![\"Makin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/0024cd0f-614.jpg\"\/)
\nMakin’s latest book is all about easy dinners (Handout\/PA)<\/p>\n
Before switching to a plant-based diet, food writer Richard Makin had a decidedly un-vegan job: making ice cream.<\/p>\n
He spent three years driving around London, selling ice cream sandwiches \u2013 before turning vegan in 2017, something he called a “surprisingly intuitive transition”.<\/p>\n
“I overdosed on dairy ingredients, because I was making all of the ice cream myself,” says Makin, 39, now based outside of Manchester.<\/p>\n
“So every single day I was pouring cream, eggs and everything into a big pasteuriser.”<\/p>\n
\nMakin’s latest book is all about easy dinners (Handout\/PA)<\/p>\n
This, coupled with the fact he shared a production premises with a now-defunct vegan street food company, showed him the potential of plant-based food.<\/p>\n
“They did the most spectacular vegan Vietnamese food you\u2019ve ever tasted, and it was down to those trades \u2013 I would give them a scoop of ice cream, and they\u2019d give me a banh mi or something \u2013 that I realised that you can love food and be vegan at the same time,” Makin remembers.<\/p>\n
“I don\u2019t think I had put those two things together \u2013 I always thought that vegan food was kind of a punishment. A lot of people think of it that way, and it\u2019s just not true. It just takes a little bit of learning and a little bit of kitchen ingenuity, and you can create food that\u2019s absolutely as good \u2013 if not better \u2013 than anything else.”<\/p>\n
Makin\u2019s time working with ice cream introduced him to the world of recipe development: “The thing I loved about making ice cream was coming up with those flavours and making them a reality.”<\/p>\n
In 2017, he founded his Instagram account, School Night Vegan, tracking his switch from vegetarian to vegan, and in 2018 he shut down his ice cream business to go all-in on vegan recipe development. In 2023, he wrote his first cookbook \u2013 Anything You Can Cook, I Can Cook Vegan \u2013 and he\u2019s now releasing his follow-up: Stress-Free Dinners.<\/p>\n
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While his debut was “very much for vegans”, Makin says, his latest offering is “for absolutely everybody”. You won\u2019t find any unusual ingredients in the recipes, with the dishes designed to be “so accessible and so unintimidating”, he notes.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s also writing in a slightly different food landscape. It seems like veganism was everywhere five or so years ago, but the climate has changed \u2013 which Makin calls “a market correction”.<\/p>\n
“There was this huge boom in the kind of products that you could buy as a vegan, and that really won a lot of people over \u2013 whether it was Beyond Burgers, or the vegan sandwiches at M&S or whatever. It made it a lot easier for people to be vegan.<\/p>\n
“I think there was always going to be a pendulum swing, because it was such a huge explosion\u2026 But I think most people have just incorporated vegan ideas and vegan meals and vegan recipes into their diet in a way that they never would have 10 years ago, so maybe they don\u2019t identify as a vegan.<\/p>\n
“But in terms of the number of plant-based meals that people are eating and the positive attitude towards high-fibre diets and plant-based proteins and things like that, people are just as open as they ever have been, if not more.<\/p>\n
“I feel like the tide\u2019s changing, but I don\u2019t necessarily think it\u2019s in a bad way. It\u2019s doing exactly what vegetarianism did 15 years ago, which is it stopped being this buzzword and stopped being the butt of the jokes\u2026 It\u2019s just not really a big deal anymore.”<\/p>\n
![\"Makin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/0024cd18-614.jpg\"\/)
\nMakin suggests plant-based meals have become much more acceptable in everyday life (Handout\/PA)<\/p>\n
This means that “vegans look different than they used to”, Makin suggests. “There used to be this whole image that went along with being a vegan, and it had this anti-establishment edge to it. Whereas now, my mum and dad are vegan; they\u2019re both 75, and they made the switch the past five years, and it wasn\u2019t a big deal.<\/p>\n
“It wasn\u2019t a political decision; it wasn\u2019t an identity crisis or anything like that. It was just, oh, we\u2019ll give it a try, and they found it easier than they thought and they felt good on it, so they carried on doing it. It\u2019s as simple as that really.”<\/p>\n
You won\u2019t find much fake meat in Makin\u2019s recipes \u2013 in his new book, just one recipe involves plant-based sausages \u2013 with a focus on protein sources like tofu and tempeh instead.<\/p>\n
Makin suggests that plant-based meat replacements are one area where “the tide has really changed”, suggesting that people were “overexposed” to these ingredients.<\/p>\n
“I think overexposure was a big reason for why people started to look elsewhere for their sources of base protein, but also all the conversations around ultra-processed meals and ingredients really put a lot of people off,” he says.<\/p>\n
“Whether that\u2019s right or wrong \u2013 there\u2019s a lot of pushback on whether that\u2019s actually as big a deal as we thought it was.”<\/p>\n
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Makin does cook with meat replacements “every now and then” as they can “really help you in a pinch”, but adds: “It\u2019s not something I use every day.”<\/p>\n
For anyone who does want to incorporate more vegan meals into their diet, Makin warns against trying too hard.<\/p>\n
“People tend to overthink it. They try and find stuff that feels completely new that fits their idea of what vegan food is, when in reality, vegan food can be exactly what you were eating yesterday, but without the animal products,” he notes.<\/p>\n
“Whether that means you\u2019re buying store-bought replacements or you\u2019re learning how to use tofu\u2026 When you make those switches in your mind, you don\u2019t have to reinvent the wheel with every meal. You can substitute in a way that feels really intuitive.”<\/p>\n
Stress-Free Dinners by Richard Makin is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Publishing. Photography by Richard Makin. Available now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before switching to a plant-based diet, food writer Richard Makin had a decidedly un-vegan job: making ice cream.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583872,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60],"class_list":["post-583871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}