Cook Your Own Fucking Life: Vegan Comfort Food Recipes to Feed Yourself and Build Community
Meatless, anti-capitalist & punk AF
For scrappy, can-do vegans on a budget, this essential cookbook eschews fancy ingredients and gets back to basics. It’s packed with attitude and recipes anyone can cook and eat, including comfort food, smoothies, holiday staples to feed your family, and dirty rice to feed the touring band sleeping on your floor.
More than just a collection of recipes, this is a DIY cultural icon. The book makes author Ashley Rowe Palafox’s long-out-of-print Barefoot and in the Kitchen zine accessible again, with spirited annotations and updated resources, so you can find plant-based, cruelty-free inspiration you need without needing to hunt through your co-op’s crusty cookbook collection. Because plant-based broke folks deserve good eats, too!
Read on for an early peek at updated classic Cook Your Own Fucking Life: Vegan Comfort Food Recipes to Feed Yourself and Build Community by Ashley Rowe Palafox, shipping directly from our site October 14th, available from your favorite local retailer November 1st!
This book had its beginnings nearly twenty years ago, in the cramped (and, let’s face it, kind of grimy) kitchen of a duplex in Santa Cruz, California. I was living on my own for the first time, joyfully surrounded by the punks and weirdos I felt most at home with and splitting my time evenly between school, shows, and refining any new vegan dish I could come up with. It was this last one, of course, that would inspire the zine Barefoot and in the Kitchen, the contents of which make up this book.
As a teenager, the bands I loved most had shaped my politics and guided my ethics toward animal liberation. By twenty years old, I had a few years of veganism under my belt. This was the age of silken-tofu-everything and feeling lucky if you could find one alternative milk option at the store—let alone for your latte. There was content on the internet and, indeed, this is where I picked up some of my most-used cooking techniques. But my favorite plant-based cookbook at the time was from a 1970s hippie commune, and the options for finding recipes were just not yet what they would go on to become, to put it mildly.
I knew cooking could be a chore, but I also realized how fun and liberating it could be to funnel my creativity into the kitchen and be the one responsible for nourishing myself and the folks I loved. I felt inspired by cooking, inventing and perfecting recipes and using new ingredients, often occupying the kitchen for much of the day. I realized quickly that I’d amassed a good amount of tasty and straightforward recipes that other people I knew might want to use. The punk scene with its DIY ethos taught me to share my resources with others; it also taught me that there was nothing stopping me from publishing my ideas myself! So, I typed up the recipes I’d created, drew a cover image, cut up some magazine pages and flyers for a little bit of flare, and gluesticked everything together into my first zine—Barefoot and in the Kitchen Volume One was born.
I’d intended this to be something I shared with friends and family who were looking for help feeding the vegans in their lives and had no aspirations for wide distribution. I made twenty-five copies, which were all gone before I knew it. Ok, people were kind of interested in this thing! Off to the copy shop again, then again and again. What followed over the next few years was something I never could have anticipated: three more volumes, and thousands of pages copied, collated, stapled and stuffed into envelopes or piled up on tables at shows and zine events.
Like most people who dare to assume their creative efforts will find an audience if only they are brave enough to put them out into the world, I reaped the benefits. I made friends with likeminded people I may never have met without the zine. My cat, GG, who was a kitten when I published the first issue, had life saving surgery a few years later in large part thanks to money I brought in fundraising with Barefoot. My friends and I made buttons with his little face on them that said, “I helped a kitty!” and sent them out with the orders, and I will never forget that it was my community who helped me to pay his mountain of vet bills, for a few vegan recipes in return.
Since the zine came out, just about everything in the world of vegan food has changed. I use ingredients now I never would have dreamed of having access to when I was writing Barefoot, and I find them in stores I never would have thought might carry them. Vegan food has cycled in and out of trendiness, but it has firmly established its place in the general consciousness, and chances of finding something suitable to eat in any given restaurant are better now than they have ever been, I am certain.
The internet overflows with recipes, and the cookbook aisle in the bookstore is flush with options. All this variety owes a debt to the vegans who were on the vanguard before it was in vogue, and I owe my small contribution to the canon to them, too. In light of all the changes of the last two decades, it feels worthwhile to preserve this work as a sort of time capsule— albeit a functional, living one, far from a mere curiosity. This book presents the contents of the original zines as more than the sum of their parts. It includes more than fifty delicious recipes that I still use in my own kitchen, and that I know you will enjoy. The book also offers a peek into the scene of the early 2000s, when DIY was not just an aesthetic but a necessity in living what would now be called a “plant-based” lifestyle. Veganism was not yet the trend it would become, for both better and worse, and still bore the fangs of its radical politics and countercultural roots.
Make delicious plant-based food for yourself, your loved ones, and your community with Cook Your Own Fucking Life: Vegan Comfort Food Recipes to Feed Yourself and Build Community by Ashley Rowe Palafox, available now for preorder and hitting shelves November 1st!