East: 120 Easy and Delicious Asian-inspired Vegetarian and Vegan recipes

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I discovered the wonderful world of the Asian larder: fermented, pickled and salted ingredients – kimchi, sweet miso and gochujang added flavour in an instant. Drawing from her 'New Vegan' Guardian column, Meera Sodha's stunning new collection also features plenty of brand-new recipes inspired by a wide range of Asian cuisines.

If you’re looking to expand your repertoire of vegetarian dishes or want to learn a bit more about how to use spices, then East will do that for you. When the rice is nearly done, it will start to bubble and burp more furiously and will need more attention. There are noodles, curries, rice dishes, salads and bakes, all surprisingly easy to make and bursting with exciting flavours. The tomatoes create a wonderful sauce with the coconut milk; they also float up to decorate the dish. Her recipe instructions are very easy to follow and are also accurate, so if she says the sauce will be ready after simmering for 7 minutes, that’s when it will be ready!Take a sharp knife and, at one of the short ends of the cake, score a mark 2cm in, all the way along the width of the cake. Using a large spatula, fold the egg whites into the yolks, being careful not to knock out too much air. This time, I travelled by reading: I followed Fuchsia Dunlop around the streets of Chengdu and saw 90s Jakarta through Madhur Jaffrey’s eyes. Just before serving, grind the remaining tablespoon of sugar, the pistachios and the edible flowers as finely as you can, using a mortar and pestle or an electric spice grinder. There are familiar and classic Indian recipes like dals, curries and pickles, alongside less familiar ones using fresh seasonal British ingredients, like Brussels sprout thoran, Gardeners’ Question Time pilau and green beans with cashew nuts and coconut.

Other favourites include the Chickpea Flour Chips with Chilli Sauce; Black Dal; Honey (I use Maple Syrup) Soy and Ginger Braised Tofu; and Sprout Nasi Goreng. I had also spent two years writing a vegetarian Indian cookery book; I knew how to make bitter cavolo nero leaves sing and how to tempt a beetroot-hater into eating a plateful. Packed with straightforward recipes to suit every occasion, I have cooked authentic-tasting dishes that I have gone back to over and over again because they have become real family favourites. Each dish sits against a monochrome background so as not to distract from the food, while flat overlay shots really emphasise the use of colour and texture in each recipe.

In Thailand, I had memorised every twist in the creation of som tam salad and counted down the minutes until my next pad thai. Add the coconut milk and 175ml of water, whisk until you have a smooth batter, then leave to one side. Taking you on a journey from India to Indonesia, Singapore to Japan, China, Thailand, and Vietnam, this book is bursting with flavourful and exciting yet accessible ingredients in dishes that vary from noodles and curries, to rice dishes, salads and sweets. And then there are showstoppers such as daily dosas with coconut potatoes, roasted cauliflower korma, sticky mango paneer skewers, wild mushroom upma and lime pickle rice with roast squash and red onion. I know that cuisines are prone to appropriation, although perhaps, like languages, that helps our cooking repertoires to grow and we then come to appreciate the originality and complexity of certain dishes.