Full of Beans

Twenty-one quick plant-based dinners that actually fill you up, for people who don't usually cook this way.

No dinner in this book has meat, fish, eggs or dairy in it, and you don't have to be vegan to use it. It is for the cook who wants a few meat-free dinners a week, is feeding someone who has stopped eating meat, or has made a bean dinner before and been hungry again an hour later.

What this book does differently

• The times are real. Every time runs from opening the fridge to food on the plate, counting the chopping, the wait for water to boil and the oven heating up. Each dinner shows its total and how many of those minutes your hands are busy, on a coloured timeline: hands busy, stay near, or walk away. A dinner that takes 39 minutes says 39.
• The protein is on the page. Every dinner shows its protein and fibre per serving beside the photo, worked out ingredient by ingredient from US Department of Agriculture data. The dinners give 14 to 33 g of protein per serving.
• A normal supermarket and a normal kitchen. No blender, no food processor, no pressure cooker, nothing soaked overnight, and no sauce you have to make from another page first.

What you'll be able to do

• Build a plant dinner that lasts: an anchor (beans, lentils, tofu...), a starch, vegetables and flavour
• Buy the right tofu, and cook it four ways so it is golden and chewy, not pale and wet
• Cook red lentils from dry, and use canned beans, chickpeas and lentils well
• Make beans taste of something: the six things that give plant food flavour, and how to fix a dish that tastes flat, heavy or too salty
• Make dinner with no recipe at all, using the same four-part plate and four sauces you mix in a jar

The 21 dinners

Open a can: 1. Chickpea curry with spinach · 2. Black bean tacos with lime slaw · 3. White beans and greens on garlic toast · 4. Crunchy chickpea salad sandwiches · 5. Pasta e ceci · 6. Smoky three-bean chili · 7. Sheet-pan chickpea shawarma flatbreads · 8. Lemony white bean and broccoli pasta

Tip out some lentils: 9. Red lentil dal with sizzled garlic · 10. Red lentil bolognese · 11. Lentil sloppy joes · 12. Greek lentil salad with hummus pitas

Unwrap the tofu: 13. Crispy ginger tofu rice bowls · 14. Tofu scramble burritos · 15. Tofu and edamame fried rice · 16. Thai red curry with tofu and green beans · 17. Sheet-pan sesame tofu and broccoli · 18. Smoky maple tempeh sandwiches

Open a jar: 19. Spicy peanut noodles with edamame · 20. Peanut stew with sweet potato and chickpeas · 21. BBQ black bean stuffed sweet potatoes

Every dinner has two pages. The first is its own photo, the start-to-plate time, protein and fibre, and the four parts of the plate. The second is the shopping list with US and metric amounts side by side, and a method where every step starts at a marked minute and says what you should see when it's done. Then how long it keeps, and what to swap.

Also inside

• How to read a dinner, the honest clock, the full plate, and protein package by package
• The six protein foods: what to buy and what to do with each
• Where flavour comes from, with a taste-and-fix table
• The shopping list and the kit (and what you don't need)
• Kitchen words: simmer, mince, zest, "medium heat" and the rest, in plain English
• Good to know: vitamin B12, iron, beans and your stomach, and leftovers, from NIH, USDA and a published study
• Dinner with no recipe, and four sauces in a jar
• Your first week: five dinners in order, each adding one skill, with the shopping list for all five
• A finder with every dinner's time, protein, fibre, and no-cook, oven, freezer, soy-free and wheat-free columns
• US and UK words and measures

What you download

• Full of Beans (65 pages, PDF, US Letter): the whole book, in colour, with bookmarks.
• Kitchen Pages (28 pages, PDF): every dinner's cooking page plus the full plate, flavour, kitchen words, no-recipe, first-week and finder pages, so you can print only what you cook from.

Good to know

• Every dinner serves 4. Amounts are in American cups, spoons and ounces with milliliters and grams beside them; oven temperatures in °F and °C.
• Each dinner says whether it contains wheat, soy, peanuts, sesame or coconut. Twelve are soy-free as written; many can be made wheat-free with the swaps given.
• Protein and fibre are worked out from USDA data and brands vary, so treat them as close estimates.
• The pages are US Letter size. On A4 paper, print with "fit to page".
• This is a PDF download. No physical book is shipped.