"Kids, come on nagging. There's food." A friend recently sent me this message via WhatsApp. It was meant to cheer me up when I was once again complaining about being uninspired when it came to cooking. Putting two hot, filling and healthy meals on the table every day for six and sometimes more people is a challenge.

Especially as I love to eat, love to cook and want to spare my children the fast food or pizza-pasta trap despite my lack of time. Of course, with four always hungry schoolchildren growing up, slow food doesn't always work, but fast and ready meals or even the typical Swiss dinner with bread and co. shouldn't be on the menu. So I'm always on the lookout for new, delicious and quick ideas for big and small appetites.

A book that came onto the market in May piqued my curiosity. The "Greentopf" is the little brother or sister of the tried and tested "Tiptopf", which has sold over 200 million copies and is well-known in Swiss school kitchens. This book contains 210 vegetarian and vegan recipes. They range from crispy tofu, sweet potato and papaya curry, pad Thai, paprika strips with spinach noodles to traditional flatbread. This could well satisfy my children's experimental palates.

The recipes were created by 20 pupils from different cultural backgrounds and their teacher Franziska Stöckli. She thought it was time to offer schools a modern alternative. After all, the "Tiptopf" has been a standard part of home economics (now: WAH-Economics, Labour, Household) at Swiss schools for 30 years.

"The dishes should taste good and be enjoyable. We don't want to use the book to proselytise for or against a particular diet," says initiator Franziska Stöckli, describing the aim of the cookbook. And explains how she came up with the idea of publishing a cookery book by young people for young people: As a class teacher, she looked after a small group of teenagers at a "Timeout" school in Thurgau.

"The young people were given the chance to take time out because they were no longer coping in their class, had lost sight of the purpose of school or were in a personal emergency situation." Many of these children often only ate in front of the television at home." The cookery book project gave eating together at the table a new meaning. The families were also open to sharing their recipes. The recipes from the children's very different countries of origin are the centrepiece of "Greentopf". They were perfected in collaboration with the Hiltl Academy, the cookery academy of the vegetarian restaurant of the same name in Zurich.

By the way: I cooked the vegan plait and my children didn't even realise it was vegan.