Six Months In — What Cooking Vegan Actually Taught Me

Six months ago I could not have told you with any confidence what miso paste was, what tempeh tasted like, or why anyone would bother pressing tofu before cooking it. I knew vaguely that nutritional yeast was a thing and had a working knowledge of chickpeas that extended to making hummus and not much else. My partner had been vegan for two years. We were eating a lot of meals where they had something adapted, or something that was technically vegan but clearly designed around what I actually wanted to eat. I decided to change that.

The first month was uncomfortable in the way that learning any skill from scratch is uncomfortable. I made a lot of mediocre food. I leaned too heavily on pasta with tomato sauce. I burned a lot of tofu. I made a lentil soup that my partner ate with the patient expression of someone being very kind to me. Learning to cook anything well takes time; learning to cook vegan food well — especially when you've spent years cooking around meat as the assumed centre of every dish — takes longer than you'd expect.

By month three, something had changed. I understood, in a practical sense, why fat matters so much in plant-based cooking — not just for flavour but for satiety and texture. I'd figured out that building umami without meat requires deliberate layering: a splash of soy sauce here, a spoonful of miso there, dried mushrooms soaked and added with their liquid. I was making things I was genuinely pleased with. My partner had stopped making the kind face.

What surprised me most was how much my cooking improved more broadly — not just the vegan stuff, but across everything. When you can't default to a piece of protein as the answer to every question, you start paying more attention to texture combinations, to the role of acid in balancing richness, to how different cooking methods transform the same vegetable into something almost unrecognisable. I cook better now in every context because of what I learned in the vegan context.

My partner's response to all of this has been less sentimental than I might have hoped — they mostly just eat the food and occasionally say it's good. But there was one evening about two months ago when they said, unprompted, that dinner was the best meal they'd had in months. It was a simple dal with roasted cauliflower and a tahini sauce. Not complicated. Not trying to be anything it wasn't. Just food, cooked well, by someone who'd finally stopped looking for shortcuts. That felt like enough.