Well, they’re all fantastic…

Veganomicon and Vegan with a Vengeance are both great for new vegans. The Veganomicon is a great source for basically every basic recipe you could want to make and a good starting point for being creative after you learn how to make the initial recipe. These books don’t have a ton of pictures though. 

Vegan Brunch is nice if you’re in love with breakfast (I am) and need ideas for switching breakfast food for vegan methods. Once you know how to make a tofu scramble though, you can basically use anything you have on hand, these recipes aren’t usually ones I follow to the letter but use as guidelines to learn how to make something using ingredients that I have. There’s lots of pictures in this one and quite a few fun ideas for making food that is guest (even non-vegan) worthy, as well as staples for everyday.

My favourites though are Vegan Pie in the Sky/ Vegan Cookies Invade your Cookie Jar/Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. These I find are the most useful as baking isn’t something you can easily improvise until you are quite experienced and all of the recipes I have tried from these books have turned out great just following the instructions. There’s a picture for pretty much every recipe too which is nice. Vegan baking is super easy too and quite a few of the recipes don’t call for any strange ingredients.

You can also check out her website/blog/forum here, there’s recipes and tips and general cool stuff.

I answered an ask a while ago too that has ideas for 5 easy meals that are fairly cheap and can be made using basic ingredients + whatever you have to work with.

Nice to hear from you again! Have a great day, and good luck cooking!