Veg Cookbooks

[Guest guest]

Lisa...

Great veg cookbook... very easy recipes & kid friendly.

" Pretend Soup " by Mollie Katzen " .

Mollie has several excellent cookbooks available. I have 3 and enjoy them all.

They're vegetarian, not vegan.

 

Now that I've been vegan for 3 years... I'm often using " How it all Vegan -

Irresistible recipes for an Animal-Free Diet " by Barnard & Kramer.

When you're ready to GO VEGAN... most recipes can be adapted with easy

substitutions:

1.) soy milk instead of milk

2.) mashed tofu, applesauce or mashed bananas instead of eggs

3.) olive oil or non-hydrogenated parve margerines in place of butter.

 

Peace,

Michelle

 

 

<< " Lisa Tigani " <kwcanine

RE: Veg cookbook

 

Hey Everyone:

 

I am new to the list and was looking for suggestions on a good vegetarian

cookbook. Doesn't have to be vegan. Probably best if it isn't. I am trying

to make the transition from a meat-eater to a vegetarian and going without

eggs/milk as well might just be too big an adjustment to start with. I need

kid friendly recipes, have a 6 and a 4 year old. I really don't like to cook

much and often get into a rut of quick and easy convenience type foods. So I

also need recipes that are easy and simple to prepare. Chapters Bookstore is

having a 30% off on-line sale. Though I would much prefer to wander around

the actual store for a few hours looking at books I have a two month old as

well so on-line shopping probably works best right now. Any suggestions

would be most appreciated. >>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Easy Being Green

by Beth Kracklauer

 

There are few subjects that people take as personally as what other

people are eating—or not eating. I've experimented with

vegetarianism, on and off, since I was a teenager, and during a

recent " on " phase, which lasted about eight years, I was struck by

the intense interest people showed in my diet. There was the friend

who fretted every time we made dinner plans: " But what will you

eat? " There were the hosts, otherwise capable cooks, who prepared

ominously beige, flavorless nut loaves specially for me. (I'd have

settled, happily, for any of the far more appealing vegetable side

dishes on the table.) And then there were fellow diners who, after a

couple of glasses of wine, would suddenly blurt out, " Aha! I see

you're not above wearing leather shoes. " The forgoing of meat puts a

lot of people on the defensive, and yet, if a recent wave of

easygoing vegetarian and quasi-vegetarian cookbooks is any

indication, we may be in the midst of a sea change.

 

 

It's been a long time coming. Unlike in many parts of the world,

where remarkably vibrant vegetarian cuisines have developed as a

result of necessity or religious observance or both, in the West

purposeful abstinence from meat has traditionally been associated

with asceticism. Until the mid-19th century, in fact, when the word

vegetarian was popularized by the British Vegetarian Society, those

who eschewed the eating of animal flesh were widely known as

Pythagoreans, after the sixth-century B.C. Greek mathematician

Pythagoras, who is said to have accepted into his circle only

scholars willing to commit to the discipline of a meatless diet. In

1812 the first known vegetarian cookbook, Vegetable Cookery, was

published in England by one Martha Brotherton, a member of a sect

called the Bible Christians whose self-denial extended to alcohol as

well as meat. Beginning in the 1830s, the American minister and

dietary reformer Sylvester Graham (of cracker fame) preached

vegetarianism as an antidote to both alcoholism and lust; his ideas,

in turn, influenced the breakfast cereal innovator John Harvey

Kellogg, who promoted a high-fiber vegetarian diet at his famous

sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. A penitential strain in

vegetarian food survived, on both sides of the Atlantic, until well

into the 1970s, by which time it had been taken up by the hippie

counterculture and become entrenched in the popular consciousness as

a regimen that was as cheerless as it was meatless.

 

 

Perhaps it's fitting that a fresh take on vegetable-centered cooking

first emerged in the hippie heartland itself, San Francisco. In 1979

a Bay Area chef named Deborah Madison (now a SAVEUR contributing

editor), who had spent time in the kitchens of both the San

Francisco Zen Center and the legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez

Panisse, opened Greens, a restaurant that, in her words, " set out to

create a [vegetarian] cuisine whose complexity and interest left the

diner feeling that nothing was missing " . With dishes like

tagliatelle, asparagus, and peas with saffron cream and Provençal

potato gratin with olives and lemon thyme, Madison bridged the

divide between a principled commitment to eating compassionately and

a decidedly sensuous approach to food. She went on to write a number

of successful vegetarian cookbooks, reaching out to her widest

audience yet in 1997 with the ambitious Vegetarian Cooking for

Everyone, which has been called by some devotees a meatless Joy of

Cooking. The recently published tenth-anniversary edition (Broadway

Books, $40) shows just how prescient Madison's masterwork was. When

I revisited her recipe for brussels sprouts with mustard butter and

caraway, I was impressed by her intuitive knack for showing off farm-

fresh produce, that cornerstone of today's organic, eat-local ethic,

to its best advantage. The mustard and caraway chimed perfectly with

the sprouts' kick, while the butter tempered their more astringent

qualities. It takes a deep affinity for the ingredients at hand and

an unabashed love for rich flavors to produce a dish that is at once

so simple and so striking.

 

 

Over the years, I've found that my intermittent vegetarianism, far

from limiting my options, has actually broadened my palate and—

thanks to enlightening books like Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East

Vegetarian Cooking (Knopf, 1981)—my knowledge of many non-Western

cuisines. When I found vegetarian cookbooks lacking, I didn't

hesitate to plunder and adapt vegetable recipes from otherwise meat-

centric sources, including, with some regularity, How to Cook

Everything (Wiley, 1998), the exhaustive book of basics by the New

York Times columnist Mark Bittman. Now, in acknowledgment of

vegetarianism's vastly expanded appeal and repertoire, Bittman has

come out with How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (Wiley, $35). The

book is a thorough primer on meatless cookery, crammed with helpful

charts and sidebars like " Six Simple Additions to Cooked Beans "

and " Vegetarian Thickeners at a Glance " . Just as he did in his

earlier volume, Bittman suggests appetizing variations for nearly

every one of the book's more than 2,000 recipes; a classic (and

delicious) macaroni and cheese made with sharp cheddar, for example,

becomes a considerably more opulent dish with the addition of

mascarpone and wild mushrooms.

 

 

Bittman, who has not personally forsaken meat altogether and who

sees his book as merely a road map to help guide readers in the

direction of a more heavily plant-based diet, is responding to a

trend that's been gathering force over the past 15 years or so.

Americans are eating more vegetables than ever, thanks to myriad

factors: the number of farmers' markets in this country has surged,

for one thing, and in many restaurants traditional meat entrées have

given way to more-varied small plates. A neologism, flexitarian, has

even been coined to describe the sort of eater who adheres to a

largely vegetarian diet while still savoring the occasional serving

of meat, fish, or poultry. In The Flexitarian Table (Houghton

Mifflin, $30), Peter Berley, a former chef at the New York City

vegetarian mecca Angelica Kitchen, who earned praise for an earlier

book, The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen (HarperCollins, 2000), makes

this way of eating look like a balanced and sensible way to live.

Berley is especially convincing because he's actually lived this way

for years, creating meals to accommodate himself, his wife, and his

young daughter, all of whom occasionally eat meat, as well as his

older daughter, a strict vegetarian.

 

 

What's remarkable about Berley's book, apart from its deft

juxtapositions of fresh ingredients and complementary flavors from

different world cuisines, is its utter accessibility. It has nowhere

near the number of entries found in either Madison's or Bittman's

book, and that comes as something of a relief. With color

photographs throughout, a seasonally based structure, and helpful

menu suggestions, this is a book I've found myself hungrily

returning to again and again. Preparations like the shaved vegetable

and apple salad, a bracing, earthy mix of fennel, apples, radishes,

and sunchokes, all sliced paper thin, are unfussy and versatile

enough to pair with meat—a boon for those who don't inhabit the

extremes of the carnivore–herbivore continuum.

 

 

I'll confess that the purist in me—the one who endured the nut

loaves and worse in the name of avoiding meat—finds something wishy-

washy in all this big-tent vegetarianism. After all, long before the

flexitarians decided to think twice about where their food came

from, the unglamorous duty of raising consciousness about the

environmental and ethical depredations of heedless carnivorism fell

upon a hard core of committed vegetarians and vegans (those who

reject not only meat, fish, and fowl but also milk, eggs, honey, and

any animal-derived food). Maybe that's why I felt more than a little

glee on reading Veganomicon (Marlowe & Company, $27.50), an

exuberant and unapologetic vegan cookbook by Isa Chandra Moskowitz

and Terry Hope Romero, who express this lament in their

introduction: " Why nobody believes us when we mutter things about

sacrificing beets under the full moon, we'll never guess. "

 

 

Veganomicon calls to mind another recent rejoinder to the dour

stereotype of veganism, Skinny Bitch in the Kitch (Running Press,

$14.95), by the cheekily foul-mouthed duo Rory Freedman and Kim

Barnouin. Whereas Skinny Bitch is a diet book, though, Veganomicon

is anything but. Moskowitz and Romero's recipes don't skimp on fat

(of the nut-, seed-, and plant-derived variety) or flavor, and the

eclectic collection of dishes is a testament to the authors' sincere

love of cooking and culinary exploration. The selections range from

cholent, a Jewish stew traditionally served on the Sabbath, to

gazborscht, a spicy, Spanish-inflected version of the classic

eastern European chilled beet soup. I won't deny that the scrupulous

veganism to which the recipes adhere dampened my enthusiasm for

certain dishes: the unwelcome taste of margarine, for example,

marred an otherwise delicious cauliflower and mushroom pot pie with

black olive crust. But then, the authors aren't trying to please all

the people all the time. And, though I might make the personal

choice of trying out that recipe using butter, it's partisans like

Moskowitz and Romero who continually challenge me to approach such

choices thoughtfully.

This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #110