About

Hi there, and warm welcome!

We’re Nico Pallotta and Louise Vestergaard—husband, wife, and business partners—passionate about sharing delicious, plant-based recipes.

Together, we run The Plant-Based School (theplantbasedschool.com), a food blog dedicated to easy, healthy, and flavorful vegetarian and vegan recipes.

Our mission? To help you eat more veggies—deliciously! We keep things simple with approachable ingredients and mouthwatering flavors, making plant-based eating easy and enjoyable.

We are glad you are here ❤️.

Nico and Louise in front of the Consolazione church in Todi — Louise and Nico in front of the **Santa Maria della Consolazione** church in Todi, Italy. Pics taken by @Zouhair Bellahmar.

Our recipes are:

Mostly vegetarian, sometimes vegan—always delicious. These are the recipes we eat daily, and we can’t wait to share them with you. They’re simple, satisfying, and will make you feel amazing.
Easy, affordable, foolproof. We use everyday ingredients, step-by-step photos, easy swaps, and quick recipe videos to make cooking a breeze.
100% real, made by us. We cook, test, taste, write, photograph, and film everything ourselves—no AI-generated content, just real food from our kitchen to yours.

START HERE with these reader favorites:

Nico after testing Ooni pizza dough too many times and making a ton of mistakes so that you don't have to. — Nico after testing Ooni pizza dough too many times and making a ton of mistakes so that you don’t have to.

Who are we?

The Plant Based School is a small family business run by Nico Pallotta and Louise Vestergaard.

While Nico cooks, Louise is our blog manager and handles our business’ commercial aspects. She also takes photos, makes videos, and edits our content for social media.

We met in Dublin, Ireland, while working in the same company.

In 2020, we started this blog and moved to Todi, Italy, a small hilltop town in the Umbrian countryside.

Nico and Louise in front of the Church of San Fortunato

That’s why some of our recipes are inspired by Italian and Mediterranean traditions.

We are influenced by our surroundings and the wonderful variety of fresh produce available here.

At the end of 2021, we decided to go full-time with our blog, and we feel endlessly grateful that we get to be together and work together every single day.

Our cats, Kiki and Pepe, help us with recipe testing (Kiki loves corn, and Pepe loves pumpkin puree), moral support, and loud purring.

Featured in

As Seen In

University of California: Plant-powered spring

University of Washington: Healthy fall recipes

Yahoo Lifestyle: Audrey Hepburn’s favorite meal

Instacart: Anniversairy dinner to impress

Tasting Table: Fried tofu

What does plant-based mean?

The term plant-based means different things to different people.

For us, it’s not the same as a vegan diet.

A plant-based or plant-forward approach includes all foods but emphasizes whole grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and healthy oils.

It doesn’t mean you have to be vegan or give up desserts, eggs, dairy, or meat entirely.

Here on the blog, we share our best vegetarian (and sometimes vegan) recipes—delicious, wholesome, and easy to make!

To learn more about plant-based diets, check out these articles:

Louise and Nico drinking coffee and working hard — Louise and Nico at their favorite cafe, @The Factory, in Todi, Italy.

How to stay in touch?

How to read our recipes?

1. “Jump to Recipe” button.

We try to be as structured as possible to simplify your life and cooking.

You can always find a “jump to recipe” button in all our recipes at the top of the page. It’ll take you straight to the recipe.

The recipe is always at the end of the page. This is an industry-wide practice, and most blog readers are used to this layout.

But if you want to learn more about the recipe (like variations, ingredients, substitutions, and tips) and how to make the best version, please read the text in the body of the article.

Nico always tries to share his knowledge with you and includes the most important information to make the recipe successful.

2. US Measurements…and the Metric System

We test and write all our recipes in US measurements (cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons) and the metric system (grams).

You can switch between US Cups and Metric measurements in the recipe box.

We do not use cup-to-grams or grams-to-cup converters because those are often inaccurate; we measure every ingredient in US cups and grams ourselves.

Thank you for your interest in our content! Please remember that our recipes, pictures, and videos are copyrighted material. We have worked very hard to produce it.

Using our photos to promote this blog.

You may use 1 photo to share a recipe and/or our blog in general as long as you include a link to our blog.

Please do not share more than one image from a post without our permission; email us here at team[at]theplantbasedschool.com.

We do not allow republishing entire recipes (with pictures, ingredients, and instructions).