well as all sorts of biscuits, cakes, desserts and ice-creams. And they are all equally as delicious as the originals!

I have a catering background, an OND in Hotel and Catering Operations, and I worked for many years in the trade. The unsocial hours made it incompatible with family life for me, so in 1990 I gave it all up for a more regular routine. I started a 9 to 5 office job and later became a self-employed English teacher, which I still do part time today. I have two grown up children, my long-time companion Guido and a houseful of animals that I adore. At the moment, we have two cats, a rabbit, eight guinea pigs (at one point we had twenty-five), two fancy rats, a reef aquarium and a freshwater aquarium.

I love all animals, and I’ll be forever grateful to my father for teaching me to love them and treat them with kindness and respect. To me, there’s no distinction between a dog and a pig, a cat and a cow, or a guinea pig and a chicken. It’s just that, for all of us, lifelong habits are hard to break. We have loving memories of family get togethers where there is meat on the plate… at Christmas time, Easter, Thanksgiving… In every part of the world, these festivities are deeply rooted in our traditions. When I finally associated the meat on my plate with animal suffering, I just had to give it up. I could not be part of it anymore. I became a vegetarian but continued to eat eggs and cheese. That went on for five years and all my recipes became vegetarian. I had this file with lots of handwritten recipes (my writing is atrocious and sometimes I can’t even read it myself), some from my catering college days, others from an unforgettable world cookery course that my mother did in the 1970s. Then there were those that I picked up from chefs in the many hotels and restaurants where I worked – in Scotland, Switzerland and Italy. In June 2020, I went vegan after realising that the dairy industry and the terrible treatment of egg-laying hens and male chicks are really just as cruel as the meat industry. So I decided to give up all dairy and eggs and go vegan.

Ironically, it was my daughter Alessia who inspired me to go vegan. She just decided, from one day to the next, to stop eating all meat, dairy and eggs, after watching Forks over knives and Cowspiracy. She was 25 at the time and had never seemed interested in joining me as a vegetarian. In retrospect, I didn’t even have a very convincing argument for my family to follow my example and become vegetarian – the whole dairy industry, When I finally did go vegan, the predominant feeling afterwards was pure relief. I no longer felt tormented, like I did when I was still eating cheese and eggs. A kind of inner peace prevailed and I’ve never looked back since. It was one of the best, if not the best decision I’ve ever made!

Covid 19 changed a lot of things for me. I saw my thriving business disintegrate, my equilibrium disrupted. When the pandemic broke out I was on a skiing holiday in Val Gardena in South Tyrol and I remember a surreal mix of wonderful carefree days skiing with my family and an oppressive sense of worry as I read the news when we came back down from the mountains in the evenings. Before we knew it we were in lockdown and I was scrambling to hold my business together. People lost their jobs, or saw their salaries reduced, and English lessons became a luxury for most people. In Switzerland we were lucky. We could still go out, go for walks in the woods or the countryside. Above all I remember the silence. For the first time I could hear the humming of the bees instead of cars on the motorway. It was a bittersweet experience for me. There was a sense of profound sadness because of the state that the world was in. On the other hand there was this feeling of happiness because all of a sudden our hectic lives had slowed down and we could finally savour some of the more simple things in life, like time with our families and the beauty of a spring that we hadn’t seen for many years. It was a paradox – the best spring ever, yet we were all locked up indoors.

I took a long hard look at life in general, my own life too and I realised how vulnerable we are. We tend to think that we can control everything, yet every now and then something happens to remind us that sometimes we can’t. This time, a virus that may have been of our own making, in one way or another, was about to change our lives forever. And like everyone else’s, my world was turned upside down.

In March and April 2020 I learnt how to do without many things, as we found ourselves on a tight budget. Before lockdown we used to go shopping in Italy where everything is cheaper. Borders closed for eight long months. Guido couldn’t see his daughters, not even at Christmas. I became a minimalist, buying only what was absolutely necessary. I’ll never forget an evening of family togetherness with frozen pizzas and beers from Aldi, at 1 franc 50 cents each. I felt like we’d won the lottery. Although economising was down to necessity, it kind of felt right. Why should we buy things that we don’t need? This was another catalyst that pushed me to go vegan. The predominant feeling was pure relief. I finally felt free and I had an inner sense of peace which is difficult to describe.

During lockdown, there were many things I used to buy in Italy that I couldn’t find in Switzerland – like fresh pizza dough and piadinas. Farinaceous dishes are cheap so I started trying to make my own. I was the kind of person that had one bag of all-purpose flour in the cupboard which would last me for 6 months at the very least. One evening I decided to try and make piadinas – a type of wrap from Emilia Romagna in Italy. I searched for some recipes on the internet… It turned out that authentic Romagnole piadinas had to be made from the suet of a certain type of pig bred only in that region and the dough was kneaded using a certain movement of the forearm and shoulder, which was descibed in depth in Italian. I was short of time (and patience at that point), so I substituted the suet with olive oil, slapped all the ingredients into a bowl and proceeded to mix them with the dough hooks of an old Bosch Turbofix instead of kneading it by hand. To my disbelief the consistency seemed right – not too dry, not too sticky – so I carried on with the recipe, and you know what? It was perfect! First time. And that stimulated me to continue exploring and experimenting.

I became more creative and adventurous, putting into practice what I had learnt in the catering profession over the years with what I had eaten in some of the nicest restaurants in Italy and around the world. During lockdown I started to transform my hastily scribbled recipes into proper pdf files, for my family more than anything really. Then, one day the idea of a blog came to me. I knew it was something that I would happily do for the rest of my working days, so I thought of a name, designed my own logo, and started to build it from scratch. I’m not very tech savvy, or at least I wasn’t at the time, so it was very hard work for me.

One of the main reasons why I created this blog, is because I wanted do something more for animals. Especially those raised, often in apalling conditions, to become food. But I also want to contribute to saving our planet and do my best to ensure that my children have a future. Not just my children – your children, everyone’s children. A plant-based diet is more sustainable and has the added benefit of actually being better for our health. I’m so happy to see veganism gaining ground and losing some of that bad rap that vegans often get. People’s awareness towards animals and the environment is also changing.

One of the things I love most is being inventive in the kitchen. You know, when the fridge is practically empty, and you have to come up with something using that improbable combination of sorry-looking ingredients staring you in the face from the depths of the fridge. Some of my best recipes ever originated just like that. It sort of brings out the best in you, you just have to be imaginative and creative. I love going to the market or supermarket and buying fresh seasonal produce which is on offer – that way I spend less. Then I go home and decide what to do with the food I’ve bought.

Gradually, over the last couple of years, I’ve taken all my recipes and started to put them all in one place – here on my blog. Today I would like to share them with you. I’d love to show people that vegan food is not boring at all. It would make me so happy to help you discover that vegan food can be truly delicious!

Going vegan was actually much easier than I thought it would be. The difficult part was catering for the non-vegan members of my family. If I had been alone, it would have been easier but definitely more boring. I would have just prepared something unpretentiously vegan for myself. But I had a family and I didn’t want to disappoint them at the dinner table. In the beginning, as a new vegan, I felt a wave of panic as dinnertime approached. “What on earth am I going to cook tonight?” Looking back, I always managed to present something that was at least edible. Later that something became tastier and today it has evolved into something which is absolutely delicious, that everyone looks forward to – non-vegans included. Never in my life have I eaten such varied and interesting food as I do today. Two years after going vegan there is a variety in our diets that I would never have thought possible.

I’ve never had any serious health problems, but after going vegan, my energy levels increased, my joint pains disappeared and my skin and hair texture improved.

Food restrictions are not life restrictions, and knowing that you don’t participate in the exploitation and killing of innocent animals gives you a feeling of freedom and an inner sense of peace. You don’t have to commit to going vegan right here, today, but you could try it out for a month, or 6 months like I did and take it from there. You could commit to having some vegan days every week. It’s a start – and remember, nobody is perfect.

If my blog helps you to shine in the kitchen and encourages you eat healthy plant-based food, it will have been worth all my time and effort. If it gives you that little extra push to go vegan, or at least eat more vegan meals, it would make me so happy!!

My love of nature and animals has instilled in me the importance of eating sustainably and caring for the earth. As the guardians of our planet, we should show compassion to all living creatures – be they cats, dogs and guinea pigs, or cows, pigs and chickens. Each and every one of them has the same right to be here as we have. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to treat every living creature with respect and do everything we can to leave them the kind of world that we inherited.