One of the keys to success with a whole foods, plant-based diet is to cook your own food. Eating out and buying prepared food is a recipe for consuming lots of extra fat, salt and sugar, even if you stick to vegan foods. It really helps if you have a kitchen set up that allows you to prepare your fruit and veggies efficiently, because you’re going to be doing a lot of it.

I’ve got a kitchen island with a wooden top that I use for cutting on directly. Not having to haul out a cutting board (except for those bloody beets) and clean it and put it away saves me some time and effort. The island has some hooks for hanging frequently used tools so I never have to scrounge for them in a cluttered drawer. My compost bin hangs right on the island so I can easily scrape onion peels, pepper seeds and carrot tops straight in.

I love having a large cutting surface and work top all in one.

This is where it all happens in my kitchen.

A scraper is the perfect tool for scraping stuff into the compost bin and also transferring things from the cutting board into a pan. My stove is right behind me as I stand at the island, so I’m always going from one to the other, but before I had the scraper I dropped a lot of chopped onions on the floor.

The scraper is also invaluable when it comes time to clean up crumbs or remove sticky stuff from the butcher block.

Have I mentioned that I really like just being able to scrape stuff into the compost? Because I get a thrill every time I do it.

Look, the scraper in action! 

Not everyone has space in their kitchen for this kind of island/worktop, but I’d strongly recommend that you find the biggest cutting board that can possibly fit in the space you have available and sort out some way of dealing with the peels and cores that doesn’t involve you having to gather them up in your hands and walk across the room to a garbage can. You want to remove any barriers to cooking, physical or otherwise.