As a veggie I’m a huge fan of Natasha Corrett’s “Honestly Healthy” recipes so I was very excited to attend the this pop up to celebrate the launch of Honestly Healthy In A Hurry. While I love creating dishes and genuinely gravitate towards healthier options, both healthy and veggie food can be perceived as expensive, time consuming to prepare and requiring a list of ingredients that require Googling to ascertain what they are. This book shows that that isn’t the case – fresh home cooked meals can be whipped up quickly with “normal” ingredients and there’s no trade-off in enjoyment or feeling of deprivation for picking a “healthy” option.

This was one of my favourite meals of 2016 so far – despite not picking the dishes on the menu I loved every course and would have chosen exactly these dishes to eat. I’ll definitely be heading back west to Farmacy to try, well…basically the entire menu!

Booze is definitely still on the menu and this Cool As A Cucumber cocktail (gin, cucumber, basil leaves, fresh apple & lime juice) was the perfect Thursday night tonic. 

Avocado and tahini dip with baked nori chips – this dip looked so vibrant and tasted so rich and creamy while being plant-based. This was to share and disappeared quickly!

 Activated macadamia nut beetroot puree with marinated kohlrabi and apple salad with cashew nigella seed “cheese” to start – this was such a fresh tasting dish, I often skip starters as find that they leave me too full to properly enjoy my main but this was light and I loved the cashew “cheese”.

 Beetroot burger with butternut butter tahini dressing and diced cucumber salsa – luckily I love beetroot and butternut squash is another favourite so this for me was a perfect dish! Veggie burgers can be bland but this one was really flavoursome and the butternut butter was a far better accompaniment than a bun.

Dessert was a polenta marmalade cake with Farmacy “nice cream” – it was lovely but my photographs of it didn’t turn out too well and I was keen to eat it (because it looked delicious and because I hate melting foods touching other foods on my plate, ahhh!).  This was such a good meal, I’m pretty fussy so I was super happy to have enjoyed every course despite not having any choice in what was served.

These dishes aren’t taken directly from the cookbook but all of the components are featured – I’ll definitely be making the avocado and tahini dip (things which don’t need cooking = my sort of “cooking”) soon and the sweet potato wedges are high on my cooking to-do list, too.