From truffle framboise vinaigrette to fennel pollen – meat-free recipes can be a gourmet’s dream, if you know where to look for them, says Laura Barton

In the early years the menus were always a little grim: wan-looking mushroom stroganoff, mushy beanburgers, Quorn fillets and chilli-non-carne. With time came endless rolls of spinach and ricotta cannelloni and the almost tyrannical reign of wild mushroom risotto. When I stopped eating meat, nearly 15 years ago, vegetarian cuisine was frequently like this — stodgy, generally overly-smitten with dairy and pasta, and always apologetic, somehow, for the glaring absence of beef. 

Times have changed, of course, and today vegetarian food is generally more adventurous and widely available. But still it strikes me that if we want to encourage more people to eat vegetarian — and the news this month that vegetarians are less likely to develop cancer than meat-eaters would surely suggest it – we have to change the way we see vegetarian food; rather than being a miserable, bland and meatless world, it can be delicious, complex, and exciting. 

Four years ago, my own approach to vegetarian cooking was transformed after a visit to Fresh, a small chain of restaurants in Toronto that specialises in predominantly vegan food (stop wrinkling your noses there at the back). It was organic, sustainable, and perhaps most importantly, a-wriggle with flavour and texture. There were salads made with shredded carrot, white radishes called daikon, yellow beets and napa cabbage in a lime-peanut dressing. There was coconut tempeh (a solid, protein-rich ingredient made with whole, fermented soya beans, which tastes three million times better than it sounds) and black bean tostadas. And more than anything, there were the restaurant’s signature rice-bowls: brown basmati rice with a choice of toppings — the ninja, for instance, which offered salad greens, wasabi dill dressing, crispy tofu cubes, sun-dried tomatoes, sunflower sprouts and spicy ginger-tamari dressing. Smitten, I bought the restaurant’s cookbook, Fresh at Home. 

Though some of the recipes, such as the coconut curry and the golden dhal, are ludicrously easy and quick to prepare, others involve a little more of your time. One of my favourites, the sunflower rice bowl involves pre-preparing “Simple sauce” (one of the cookbook’s staples which you can make in larger quantities and store in the fridge), creamy sunflower dressing and marinating tofu steaks. The extra effort is rewarded with a dish that is richly-flavoured, variously-textured and truly joyous.

Some months later, having familiarised myself with the Fresh book, I was eager to try some other adventurous recipes, and after a little investigation chanced upon a website named VeganYumYum. It’s written by Lolo Ulm, a young Boston woman who falls asleep dreaming of recipes (miniature aubergine napoleons, which involve artfully stacked roast veg bound together with delicious aubergine “creme”, were a particular drowsy triumph). She has appeared on the Martha Stewart Show and won Food Blog of the Year in the 2007 Bloggers Choice Awards.

Like Fresh, VeganYumYum displays a passion for flavour, and many of the featured recipes are a result of trial, error and experimentation: marinating tofu in home-made marmalade for instance, making cookies with avocado and lime, or wondering what to do with fiddlehead ferns (the unfurling spring fronds of the ostrich fern) for the few weeks they are in season. 

One of the first recipes I tried from the site was the spaghetti squash, shitake, rocket and pistachio spring rolls. “I had a crazy idea for spring rolls, and here they are,” was how Ulm announced the recipe. “They were very light, and went really well with a lime & chili oil dipping sauce that I made up. “

Another of VeganYumYum’s triumphs is that it dispels the notion that vegetarian and vegan cuisine is austere or restrictive; this food is gutsy and gorgeous and occasionally gluttonous — the site boasts a particularly excellent selection of recipes for sweet treats such as blood orange and coconut mini bundt cakes, ground cherry pies and mojito cupcakes.

I was, by this stage, a little obsessed with finding new and interesting ways to cook without meat, and as last year’s festival season approached I began to feel a tad worried that I might face a summer of little more than veggie burgers and half-arsed Thai curry. Happily on the first day of Glastonbury I found a branch of a London cafe named Dragonfly Wholefoods, which I credit with keeping me alive and healthy for the duration of the festival. The menu specialised in raw vegan food — vegetable noodles made from marinated slivers of carrot and cucumber, raw onion seed bread and raw pizza, flax fire crackers and walnut and thyme cutlets. While I had no desire to make my diet completely raw, it did excite me that here was a whole thrilling new world of flavour and recipes to explore, and, as I lay awake in my tent at night, I began to wonder whether having a dehydrator (which preserves food without cooking it) in my kitchen would be any more bonkers than someone having a microwave.

In New York last year, a friend directed me to a raw vegan restaurant named Pure Food and Wine, set up by two chefs, Matthew Kenney and Sarma Melngailis, who had both previously been dedicated meat-eaters. Here I ate a salad of lamb’s lettuce, summer berries, and fennel with truffle framboise vinaigrette, aged cashew cheese cured with dill and fennel pollens and toasted pine nuts, followed by white corn tamales with raw cacao mole, marinated mushrooms, salsa verde and avocado, and with it, a plum-sake cocktail. It remains one of the best meals I have eaten, and, of course, I brought home their cookbook.

It’s feasible that at this moment you’re thinking I sound a little nuts, that you’re gagging at the notion of kale soup and nut-milk, turnip carpaccio and noodles made from raw coconut, but the last four years have been for me an epicurean delight, a chance to explore flavours and textures and senses, to take a grand adventure in the world beyond mushroom stroganoff •