Introducing One Pan Pescatarian, my second cookbook. Pre-order now!
Okay, so I’ve been bursting to tell you all this for months, and I’ve now finally got the go-ahead: I’ve written another cookbook, and it will be on shelves in just a few months time!
I’ve always said you can tell if a food blogger who typically posts a couple of recipes a week is working on a cookbook as they tend to post much less, and focus on less elaborate recipes. This is why last year from around the start of March to about the end of October you were all treated to re-runs from my BBC Food author page, old recipes I’d re-jigged and re-posted, and only 10 new recipes. I was still writing recipes in all that time, and you’ll get to see them all on June 11th when One Pan Pescatarian (ad), my second cookbook will be published! It is a collection of 100 vegetarian, vegan and fish-forward dinners all cooked in one pot or one pan, and I could not be prouder of it. I wrote it with one goal in mind: to get people to eat less meat, and to eat more plant-based or seafood inspired meals. I wanted everything to be simple, easy to follow and accessible, and of course delicious!
I don’t think you should give up meat. I’m certainly not going to, but it is an unavoidable truth that the amount of meat we consume in this country is bad for our health, bad for the environment and also actually quite bad for our bank balance. Also, we live on an island, and the amount of our amazing fish and seafood we eat at home – whilst improving – is still minimal. So, One Pan Pescatarian aims to provide you with simple, un-intimidating but modern vegetarian suppers, vegan recipes designed for carnivores that I as a meat-lover think taste amazing (is it just me or does food designed for dedicated vegans just not work for meat eaters? The recipes are designed for people with different taste buds, and can sometimes be heavy on substitutes – my vegan recipes pretty much use the same ingredients I always use, just without animal products on the plate!) and fish dishes that will hopefully make it easier to cook with new types of fish and shellfish at home.
As when I announced Student Eats, because One Pan Pescatarian is essentially what I was working on for most of 2019 (and we’re still putting the finishing touches to it before it goes off to print now!) I posted a few of the recipes you’ll find in there on Instagram without really letting on. Seeing which ones you all loved and wanted the recipes for also helped me choose what dishes went on the cover (don’t worry, I took loads of photos in the studio so I’ll be sharing a cookbook shoot behind-the-scenes later!) and what type of recipes I should be putting more of in the book. So, below are just a few little previews of what you can expect!
Roast Aubergine & Fresh Tomato Salad with Basil Vinaigrette | Tomato, Almond & Thyme Tart | Greek Lemon, Feta & Veggie Bake | Whole Roast Sea Bass with Fennel & Potatoes | Beetroot & Dill Cured Salmon | Tomato Salad with Sage Flowers & Pomegranate Molasses | Hot Prawns in Garlic Butter | Fancy Friday Night Fish & Chips | Vegan Watermelon Poke Bowls
Pre-order: Amazon (ad) | Waterstones | Hive | Go ask for it in your local bookshop!
Authors already know this, but literary agent Helen Cullen recently posted a brilliant Twitter thread about how pre-ordering a book is one of the best ways you can support your favourite authors. Do go and read the thread, but in summary if an author gets lots of pre-orders it shows their publishers there is a lot of interest in the book, which means they’ll invest more time and money into promoting it so that it can reach more people – authors love to gossip about their publishers, and I know of so many amazing books that did not meet their full potential as their publishers did not prioritise promoting them over some of their other new titles. Also, if there is the chance that the book might make the bestseller list when it debuts it is the pre-orders that will but them there. Even if a book is available to pre-order an entire year before publication, all those books count as being sold on publication day, really bumping that first week of sales figure. Finally, while you should go and pre-order something from your local bookshop (if you get in early enough the bookseller will be able to order it direct from the publishers rather than from a distributor, also saving them money!) pre-orders tell the algorithms on big sites like Amazon that there is interest in a book, so the algorithms show it to more potential readers!
I really, really hope that you’ll all love One Pan Pescatarian. By far it is my favourite thing I’ve done so far, and I simply cannot wait for it to be out in the world!
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