Welcome to these gluten free, whole foods plant based vegan recipes!
Love Vegan Living is a site for exploring a healthy plant based vegan diet and living life to the full with the help of meditation, mindfulness and yoga.
Many of the recipes are oil free and some are interchangeable, with or without oil. All are gluten free and vegan.
I hope you can find some inspiration here to help you on your journey of living a healthy, vibrant and compassionate lifestyle.
My mission is to highlight how easy it is to enjoy this awesome way of life and to reclaim our health while not supporting barbaric cruelty to animals. Whether you want to lose weight, get in shape, recover from chronic disease or just be the healthiest version of yourself that you can possibly be, a whole foods plant based lifestyle can help.
When you read a recipe here, please take it away and make it yours (and let me know how you get on!).
Get inspired and allow things to flow. Plant based cooking doesn’t (usually) have to have precise quantities weighed out each time. So feel free to tweak things to suit your needs.
What the Gluten Free Vegan Recipes on Love Vegan Living, Aren’t . . .
I hope that the recipes here inspire you to explore vegetables and pulses and fall in love with a plant based lifestyle. None of the recipes are meant to be followed to the letter. They aren’t expensive, fancy, complicated things but more wholesome and easy to create, nutritious meals.
Homemade hummus can be made in so many different ways. Sure, there are some tricks to help it taste divine, but there are also so many variations you can apply.
And this hummus is made entirely oil free with the extra virgin olive oil drizzled on top at the end for those of you who eat oil. Yum.
The ultimate goal of Love Vegan Living is to help you to create meals that you love, effortlessly.
Discover the freedom to rustle up a balanced meal using only whole ingredients and with a minimum of effort. We only use primary ingredients which are all simple to get and inexpensive, so this is not only a healthy way to eat but also cost effective.
Even when there’s almost nothing left in the cupboard you can always rustle up a feast, like this onion soup pictured below.
Why Aren’t There Any Calories Listed on any of the Recipes?
You may have noticed that none of the recipes on this site have calories.
This isn’t an accident (even though Google would prefer the site if it had the calories listed).
I’m not knocking calorie counting for you if you already do it (and like it), as I believe everyone must follow their own path.
And despite not being a fan of calorie counting, there are some situations when you might want to count calories even on a whole food diet (see section below).
But it’s not something I do or recommend that you should do once you start eating a healthy, balanced, whole food, vegan diet.
Instead of counting calories, think about the quality of the food you’re eating rather than the quantity. Everything you eat should be nutritious and contribute towards your health.
This may not happen overnight of course, and remember that any changes take time, so don’t try to jump five steps from where you are. Instead take one step in the right direction and congratulate yourself on that step.
Get comfortable with that change before you take on another one. And alway recognise your progress, not your lack of progress.
I know you might say that some people need to count calories because otherwise they eat too much, but if they change their lifestyle bit by bit, eradicating the refined sugars, deep fried foods, processed foods etc. they will also find their eating habits changing.
And then it’s no longer necessary to count calories.
Sugar Leads to Cravings
Eating sugar leads to sugar cravings. And there are so many foods which can create a false hunger. When you cut processed foods, refined carbs and sweet things out of your diet, not only will your taste buds change (even a plain tomato can taste sooo sweet), but also your hunger levels.
And if you feel you should be counting calories, one very big step to reducing your calorie count is to adopt oil free cooking.
I became oil-free after trying it out as an experiment and I love it so much I just stayed with it. Sometimes, very occasionally, I’ll eat some raw extra virgin olive oil and I really do enjoy the flavour when it’s raw. But I never cook with it anymore.
When you stop cooking with oil, the flavour changes and what you once would have enjoyed can taste pretty greasy now!
If you’re new to eating vegan food, you might not be very aware of the value of different foods, and calories can form a part of the whole picture and education to help you to learn about different foods.
It’s especially interesting to compare the nutrient value of a certain food using calories as a guide (thanks to the WFPB diet for this method of measuring) instead of the weight.
So, instead of taking 100 gr of food and comparing the nutrients, you take 100 calories of different foods and compare the nutrients. This give you a much more useful and practical way to understand the nutrient value of any given food.
Also, if you become vegan and only eat very low calorie foods, like just simple salads, without being aware of the nutritional content, you could end up losing weight when that isn’t your objective or even healthy for you.
So calories have their place and it’s important to have a general understanding of different foods and the roles they play in your nutritional profile, and that includes calories, but it’s best not to get obsessed by them.
Conclusion: calories are an important part of the information about any given food, but it isn’t necessary to obsess over them and it’s far more productive to learn how to eat a healthy balanced diet than to just count the calories.
Why Gluten Free?
All the recipes on Love Vegan Living are gluten free. Gluten is in almost everything these days, from bread to salad dressings, spice blends to snacks.
Gluten is a protein that’s very difficult for the human digestive system to digest, regardless of whether you’re intolerant or not. In my case, I was lucky enough to develop an intolerance, which led me to remove gluten from my diet.
Now, in hindsight, I’m very glad of that change, because I wouldn’t want to feed my body with gluten left, right and centre anyway, given how difficult it is to digest.
It was years ago now, and I became extremely intolerant to gluten, to the point where I have been my most sick ever in my life, from gluten contamination. Since having that experience so many times, my view to gluten, has naturally changed and I’ve become more informed on the story of gluten.
Even if I could, I wouldn’t want to eat it again. And you may think that gluten is ok for you because you’re not intolerant, but with gluten intolerance on the rise so dramatically we should be asking ourselves whether this is something you want to eat so much of anyway.
I mean they add it to absolutely everything. Even ice-cream can have gluten added to it.
If you don’t have a problem with gluten, and you want to use normal flour, feel free to substitute the gram/chickpea flour (for example) for regular wheat flour. In some recipes, the wheat flour might taste better whereas in others, the gram flour is the best choice.
For example, for making burgers or vegan balls, I would choose the gram/chickpea flour over wheat flour any day. It’s that gram flour that gives the dish its characteristics and flavour. Yet for a pizza base, using wheat flour could make your life easier.
Ultimately, the choice of whether or not to include gluten in your diet has to come from you.
Please share your results if you cook things from the site and come back to me with either positive results or constructive criticism so that I can continually evolve and improve the site for other readers.
And finally, thanks for stopping by!
Enjoy your whole foods plant based gluten free vegan lifestyle!
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
