The Veg Blog

In my never-ending attempt to catch up on cookbook reviews, here is a trio of books that came out a while back from Surrey Books. Thanks to Surrey for sending these along for me to take a look at.

The Veganopolis Cookbook
by David Stowell & George Black
Surrey/Agate, 2010

Authors David Stowell and George Black ran the Veganopolis restaurant in Portland from 2003 to 2008. They’ve since moved to Chicago, but put together this hefty collection of recipes from the restaurant’s five-year run.

Being that these are recipes that were created to build a strong menu, they aren’t necessarily simple choices that you’ll turn to late on a Monday night. But, on a weekend with some extra time, you might want to spend the afternoon in the kitchen putting together the lasagna or Blackened Tofu Étouffée. There’s no shortage of intricate, unique, restaurant-quality dishes to be had.

Being a family that’s always eating a late dinner, we’ve only been able to try a few of the less ambitious recipes. We liked the Classic Pot Pie, but didn’t go for the spelt crust. We really enjoyed the Easy Vegan Dumplings and had good success with the simple Cabbage, Carrot, and Parsley Slaw, both served as parts of a larger meal.

There’s limited food photography and what’s there is harshly lit. Nevertheless, the food itself is the star and I suspect there’s a lot here to like for home cooks looking for something a little more advanced than the typical beginner’s vegan cookbook.

Venturesome Vegan Cooking
by J.M. Hirsch and Michelle Hirsch
Surrey/Agate, 2004/2010

Originally published in 2004 as Venturesome Vegetarian Cooking, Venturesome Vegan Cooking delivers creative, whole food vegan recipes that don’t require extravagant preparation and are elegant in their simplicity. There’s nary a mock meat dish to be found and the flavors are bright and exciting.

Our successes in this book: a super simple tofu salad, the bright tasting Zippy Zingy Pasta Shell Salad, bordering-on-too-fudgey fudge pops, and the surprisingly pleasing combination of apples and kale in the Apple-Fried Greens and Orecchiette Pasta. And one of these days, I may even be extra venturesome and try the vegan haggis, something I thought only existed on the shelf at Food Fight.

The only frustrating thing in this book is that it’s VEFH (Vegan Except For Honey). Thankfully, honey’s one of those things that can be easily be subbed for, but until we stop putting honey in recipes labeled “vegan,” we’ll keep getting served items with honey by omnis that think it’s a vegan ingredient.

I highly recommend Venturesome Vegan Cooking as one of those books you’ll keep finding new inspiration in years after it’s found its way into your collection.

Vegan Baking Classics
by Kelly Rudnicki
Surrey/Agate, 2010

When I went first went vegetarian over ten years ago, I never would have thought that the day would come where I’d see a vegan baking book and say, “Wow… another one?” It’s got to be difficult for a vegan baker today to stand out with so many excellent books already on the market. Kelly Rudnicki, who you may know as Food Allergy Mama, throws her hat into the ring with Vegan Baking Classics.

As with most baking books, a few pages are spent explaining the basics of vegan baking for those that are terrified at the notion of not using eggs in their cookies. The recipes include the standard list of breads, muffins, biscuits, cookies, bars, cakes, cupcakes, pies, and “other.” There’s beautiful, simple food photography on glossy pages for the majority of recipes in the book.

Thusfar, we’ve enjoyed just about everything we’ve made. The chocolate chip brownies are a great midway between cakey and fudgey, the zucchini bread was delicious (and we subbed in half whole wheat flour), and the Heart-Healthy Oatmeal Pancakes and oatmeal muffins are two excellent go-to recipes for breakfast. Our two favorites were the Oatmeal Raisin Cookies (we added chocolate chips and used a mixture of spelt and whole wheat flour) and the chocolate chip cookies (I have yet to make a chocolate chip cookie I didn’t like). Our only dud recipe was the dinner biscuit recipe. Compared to others we’ve made in the past, the dough was really hard to work with, though the end result was tasty enough.

The one recipe I really can’t wait to make: Snickeroos. Oh man. I loved those things growing up and haven’t had one in many, many years.

Rudnicki’s book is another worthy entry into the series of vegan baking books that are likely on your shelf. Do you need another? Yeah, sure… couldn’t hurt, right? I mean, come on… Snickeroos!

Back in my early days of begin vegetarian, Erik Marcus was one of the first vegans I talked to and met up with. I remember meeting him for a breakfast in Ithaca when my wife and I were in town visiting Farm Sanctuary.

Erik’s always been one to try new things in terms of book promotion. A while back, I remember him giving away free PDF copies of his first book, Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating. And now, he’s drastically dropped the price on his most recent book, The Ultimate Vegan Guide. The paperback price has been slashed from $14.95 to $8.95 and the Kindle price has dropped to a mere 99 cents!

Getting a 99 cent book about veganism onto a family member’s Kindle should be a great way to plant the seed in their mind. It should be interesting to see how this experiment of Erik’s works out.

Lots of catching up to do with cookbook reviews, so let’s get started with a few baking books that have piled up over the last year or two.

Ani’s Raw Food Desserts
by Ani Phyo
Da Capo/Lifelong, 2009

I’ve been a fan of Ani Phyo since her first book, Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen hit the shelves in 2007. This book focuses solely on desserts, all raw and free of wheat, gluten, dairy, and processed sugar.

There’s a nice variety of desserts here, from frozen items like Pineapple Icebox Cakes and Key Lime Kream Bars to cakes, cookies, fudge, crisps and cobblers, and sun-baked treats like scones and biscuits. As with Ani’s first book, the recipes are relatively easy to make and don’t usually require ingredients that are too off-the-wall or hard to find. Certainly her recipes are easier with something like a Vitamix on hand, but most don’t require extensive dehydrating or preparation. Ani continues to be one of the most accessible raw chefs.

I had good luck with the Coconut Ice Kream recipe, made with just five ingredients: cashews, filtered water, agave, shredded coconut, and coconut oil. It’s surprisingly easy and offers up a strong coconut flavor and smooth texture.

Also very simple and quick are Sliced Apples with Rosemary. With only three ingredients (apples, lemon, and rosemary), this an amazing little dessert that perfectly combines sweet, sour, and savory. Love it, love it.

While I haven’t had a chance to try out any of the cakes yet, I hope to make the cheesecakes soon along with some filled chocolate truffles on the side.

The book is small and well-designed (it’s basically the same layout as Isa’s cookie and cupcake books) with beautiful food photography. Definitely worth having on hand if you’re experimenting with raw foods and want to delve into the sweet side of things.

Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar
by Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero
Da Capo/Lifelong, 2009

I’m definitely late to the game reviewing this one, given that pretty much everyone that reads this blog probably has a copy, but here we go anyway. Viva la catching up!

Cookies. It’s a book with lots and lots of cookies. Kind of like the cupcake book, except with cookies.

The basic chocolate chip cookie recipe is quite good, of course, as are the Chocolate Fudgy Oatmeal Cookies (known around our house as the Compromise Cookie since I’m all about the chocolate and my wife’s into oatmeal cookies). The whole wheat chocolate chip cookies are a slightly healthier version of the old classic, making use of the love-it-or-hate-it white whole wheat flour. The recipe also works well just combining half all-purpose and half whole-wheat flour. The Orange Agave Chocolate Chip cookies, however, were disappointing. With the combination of orange and chocolate, I was expecting the world.

And in the “not-a-cookie, but good anyway” category, the Deluxe Cocoa Brownies are moist and super awesome.

Reading back this review, I realize that I’ve pretty much only made chocolate chip cookie variations. Not sure what’s up with that, but there are certainly a handful of other cookies I’m dying to try out at some point, including the Lazy Samoas, Peanut Butter Chocolate Pillows, and Peanut Apple Pretzel Drops.

The book’s got great photography, the familiar Da Capo “square vegan baking book” layout mentioned in the last review, and all of the wonderful added text from Isa and Terry you’d expect. The recipes are not heavily reliant on Earth Balance, so if you avoid EB, it’s not an issue. Another thumbs up for America’s favorite cooking duo.

Flying Apron’s Gluten-Free & Vegan Baking Book
by Jennifer Katzinger
Sasquatch Books, 2009

While no one in my family has any level of gluten intolerance (that we know of, at least!), I still try to keep up on gluten-free cooking and baking. With so many more people finding out that they’re intolerant or allergic, it’s helpful to have some knowledge of different flours and baking techniques so you can accommodate everyone at a dinner party or make sure all the little ones in your son or daughter’s class can join in when it comes time for birthday cupcakes.

Jennifer Katzinger runs the Flying Apron bakery in Seattle and this cookbook offers up some straight-up gluten-free goodness for anyone ready to dive headfirst into gluten-free baking. The recipes in this book are VEFH (seriously, what’s up with the vegan books that still have honey as an ingredient? Can we just list agave instead or, at the very least, use the term “liquid sweetener”?) and all the recipes are appropriate for those with Celiac Disease (meaning low-gluten flours like spelt are not used). In addition, all recipes are soy-free.

Before going any further, let me be honest: I’ve made only two recipes from this book. While there are a lot of really, really tempting recipes, in many cases, one of two things held me back. For one, lots of the recipes called for a stand mixer, which I don’t have. I realize that it can be done by hand, but sometimes I just don’t feel like putting in the effort.

The biggest issue, though, is that these recipes can get quite expensive to make. For instance, to make one 10-inch square Earl Grey Tea Cake, you need three cups of maple syrup. Given what maple syrup costs, that’s easily $10 in just sweetener for just one cake. Yikes.

Some bakers may also be turned off by the use of palm oil in many recipes, given the issues that exist.

Obviously some of the flours are going to be tricky to find, too, but that’s not a criticism I’m willing to level on a gluten-free cookbook. If you’re going to get into gluten-free baking, you’ll get used to hunting down brown rice flour, hazelnut flour, and quinoa flour.

So, with all that said, let’s get to the food.

The first recipe I tried was the basic chocolate chip cookie recipe, which uses brown rice flour and garbanzo bean flour (which tends to lend a nice “egginess” to foods). While recipes with brown rice flour can tend to be a bit gritty, these cookies were quite tasty and didn’t suffer from an overly gritty texture.

For Thanksgiving last year, I made the pumpkin pie, which makes use, interestingly, of apricot puree. There’s definitely an apricot-y flavor to the pie, so it’s not traditional in that sense, but it is quite good. The texture wasn’t firm enough for my liking, but overall, I enjoyed it.

Given my lengthy commentary, you might think I wouldn’t recommend this book, but the fact is that I’ve recommended it and lent it out several times to friends with Celiac or with gluten-intolerant children. Even with its faults, it’s still quite a resource for those that still want the sweetness in their life but may not live near a Babycakes or Flying Apron.

500 Vegan Recipes
by Celione Steen and Joni Marie Newman
Fair Winds Press
Buy Now

When 500 Vegan Recipes arrived in the mail for review a while back, I have to admit I rolled my eyes a bit when I saw the title. Here was a compendium of recipes bound for the dollar bin at Barnes & Noble. It didn’t take more than a minute of flipping through the book, though, to see that I was being a big dummy and judging a book by its cover (title).

500 Vegan Recipes has quickly become one of our favorite go-to cookbooks when we want something relatively simple, but new. While there are some old standbys in here, by and large, there are a lot of surprises and interesting twists that will keep this one on the shelf when others gather dust.

Food bloggers Steen (of Have Cake Will Travel) and Newman (Just the Food) compile 20 chapters and 500 pages of recipes ranging from breakfasts to casseroles to sides, and you know the rest. Lots of food from beginning to end in every imaginable category.

Our favorites thusfar include Butternut Drop Biscuits (made with spelt flour, oats, and butternut squash puree, they taste amazing right out of the oven getting that sweet and savory balance just right), a delicious Garlic and Sage Cashew Cream Sauce that we had on pasta but would be perfect as a pizza base (double the recipe… trust me), the budget-friendly Beefy Bacon Burgers) which take the unlikely hodgepodge of peanut butter, bacos, TVP, yeast, oil, and a few other things and make an easy and filling burger), Mac and Sleaze, and a Swiss-inspired Rosemary Apple Potato Rosti that would make a perfect late fall/early winter side.

We’ve made 23 recipes from here thusfar (still not even 5% of what’s in the book!) and only three haven’t been unadulterated thumbs up (and of those three, two were split decisions in our household). Not bad at all.

As I mentioned, while most of the recipes here are within the grasp of anyone with a little bit of kitchen time under their belt, you’ll be surprised at what you’ll find. Like the nicely spicy Chorizo, Cranberry, and Cornbread stuffing or the Creamy Pumpkin Almond Sauce as a super simple pasta and veggie topper. The Raw Lemon Cheesecake is another winner I haven’t seen elsewhere (and it’s not hard, even making the raw crust from scratch). There’s a lot of international influence here, too, ensuring a range of flavors for every palate.

While there aren’t any photos in the book (not unusual for such a giant tome), Steen and Newman’s blogs have more than enough to let you see what you’ll be getting.

For well under $20 at most online stores, it’s going to be hard to get a better deal on such a huge collection of recipes that you’ll return to again and again. I recommend this one whole-heartedly.

(Just to show how slow I can be with my reviews, the authors already have another book up for pre-order: The Complete Guide to Vegan Food Substitutions and a third book in the works.)

Children’s books about animals can either be really awesome or really depressing. The ones that teach children about animals’ personalities and their individual likes and dislikes are great. The books that make fun of them or end up making light of things like eating eggs or bacon are pretty evil.

And there’s a new breed of books coming out that are explicitly vegan-friendly, like Maya Gottfried’s Our Farm: By the Animals of Farm Sanctuary. Maya’s fun (but not overly cutesy) poems are a perfect match for the paintings and sketches by Robert Rahway Zakanitch. The animals featured are all actual residents (past or present) of Farm Sanctuary.

Rather than go into any further detail myself, I thought I’d get some help from Rasine to review this book. Here’s the audio (with some sections edited out for brevity and clarity):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You heard her. Go buy a copy! (And become a fan of Izzy and Morty on Facebook, since they came up in our discussion.)

Three mini-reviews for you this time around, to start making up (again) for lost time. If you just want to enter the contest, jump right to it.

In Search of the Lost Taste

I’ve been a fan of Microcosm Publishing for a number of years. Though I was a latecomer to the DIY wonder that are zines, I’ve been able to make up for lost time by ordering hand-drawn comics, zine anthologies, and, most importantly, cookzines (and though I’m sure they exist, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-vegan cookzine). Though I’m a regular Microcosm customer, they’ve also sent along a number of items to review and I’ve been pretty poor about keeping up.

The latest item they sent along was a copy of Joshua Ploeg’s In Search of the Lost Taste. Ploeg is a traveling vegan personal chef that wrote the entertaining A Chef’s Tale travel zine based on his time on the road as a traveling chef. If you’ve read A Chef’s Tale you’ll be ready for the unique approach Ploeg takes in In Search of the Lost Taste.

A combination cookbook and surreal tale of a tomato and aliens, Ploeg’s latest is unlike anything you’ve seen before. Ploeg takes pride in combining seemingly incompatible ingredients and creating something amazine out of them. Where else have you seen recipes like:

• Bamboo, Radish, Leek Hearts & Fried Gluten in Spicy Coconut Milk Sauce
• Cherry Wontons with Plum-Brandy Sauce and Yam-Mango Ice Cream
• Orange and Vanilla Tart with Mint & Pineapple Glaze
• or, Beet Pancakes with Creamy Dill Sauce & Wild Mushroom-Walnut Spread

While the book is aimed at the more adventurous eaters (I wouldn’t, for example, choose one of these recipes to serve to your grandmother-who-only-eats-beef as her first introduction to vegan food), you won’t find yourself thinking, “Oh man… another ‘Basic Hummus’ recipe?!!”

Thusfar, we’ve only tried one recipe (Potato-Cucumber Salad with Onions & Sweet-Sour Parsley Vinaigrette, which, by the way, makes a metric asston of food). It was very tasty and leaves me anxious to explore some of Ploeg’s more avant-garde recipes. (And the illustrations are great, too.)

Want a copy? You’ve got two choices:

1. Tweet the following phrase: “Hey, @thevegblog, I want to win a copy of ‘In Search of Lost Taste’! #losttaste” On Tuesday January 26th at 9am eastern, I’ll pick a winner. I’ll ship anywhere in the world. Maybe even to the moon.
2. Pick up a copy at Microcosm or AK Press for well under $10.

“Peace To All Creatures” Zine

The world can never have enough vegan-themed zines, so I was happy to see another one hitting the shelves last year titled “Peace to All Creatures.” Designwise, it’s quite nice, with an attractive color cover, nice photography (including a shot by yours truly in the second issue), and articles split into three categories: animals, veg diet & health, and social & green issues. The zine is edited by Pippi Howard from Colorado and Jessi VanPelt from Orlando (yes, seriously, it’s a zine that’s not produced in Portland!) and all of the writers in the first issue are women. There’s a little something for everyone here, from an article on vegan diets for dogs to a piece about pet snails and a feature about green art studios.

Given that non-glossy vegan magazines are slim pickings these days, it’s nice to see a well-written, well-designed zine like “Peace to All Creatures.” Sure, there are a thousand vegan blogs out there today, but it’s really nice to have something like this to leave out on your coffee table for visitors to flip through. Well done, Pippi and Jessi!

You can buy the first two issues on Etsy. And of course, there’s a Facebook page as well.

Vegan Fire & Spice: 200 Sultry and Savory Global Recipes

I’ll come clean right now and tell you I can’t deal with hot and spicy food very well. Plus, with a three-year-old, our food tends to be on the milder side. With that in mind, I wasn’t expecting to be able to make much out of Vegan Fire & Spice. It’s certainly not because I’m not a fan of Robin Robertson’s books — the pot pie from Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes is one of my favorites and I really enjoyed Quick-Fix Vegetarian. As it turns out, we just cut back a bit and have enjoyed everything we’ve made from here thusfar (plus, Robinson notes that “spicy doesn’t have to mean hot,” so not all of the recipes are made to singe your palate).

Each recipe is marked with a number of peppers, to help give an indication of how much you can expect your mouth to burn. The book is divided into five sections (The Americas, Mediterranean Europe, Middle East/Africa, India, and Asia), each with several subsections. As with all of Robinson’s books, each recipe is given context with a short write-up and there’s an informative introduction.

Thusfar, we’ve made with success: Vietnamese Noodles with Tempeh and Peanuts (big yum!), Baked Mahogany Tempeh, the very easy and tasty Ginger Broccoli, and South African Green beans.

While this book seems to have not received as much attention as her others (including her most recent, 1,000 Vegan Recipes (!!!)), every time I pick it up, I find another recipe I want to try. It’s a good one, even if you’re a hot and spicy wimp like me.

(Edited to provide an alternate source for Joshua Ploeg’s book.)

Thanksgiving can be a rough time, particularly for new vegans that still celebrate with meat-eating family. It’s not easy sometimes to handle the chides that come with eating differently from everyone else at the table. And, especially the first time, it can be hard to resist the comfort food we remember from our childhood. There’s been a lot written about how to do a vegan Thanksgiving, but hey, there can always be a little more, right?

So, here are some ways to help get you through the holiday season stuffed and happy.

Get to cooking!

Whether you’re spending a quiet Thanksgiving at home or braving an evening of stupid questions and taunts from 20 family members, there are some great resources online to help you get cooking and make sure that you not only have something to eat, but something to wow the rest of the family as well.

I got a peek at Nava Atlas’ significantly updated version of A Bountiful Vegan Thanksgiving e-book and it’s mighty impressive. It features 65 recipes in all, including Nava’s own as well as contributions from all your favorite veg cookbook authors and bloggers (among them: Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Dreena Burton, Jill Nussinow, and Bryanna Clark Grogan). The e-book sells for $8.95 and all profits go to “humanitarian charities concerned with hunger, microfinancing for women in developing countries, and the alleviation of human trafficking.”

Then, over at Vegan.com, there’s a guest post from Robin Robertson (author of many cookbooks, including the new and massive 1,000 Vegan Recipes). A full Thanksgiving menu is presented. The Triple Cranberry Relish and Ginger-Dusted Pumpkin Cheezecake sound mighty good. (Last year’s guest post is also still available.)

Go to a real Thanksgiving…

And by that, I mean a celebration that doesn’t involve killing turkeys. Why not hang out with some turkeys instead? Sanctuaries around the country have vegan Thanksgiving get-togethers. The one at Poplar Spring is my favorite event of the year — imagine a vegan potluck with 300 people bringing dishes. Hot damn.

Below is a sampling of sanctuaries and their Thanksgiving events.

• Colorado – Peaceful Prairie’s Living at Thanksgiving (sold out)
• Maryland – Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary’s Thanksgiving for the Turkeys (November 21)
• Maryland – Thanksgiving Vigil for Turkeys (November 20, leafleting event)
• Montana – New Dawn Montana monthly potluck (every second Saturday)
• New York/California – Thanksgiving Celebration FOR the Turkeys (November 21)
• New York – Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary ThanksLiving 2009 (passed – catch it next year!)
• New York – Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary’s Celebration for the Turkeys (November 22)
• New York City – Thanksgiving Celebration FOR the Turkeys (November 22)
• Oregon – Lighthouse Farm Sacntuary’s Gentle Thanksgiving (November 21)
• Utah – Ching Farm Vegan Thanksgiving Dinner (passed – catch it next year!)

Vegetarian and Vegan organizations also tend to do Thanksgiving meals on or around Thanksgiving, so check in with your local groups to see if there’s any thing to get involved in.

Read Things

This is a good time of year to dig into More than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality by UPC’s Karen Davis (here’s a Google Books version). The level of detail is impressive — you’ll learn something. Trust me.

Feel free to share your favorite vegan Thanksgiving events, recipes, or books.

At this point in her cookbook writing career, I think Isa could put out a book titled 137 Ways to Cook Brussels Sprouts and it would not only be a best seller, but a favorite on vegan messageboards everywhere (Really. Her roasted brussels sprouts recipe is great.). After the success of Vegan with a Vengeance, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and Veganomicon, it’s little surprise that Vegan Brunch got such hype (and then lived up to it).

Isa’s Basic Scrambled Tofu recipe is quite good. I’d gotten so used to my own hodgepodge of spices, nootch, and turmeric that it was refreshing to try someone else’s recipe. Our first attempt came out a bit salty, but we cut back the second time around and it was nearly perfect. We also enjoyed the swiss chard frittata quite a bit.

The Perfect Pancakes lived up to their name. The secret ingredient here is maple syrup; having it in the pancakes as well as on top of them makes a big difference. We made it with half all-purpose flour and half spelt flour with very good results.

Other big-time winners (and recipients of the rare “double plus” rating in our notes): Chesapeake Tempeh Cakes (which do a surprisingly good job of capturing the flavor and spirit of crab cakes considering Isa had never actually eaten one before — do yourself a favor, though, and double the sauce… it’s really tasty), Whole Wheat Crepes (super quick and super tasty), and Red Flannel Hash (a great way to use those beets from the CSA that you don’t know what to do with).

The two recipes that I’ve enjoyed the most so far are the ones I was most anticipating. First: New York-style bagels, made from scratch. Sure, I had to get up at 7am to start making them in order to have them ready by 10, but it was totally worth it. That first morning they’re crispy outside and chewy inside and just perfect. I had no idea that making bagels at home was possible, let alone with such good results. The second show stopper: Cherry Sage Sausages. Using a nifty cooking tip from fellow vegan chef Julie Hasson, Isa pairs chopped dried cherries with a surprisingly easy to make steamed seitan sausage. Fry these babies up and you will be 100% satisfied.

Only two times so far have we come up a bit disappointed. The Chive Spelt Mini-Biscuits sounded promising but came out funny tasting — I’m betting that it was due to bad baking soda or flour, though (which means I probably shouldn’t be mentioning the recipe in a negative way, but I promise I’ll correct this review if they come out better the second time around). We were also not as happy with the Banana Rabanada as we expected. Again, I’ll give it a second chance because it just sounds so promising.

With sections dedicated to savory, sweet, sides, breads, toppings, and drinks, Isa takes you from the familiar to the exotic. The food photography is beautiful and as with her previous books, Isa’s commentary is fun, useful, and eminently readable. She’s got another winner here.

Now bring on the cookie book.

“I don’t eat no meat, no dairy, no sweets
only ripe vegetables, fresh fruit and whole wheat
I’m from the old school, my household smell like soul food, bro
curried falafel, barbecued tofu…”

- “Be Healthy,” Dead Prez

(Note: anytime I can quote “Be Healthy,” I do.)

Bryant Terry‘s Vegan Soul Kitchen fills a niche that’s been long left empty: good, healthy vegan food rooted in traditional African-American cuisine. It’s one of many excellent cookbooks released this year and is definitely one that belongs on your shelf if you’re looking to get more veggies into your diet.

Our two favorite dishes from Vegan Soul Kitchen come from the “salads, slaws, and dressing” chapter and both are great for dinner or potlucks. The first is Roasted Red Potato Salad with Parsley-Pine Nut Pesto. It takes a little while to prepare, but is a really flavorful alternative to the mayo-heavy potato salad that usually finds its way onto summer picnic tables. A few pages later comes the recipe we’ve made more than any other in the book, Wild Style Salad (Rock the Bells Remix). Sure, I was predisposed to liking it given that it’s named after one of the greatest movies of all time (and the “remix” refers to one of old school hip-hop’s best tracks), but I suspect even if you’re completely unfamiliar with Fab 5 Freddy’s fine acting and L.L.’s brash teenage braggadocio, you’ll dig this salad. Its base is wild rice, four different colored bell peppers, and some raisins and cashews. The dressing is a mixture of apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, Dijon, agave, and some salt, pepper, and oil. The end result is a bright, vibrant, filling salad that’s packed with protein, minerals, and B vitamins. Love it, love it, love it.

Since we’re smack in the middle of autumn here, we’ve also tried out two of the recipes from the “root vegetables and winter squashes” section of the “So Fresh and So Green Green” chapter. We enjoyed both the smooth and sweet Roasted Sweet Potato Puree with Coconut Milk as a dip/spread and the Cumin-Cayenne Mashed Potatoes with Carmelized Onions, which provides just enough of a kick without being overpowering.

Other dishes we’ve tried: Citrus Collards with Raisins Redux (a great way to get your greens – also try his Collard Confetti, made with the leftover stems, with some sugar and balsamic), Sweet Sweetback’s Salad with Roasted Beet Vinaigrette (not for everyone’s tastes, but very bold if you dig arugula, beets, and candied walnuts), and the Carrot-Cranberry-Walnut Salad with Creamy Walnut Vinaigrette (the one recipe we’ve tried that was underwhelming).

In addition to being filled with great recipes organized in unique ways (there’s a whole chapter just for watermelon!), Vegan Soul Kitchen is a really entertaining read. The stories behind some of the food are longer than the recipes themselves and each dish is given a suggested music soundtrack ranging from MF Doom to Ann Peebles to Grant Green to DJ Spooky remixes of Charlie Parker. A fan even compiled two imixes on iTunes of 170 of the songs referenced in the book.

So, a big thumbs up for Vegan Soul Kitchen. If you don’t know, now you know…

Start of summer: check.

Cheap-o ice cream maker: check.

Collection of vegan ice cream recipes ranging from “vanilla” to “seaweed”: check.

By now, I’m sure you’ve all heard of Wheeler Del Torro, the mysterious man behind Wheeler’s Black Label Vegan Ice Cream, based in Boston.  I reviewed some of his flavors here last year and was super excited to see that he was sharing his secrets to homemade ice cream greatness.

Wheeler learned his craft from a high school girlfriend’s grandmother in France and perfected it upon returning to the United States.  Though he wasn’t vegan until a bet he made with an incredibly unhealthy boss, Wheeler was able to adapt what he had learned about making ice cream to his new vegan diet.  Before long, he was making vegan Cristal ice cream with gold flecks for Alan Iverson that cost thousands of dollars.

While that recipe doesn’t appear in the book, there’s still quite a variety.  The Vegan Scoop is divided into nine sections:

1. Classic Flavors (Vanilla, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Black Raspberry, Caramel)
2. Fruity Flavors (Blueberry, Plum, Date)
3. Healthy Flavors (Cinnamon Ginkgo, Yam, Orange Dragon Fruit)
4. Asian Flavors (Black Sesame, Thai Chile Chocolate, Seaweed)
5. Caribbean and Island Flavors (Orange Passion Fruit, Ginger Beer Sorbet, Ginger Lychee)
6. Novelty Flavors (Peanut Butter Cucumber (no, I didn’t miss a comma in there), S’more, New York Irish Cream, Jalapeño)
7. Aphrodisiacal Flavors (Lavender, Rose Water, Pumpkin and Oats)
8. Ice Cream Vessels and Sauces
9. Ice Cream Sides and Desserts

In addition, there’s a very helpful introductory chapter on how to construct your own unique flavors in case you’ve been itching to try a Basil Carob Rhubarb ice cream.

A true measure of a cookbook is in how often it gets used.  The fact we’ve made six quarts of ice cream in the last month-and-a-half should give some indication of how much we’re digging the book around here thusfar.  Here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve made:

Vanilla – I used Mimicreme instead of a soy-based creamer which resulted in a very, very creamy rich ice cream, but definitely not classic vanilla in flavor.  It had that nuttiness that some may or may not appreciate.  Next time: soy creamer, as recommended.

Rocky Road – This was our favorite.  Made with Sweet & Sara marshmallows, the Rocky Road was nothing short of amazing.  It lasted the shortest time in our fridge.  Creamy, chocolatey, nutty, and just delicious.

Mint Chocolate Chip – My all-time favorite flavor is done justice here.  The original recipe calls for 1 1/2 T. of peppermint extract, which is enough mint to singe your eyebrows.  Cut it back to 1 T. for near-perfect results.

Apple Pie – The least orthodox of the ones I tried, the apple pie ice cream really is just that: apple pie in ice cream form.  Though it took twice as long as the instructions said to prep the apples, the end result was quite intriguing: just enough apple and cinnamon to not be overwhelming, yet distinctive enough to stand out.  I liked it.

Key Lime-Strawberry – This was our first attempt and was far, far better than the commercially available key lime soy ice cream.  It packs a punch, but isn’t overly sour.  Great stuff.

Other flavors I’m most looking forward to trying: Wasabi, Pomegranate-Grapefruit, Vanilla Saffron, Green Tea, Peanut Butter and Flaxseed, and Peanut Butter and Jelly.

The recipes themselves are straightforward and follow a simple formula.  It should be noted, however, that you need to plan ahead.  You’ll need to freeze the ice cream maker bowl the night before and start making your ice cream about six hours before you’ll want to eat it.  (Ice cream makers are cheap – I got this one a few years ago for a mere $20.  There are some alternative solutions on Wheeler’s site if you don’t have space for a dedicated ice cream maker.)

There are only two notable criticisms that I offer about The Vegan Scoop.  First, the recipes all call for vanilla extract rather than vanilla beans.  While that makes sense when you realize that a single vanilla bean can cost you $9 in your local grocery store, here’s a secret: you can get 60 quality vanilla beans for $14 on eBay.  For that reason, it would have been nice to have the option to use actual beans in place of the extract.  I found a suitable substitution online: for each teaspoon of extract, use one inch of vanilla bean.  Most of the recipes here use a tablespoon of extract, so one 3” long vanilla bean does the trick.  Drop the full bean into the milk/cream mixture while it heats.  When the mixture is done heating, remove the bean, slice it down the center, scrape out the vanilla paste inside and add the paste back into the milk/cream mixture.  I confirmed this method with Wheeler and local vegan cooking teacher Mimi Clark.

My other nitpick is the subtitle of the book: “150 Recipes for Dairy-Free Ice Cream That Tastes Better Than the ‘Real’ Thing.”  I’ve gotten to the point that I dislike when a non-vegan version of a food is called “real,” implying that a veganized version is somehow fake or less real.  Minor nitpick, I realize, but I think language is important when presenting veganism to a mainstream audience.

All told, Wheeler Del Torro’s The Vegan Scoop is a big win for those looking to put that ice cream maker to good use.  You won’t grow tired of the options and the old favorites will be new again.  And, honestly, you may not buy another store-bought ice cream again.

(If you’re avoiding soy, you can substitute other milks in these recipes.  If you prefer cashew-based ice creams, Vice Cream is worth checking out.)

(I am way, way behind in my cookbook reviews and I’ve been getting more and more to review — three just last week! — so this is the first in what I hope will be a frequent series of catch-up reviews.)

With so many great vegan cookbooks on the market, it’s easy for some to slip under the radar and get overlooked. Lacey Sher and Gail Doherty’s You Won’t Believe It’s Vegan! is one of those books surely due to a poorly chosen title that not only infers inherent poor quality of vegan food but also brings to mind stacks of overstocked, generic $5 cookbooks in a bin in front of Borders.

But guess what? This book is anything but generic. In fact, it’s often downright inspired.

Sher and Doherty may be known to vegans in the Northeast as the owners of New Jersey’s Down to the Earth, an organic vegan restaurant that they ran until 2006. Their 2008 reprint of their 2007 Down to Earth Cookbook falls neatly between an accessible everyday vegan cookbook and a gourmet cookbook like The Artful Vegan. The recipes are all within the reach of most home cooks, but combine to make dishes with an impressive complexity that isn’t always immediately obvious.

Our family’s tried a number of recipes so far. Among them, two soups: a filling Mediterranean Lentil Soup and an amazing Potato-Leek Soup with Lemon and Dill that far surpasses any other Potato-Leek soup we’ve tried. From the salad section, we enjoyed both the easy-but-satisfying Chickpea Untuna Salad and the Quinoa Salad with onion, peppers, and corn. Also, thumbs up for the tasty Tofu Hot Wings with Ranch Dressing. They definitely bring the flavor.

The most interesting dish we’ve encountered is the “Love Bowl,” a giant dish of layered brown rice, black beans, greens, and marinated tempeh, topped with scallions and sesame seeds. The recipe says “serves one,” but it’s huge bowl that is hearty and filling for two people, easy. (My notes for this one indicate it could have also been titled “A Bowl of Things Ryan Would Never Have Eaten Ten Years Ago.”)

The only not-so-great recipe we tried was the falafel, whose texture and flavor were off and not what we were hoping for. Thankfully things like the pizza and easy Raw Cashew Cheese recipes made up for the one subpar recipe.

You Won’t Believe It’s Vegan! features 200 recipes divided into breakfasts, drinks/juices/smoothies, sides, soups, salads, sandwiches/wraps, appetizers, entrees, raw/live foods, desserts, and there’s even a section for kids’ food. Beyond what we’ve tried already, I look forward to trying out their Chickpea Socca, Tortilla Torte with Creamy Pumpkin-Seed Pesto, and of course the entire dessert section.

Sher and Doherty’s book is a pleasant surprise that proves the old adage, don’t judge a book by its title. Or something like that.

You Won’t Believe It’s Vegan!
Lacey Sher and Gail Doherty
Da Capo Press
978-1-60094-070-5

NBC4 in Washington, DC is featuring a really nice video featuring Poplar Spring sanctuary.  It’s primarily a review of Karen Dawn’s new book Thanking the Monkey (Really?  That’s the title?  And with a peeled banana on the front cover?), but it’s shot at Poplar Spring and features some great footage of the animals.  I thought the tone of this piece was particularly noteworthy, especially in contrast to the local FOX affiliates’s patronizing animal feature last month.  The NBC 4 piece doesn’t attempt any goofy wordplay, respectfully presents the issues, and even makes mention that “cage-free doesn’t mean cruelty-free.”

Of course, the sole comment on the story is completely trollish:

(August 12, 2008 11:32 PM)

What a waste. Those animals could feed homeless people and other hungry humans. These animal "rights" activists should be ashamed of themselves. There’s a place in this world for ALL of God’s creatures — right next to the beans and mashed potatoes.

I submitted a reply, which hasn’t been approved yet:

You know what else could be used to feed homeless people and other hungry humans?  Money spent on pointless wars.

Compassion for animals and compassion for humans aren’t mutually exclusive.

I know, I know, don’t feed the trolls.  And the “pointless war” thing is kind of played out, but at its most basic level, it’s still true, no?

In addition, the station’s blog entry received its own trollish comment:

Alexandria, VA

I can’t believe that in this day and age some people are still working for the “rights” of animals. My goodness — have they run out of CONSTRUCTIVE things to do? Next thing you know they’ll want legal rights for potted plants. This is what happens when overprivileged brats lose focus in life and forgot what’s truly important: watching out for the welfare of PEOPLE.

I replied to this one as well:

It’s always funny to me how people like Adam seem to assume that a person’s belief in animal rights somehow means they’re anti-human. Animal rights and human rights are inextricably connected, as they recognize (rather than ignore or capitalize on) the suffering of “the other.”

I’ve found that those that accuse others of “wasting” time on “unconstructive” things like animal rights really aren’t doing much of anything to advance any cause other than their desire to hear themselves talk.

Anyway, I’m happy to see Poplar Spring get such good coverage on local news.  And it sounds like Karen Dawn’s book has that Skinny Bitch mainstream appeal that will get new people thinking and talking about animal issues.

(For those in the DC area, two dates to mark on your calendars: First, on Monday August 18 from 5-8:30pm, Karen Dawn will be doing a signing for her book at the sanctuary. Then, on Sunday August 31, Great Sage restaurant will be donating 10% of the day’s profits to the sanctuary.  Go get some tasty eats and support the farm.)

Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook
by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero
Marlowe & Company, 2007

Even though there are only four episodes, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero’s Post-Punk Kitchen remains one of the most entertaining vegan cooking shows ever.  EVER!  After all, what better way to find out about an awesome band like Made Out Of Babies than by watching them play vegetable-instruments in Isa’s living Brooklyn living room?  Sadly, I doubt we’ll be seeing any new episodes now that Isa’s moved to Portland to live with the other 98% of North American vegans, but don’t fret too badly: Isa and Terry’s cookbooks will help you forget the lack of good vegan cooking shows.  Vegan With a Vengeance remains one of my favorite vegan cookbooks and Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World was so successful, it made Isa hate cupcakes.  Veganomicon continues the tradition of greatness (three makes a tradition, right?).

This nearly 300-page book offers up over 250 snacks, brunch items, salads, dressings, sandwiches, casseroles, one-pot meals… you get the idea.  Everything’s covered.

The Eggplant-Potato Moussaka with Pine Nut Cream was the first thing we tried.  My margin commentary reads: “Takes a long-ass time, but is really good.  Very lasagna-y.”  There are layers of eggplant, potatoes, zucchini, tomato sauce, and breadcrumbs topped by an incredibly delicious pine nut cream that I think would also taste good in a pizza setting.  This dish isn’t one you’ll want to make on a night you get home from work at 6pm, but it’s an outstanding one to break out on a weekend.

One recipe that’s gotten a lot of praise on various forums is the Chickpea Cutlets.  It lives up to the hype.  It’s the cutlet for vegans who are ready to to move beyond regular ol’ mock meats.

The Curried Tofu was really good on sandwiches, the Black Bean Burgers are a good go-to burger, the hummus is what you’d expect (in a good way), and the White Bean Aioli is a nice variation on the standard mayo-heavy sauce.  The only dish we haven’t cared for so far is the Grilled Yuca Tortillas.  It’s OK, but not one we’ll be returning to.

Some other recipes I’m looking forward to trying: Chestnut-Lentil Pate, Saffron-Garlic Rice, Leek and Bean Cassoulet with Biscuits, Pineapple-Cashew-Quinoa Stir-fry, Pumpkin-Cranberry Scones, and a simple Vanilla Ice Cream.  Oh, and the Smlove Pie because it looks absolutely insane.  Quite simply, there is so much here, you will never tire of this book.  The variety that Isa and Terry come up with is truly amazing and it’s exceedingly rare that you stumble upon a dud, thanks to how much testing goes into each of their books (hi PPK forum people!).

The book’s been compared to a high school math book and I’d say that’s apt.  But I like it.  It’s sturdy and stands out on the bookshelf.  And huge thumbs up for presenting the full list of recipes in the table of contents.  As you may remember, that’s my number one most important requirement in a cookbook’s design.

Of course, the writing’s great.  Isa and Terry know their stuff, but their writing lacks the pretense of most cookbooks of this complexity level.  There are sections on kitchen equipment, stocking your pantry, terminology, how to lower fat in your cooking, and basic instructions for cooking vegetables, grains, and beans.  In addition, they provide helpful menu combinations and an organization of recipes by the time they take to cook, their fat content, gluten-free and soy-free recipes, and the most interesting: “Supermarket-Friendly Recipes.”  For this last category, the ingredients had to be easily found in a supermarket near Isa’s in-laws in rural Vermont.

While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Veganomicon for someone who has to call their mother to find out how to boil water (I swear, I never did this.  OK, maybe I did, but I was 15 and babysitting.), as the recipes can be somewhat involved and time-consuming.  But for those of us that have gotten comfortable around a kitchen since becoming vegan, it’s an absolute must-have.

The next book in the series will be a brunch-themed book, which may or may not be named after an object in Evil Dead 2 (Vegan Brunches for People With Chainsaw-Hands, perhaps?).  Isa’s blogged about other books-in-the-works, but I’m having trouble finding the post.  I’ll be eagerly awaiting each and every one.

I’m closing with this picture.  It’s old, but I still love it:

Cookbooks that focus on baking take me a little longer to get to since I don’t bake as often as I cook, but that’s still no excuse after having had this one around so long waiting for a review.

Portland’s Kris Holechek, who you may know from Squirrel’s Vegan Kitchen, self-published this fun collection of breads, cookies, cakes, and other assorted goodies.  The first thing I noticed and loved about The Damn Tasty! Vegan Baking Guide was the "baking basics" section where she expounds on why she just uses the term "milk" throughout the book rather than "soy milk," "non-dairy milk," or some other similar term:

As I refined the content, I truly agonized over the way to write about milk.  I’ve seen books that assume soy milk for the milk and I’ve seen books where the word milk is in quotes, calling for "milk."  Now just think of coconut milk.  No one protests calling that milk.  Alternative milks date back hundreds and hundreds of years to different regions of the world, so they aren’t a new invention, they are just newly recognized by western society.  Because of my strong views on the linguistics of eating, I chose to simply write the word milk.  This is a vegan book, so clearly the use of cow’s or goat’s milk is unacceptable.  But people have preferences, allergies and limitations to what is available to them, so the milk you prefer, be it so, almond, rice, it’s up to you.  If there is one kind or another that I’ve found works best, it is noted in the recipe.

She also points out that something like Boston Cream Pie isn’t called Boston Cream Pie with Eggs and Cow’s Milk, so a vegan version isn’t any less "real."  "Let’s stop playing semantic games and not allow mainstream eating habits to make us feel like our vegan "food" is any less enticing than it is."  Well said!

Onto the food.

I still haven’t had a chance to try as many recipes here as I had hoped, but we’ve had good success with the ones we’ve made thus far.  The Raspberry-Lime Muffins are every bit as awesome as they sound and the Pumpkin-Cinnamon Zig-Zag Bread is excellent, even when made with whole wheat pastry flour.  The simple white icing recipe has become a go-to when making anything that needs a quick icing.  The recipe for garlic rolls has a great little side note about a very easy cheesy topping made with raw cashews and nutritional yeast that tastes absolutely perfect on popcorn (go just a smidge lighter on the salt, though).  Our recipe queue includes: Polski Apple Crisp, Blueberry Streusel Muffins, Basic Biscuits, and Danish.  I look forward to trying each of those in due time.

The only less-than-success I had was with the Baked Chocolate Glazed Donuts, which I made as donut holes instead (dropping the batter into a mini-muffin tin).  They tasted OK but were… weird.  The consistency was off and they didn’t come out in a very appealing way.  I suspect, though, that this may be due to baker error.  Baked goods can be hard to review for this reason — they’re generally not as forgiving of mistakes as recipes made on the stovetop.

There’s a lot to like in Damn Tasty.  There’s a good variety of recipes (they’re not all sweets) and the voice is conversational and a pleasure to read.  Though there’s no food photography, its absence didn’t bother me; the descriptive text was often enough.  If baking is your thing, you’ll certainly want to put Kris’ book on your wishlist.  Good stuff.

One of my favorite cookbook authors and long-time friend of the Veg Blog, Nava Atlas has just released her newest collection of recipes titled Vegan Express. While I admit to being a little skeptical of another “quick vegan meals”-type book, I knew that Nava has experience in that realm with The 5-Ingredient Vegetarian Gourmet. Plus, her Vegetarian Soups for All Seasons is still one of my favorite cookbooks.

I’ve only had the book for a week, and I’ve gotta say, Vegan Express may unseat Vegetarian Soups… as my favorite Nava cookbook. We’ve made a few recipes with good luck, including Broccoli Salad with Yellow Peppers, Pine Nuts, and Cranberries (see below) with a simple homemade Sesame-Ginger dressing and just tonight we had a hearty pink bean, quinoa, and spinach soup. I’m looking forward to trying the Berry-Apple Skillet Crumble and the Very Green Veggie Pesto Pizza.

Another thing I enjoy about this cookbook: Nava has put together a list of her favorite recipes, two from each chapter. That helps those have trouble deciding where to start when getting a new cookbook.

Nava has given permission to share a recipe from the book, so here’s one we had a week or so ago that I really enjoyed:

Broccoli Salad with Yellow Peppers, Pine Nuts, and Cranberries

Ingredients

• 2 large broccoli crowns, cut into bite-size florets (about 4 heaping cups)
• 1 medium yellow bell pepper, diced
• 1/4 cup pine nuts, lightly toasted in a dry skillet
• 1/3 cup dried cranberries
• 1/4 cup Sesame-Ginger Salad Dressing (elsewhere in the book) or equivalent store-bought dressing

Instructions

1. Steam the broccoli florets just until bright green. Drain and rinse under cool water until room temperature or slightly warm.
2. Combine the broccoli and the remaining ingredients in a serving bowl, toss well, and serve.

Nutritional Breakdown:

Calories: 170, total fat: 11g, protein: 5g, carbohydrates: 15g, fiber: 4g, sodium: 55g.

I’ll be doing a more thorough review once we’ve tried a few more recipes, but for now, go make that salad!

Eat, Drink & Be Vegan
Dreena Burton
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007
http://vivelevegan.blogspot.com/

What I like most about Dreena’s books, in addition to the great food photography, is that she doesn’t rehash the same familiar recipes you find in a lot of other cookbooks.  Plus, while her recipes sometimes call for ingredients you may not have used before, they remain simple to prepare and even unfamiliar ingredients can be found in your local grocery store or co-op.  As with Dreena’s previous books, Eat, Drink & Be Vegan is a wonderful collection of unique recipes that home cooks of all skill levels will enjoy.

We’ve had a lot of success with ED&BV around our house.  Dreena’s always been known for her inventive hummus and this time around, she devoted an entire chapter to the creamy, beany vegan staple.  I loved the Black Bean & Orange Hummus — the orange adds a whole new dimension and combined with the black beans (rather than chickpeas), this one is sure to turn some heads at potlucks.  The Roasted Red Pepper and Almond Hummus is a little more familiar but is the tastiest red pepper hummus I’ve had.  Fresh parsley used for garnish tops it off perfectly.  Other hummuses include a white bean hummus, a peanut-sesame hummus (!), and one geared specifically for kids.

From her soups and stews section, the Mellow Lentil "Sniffle" Soup has already become a go-to dish for us and my wife and I agree that the Sweet Potato Lentil Chili may be the best homemade chili we’ve ever had.

The main dishes we’ve enjoyed include the Lemony Cashew-Basil Pesto on Pasta (we substituted cilantro with good results since basil was far out of season), the slightly lemony Quinoa Chickpea Confetti Casserole (which went over well over the Christmas holiday and is simply delicious when drizzled with the Balsamic Maple Sauce), and Sweet & Sour Chipotle Tempeh with Sweet Potatoes.  The Cran-Apple Quinoa recipe was another dish shared over the holiday ("Quinoa?  Is that how you say it?  This is good!").

This may be a first, but I haven’t made any of the desserts.  I am looking forward to trying the Pumpkin Cheese Pie and the Lime Sucker Coconut Pie.

So far, there have only been a couple of recipes that haven’t gone well for us, which isn’t bad considering how many we’ve made.  The Goddess Garbanzos didn’t sit well with me, but I’m also not a big fan of Annie’s Goddess Dressing, which probably explains it.  The Cinnamon-Lime Quinoa with Apricots & Almonds was alright tasting, but consistency was a bit squishy for my liking.

Dreena Burton’s third book, Eat, Drink & Be Vegan, solidifies her as one of my favorite cookbook authors.  Her inventive recipes manage to balance innovation, accessibility, and health in a way few others can.  There’s no doubt you’ll want this one on your shelf if it’s not there already.

Everyday Dish (DVD)
featuring Dreena Burton, Bryanna Clarke Grogan, and Julie Hasson
YaYa Productions
http://www.everydaydish.tv/Shopping%20Cart/vegan_vegetarian_dvd.html

When you flip through the channels while Wife Swap is on commercial, you won’t have a tough time finding cooking shows.  Unfortunately, they usually feature Rachael Ray and her damn yummers EVOO (wow, two sentences in and I’m already insulting Rachael Ray).  In fact, when it comes to vegan cooking shows, you’ll come up empty (regional shows excepted, of course).  There have been a few decent vegetarian-themed cooking shows through the years (Regina’s Vegetarian Table and Delicious TV come to mind), but vegans often have to suffer through visits to cheese stores and recipes topped off with feta.

Everyday Dish features three vegan cookbook authors sharing a handful of their favorite recipes in a cooking show format.  First up is Bryanna Clarke Grogan, author of Nonna’s Italian Kitchen and many other classic vegan collections.  I’ve always been a fan of Bryanna’s very open sharing of her creations.  Some cookbook authors are notoriously stingy with their recipes, hunting down anyone that posts one online.  But if you search for vegan recipes online, it’s a sure bet that one of Bryanna’s will show up in the top 10.  She’s the master of the homemade mock meat and that shows with her selections for the DVD.  She serves up gravy, neatballs, chicken cutlets, and an ambitious pork tenderloin.

Dreena Burton, who you may remember from a few paragraphs ago, shows us how to make Chickpea Sensation Patties, assorted hummuses, Lemon Herb Tofu, Sundried Tomato Pesto, and Chocolate Mint Melties.  I’m pretty sure that in a future life, I want to be reincarnated as a Chocolate Mint Meltie.  Dreena has a great blog that gives some real insight into what it’s like trying to put together a cookbook while managing a family.  I’m pretty sure she only sleeps three hours a week.

Julie Hasson, who I had the pleasure of meeting last year at the DVD’s release party in Portland, serves up a simple and tasty-looking Deli Noodle Soup, Diner Loaf, Tacos and Salsa, Chocolate Cake, and Triple Chocolate Pudding (triple!).

All three of the chefs have personalities that lend themselves well to this type of endeavor.  Bryanna has a quiet, understated way of demonstration that makes even complex recipes seem accessible.  Dreena is the person you hope you’d bump into at the grocery store, because she’s so open and willing to share what she knows.  And Julie seems to have boundless energy and enthusiasm, but it’s genuine enthusiasm, not forced Rachael Ray enthusiasm.

In addition to the nearly two hours of cooking footage, the DVD also includes bonus recipes, printable recipes from the demos, and some other extras.

It may seem a little strange to buy a DVD of a cooking show in this age of "hey, it’s on YouTube" and with food blogs-a-plenty everywhere you look, but there is something nice about having a DVD you can lend to friends or show family, particularly those that enjoy watching cooking shows on TV.  And this is a good one to use – the production values are quite good.  About the only constructive criticism that I’d offer for a second edition would be to try and incorporate the use of an overhead camera to provide a bird’s eye view of the food and give some variety to the camera angles.

Be sure to check out all the videos at everydaydish.tv to get a good idea of what you’ll get on the DVD (and then some).  Julie also has a blog for the site with some great food photos and commentary.

Everyday Dish joins Post-Punk Kitchen and Regina’s Vegetarian Table as my one of my favorite veg cooking shows and is definitely worth checking out on DVD.  I hope there’s a second volume in our future.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten a number of e-mails from people or small companies looking to pimp their new vegan-friendly products. Rather than shill for each one individually, allow me to share a list of these products/sites that you may find interesting:

• Veganomicon by Isa and Terry. If this is the only veg blog that you read, you may have missed every other one on the planet discussing the long-awaited new vegan bible from the PPK’s Mighty Isa and Terry (yes, the “M” is capitalized). The book is out now in a beautiful hardback edition. I’ve got my copy and am having a tough time deciding which recipes to try first. I know you’re going to buy this, so I’m not going to say any more.
• Swanky Veg. A new site for “fashion conscious veggies,” hosted by Ali Berman, a former fashion model in New York and Paris. I’m about the least fashionable dude you’ll ever meet, but I’m glad sites like this exist. It makes veganism seem a little less weird to people.
• Nava Atlas’ Vegan Thanksgiving. Nava’s awesome. As the holiday that tortures vegan souls across the country approaches, Nava makes life a little easier by sharing a bunch of Thanksgiving resources. She’s also got a new ebook titled Nava’s Thanksgiving Favorites, available for a mere $8.50. A good portion of the proceeds go to an anti-hunger organization called Share Our Strength. Good stuff.
• Jinga Shoes. A couple of folks have created the first lightweight Brazilian shoe which are suitable for vegans. Tessa, one of the co-creators wrote that, “We have had our jingas approved by the Vegan Society as no animals were involved in any way or at any time were in involved in the making of our shoes, not even in the glue we used.” Nice!
• ABBA^® Pure Performance Hair Care^TM. “A comprehensive range of 100% vegan cleansers, conditioners, treatment and styling products formulated with natural plant ingredients specifically to enhance performance, not in spite of it.” Never tried them (see above, re: fashion), but hey, it sounds good to me.
• Artivist. Damn! I meant to promote this before the Nov. 8-11 showings in Hollywood. Well, if you’re in Lisbon or London, it’s still not too late to catch this great event that combines art and activism.

On Isa’s recommendation, I plunked down $2.50 for the new cookzine titled Don’t Eat Off the Sidewalk. It’s slim, with a few pages of introduction and 13 recipes, but here’s the thing… cookzines tend to have a really high percentage of really good recipes. When someone puts a cookzine together, it’s usually because they think, “Hey, I’ve got a bunch of great recipes. I should write ‘em down and share them.” I imagine published cookbook authors thinking, “Hey, I’ve got a cookbook deal… I better create some new recipes!” With cookzines, you tend to get really good, well tested, familiar recipes. With cookbooks, you get more innovation, but also the occasional dish that doesn’t hit the mark.

Maybe I’m making all that up. The point is, don’t hesitate to pay a couple bucks for baker’s dozen recipes.

Katie is the mind behind Don’t Eat Off the Sidewalk (she turns 27 today — happy birthday, Katie!). She’s only been cooking for a few years, but it’s become her passion. Still, she likes to keep her recipes simple.

The three recipes we’ve tried so far have been resounding successes. We tried out the talked-up Tempeh Wingz when our friend Katherine came in town to visit a month or so ago. They were easy to make and combined with the simple sauce were just delicious. The spice was enough to provide a kick in the teeth, but not enough to actually knock any loose.

The Herbed Tomato Potato salad we served at two different birthday parties we had for our daughter. It’s a nice twist on the standard picnic staple and went over well with both crowds.

Last night we tried the Vegetable Fried Rice, a very simple and straightforward rendition of the classic take-out dish. It seriously hit the spot and is going to become a regular in our arsenal.

Other recipes I’m itching to try include a veganized Bob Evans Biscuit and a Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie. I plan to simply dive face first into the latter, manners be damned.

Katie’s finishing up the second issue as we speak. Can’t wait to see it.

I got my copy of Dreena Burton’s new Eat, Drink & Be Vegan in the mail last week and let me tell you, folks: this thing is great. I love the cover design and I love the layout even more. And if you’re a fan of Dreena’s food, this one will knock yer organic hemp socks off.

I’ve only made one recipe so far, the unbelievably good Black Bean and Orange Hummus, part of an entire chapter on our favorite vegan beany concoction. You can bet I’m looking forward to trying out the Chocolate Pumpkin Pie, too.

What I love about Dreena’s books is that they use ingredients that aren’t hard to find, but that you may not be accustomed to. I’ve learned more about using various grains (What?! There’s more than unbleached white flour?!) from Dreena than I ever imagined. Her recipes are inspired and unique, yet not “out there.” Think of them as the types of dishes you’d make for a dinner party and someone invariably says, “Wow, this is different! I’ve got to get the recipe for this.”

A more formal and thorough review is on the way, once I can make some more food, but I wanted to let you all know about the book now since I have a really rude tendency to be late with my cookbook reviews.

The Vegan Family Cookbook
Chef Brian P. McCarthy
Lantern Books

Late last year, Lantern books released Chef Brian P. McCarthy’s The Vegan Family Cookbook, the front cover boasting “over 400 recipes.” Sure, that number’s a bit fudged counting things like “brown rice” and “artichokes” (sole ingredient: artichokes) as one recipe each, but this 300-page book does pack an awful lot of food into its pages.

We had good luck with the high-protein split pea soup, the Morning Pancakes (add some ground flax for extra flavor), curry baked tofu (easy, tasty, and mild), the super-easy Teriyaki Tofu, and the creamy Pasta with Pepper Cream sauce. Our go-to recipe is the simple classic Red Beans and Rice.

While The Vegan Family Cookbook won’t be remembered for its unique recipes, it will be one that you find yourself grabbing off the shelf when you’ve got to throw something together with the ingredients sitting in your fridge about to go bad. Everything’s straightforward and familiar and will please palates of all ages.

Vegan Success
Susan C. Daffron and James H. Byrd
Logical Expressions Publishing
vegansuccess.com

Another entry in the “simple and easy” vegan cookbook category, Vegan Success offers up some great dishes you can pull together at the last minute. The faux cheese sauce is probably the easiest of its kind and tastes great as part of good old mac and cheese. The Curried Potatoes and Cauliflower with Cream Cheese is a good go-to dish and the Spicy White Bean Salad was really tasty, even when using a number of substitutions.

Slightly less successful was the Creamy White Bean Soup — it was “too beany” for my wife and “too mushroomy” for me. We also had an issue with the Blender Hummus — sure it tasted good, but it broke our food processor! See, our blender doesn’t blend things nearly enough for a good, smooth hummus, so we tried it in the food processor but ended up burning out the motor in the process. The story has a silver lining, though: we bought an awesome 14-cup behemoth to replace it.

All your favorites are here, from vegan biscuits to eggless egg salad to stews, soups, sandwiches, and desserts. This is one of those unassuming books that’s easy to overlook next to larger, more elaborately designed collections. But don’t let the ultra-minimalist design fool you: there’s good food to be had between the covers.

Please Don’t Feed the Bears!
Edited by Abjorn Intonsus
Microcosm Publishing

I love me some cookzines. Every one I own has turned out some amazing and often surprising recipes, despite their low-budget production values. Please Don’t Feed the Bears! is a compilation of one such cookzine. There’s a huge variety of dishes, plenty of attitude, and even obscure death metal recommendations for each recipe. I gave this collection respect before I even started because they managed to name a recipe after one of my favorite ultra-obscure films: Mystics in Bali(nese Tempeh). I haven’t even made it yet, but I know it’s gotta be disembodied-head-on-a-spine-floating-around-the-sky good.

Foodwise, I loved Curly Jim’s Chocolate Chip cookies, thinking they were about the closest to the classic chocolate chip cookie I’d tasted. My dad pointed out that it’s essentially the Toll House recipe, veganized. Hey, that’s fine by me.

Also good: the Broken Jaw Biscotti and Tofu Pot Pie In Your Eye (which I think would be just as good without the tofu).

You seriously get your money’s worth here: at only $7 from Microcosm, you get 160 pages absolutely stuffed with recipes. About the only bad thing I can say about this one is that there’s no freaking index. And with only six sections, it can be tricky to find a recipe you came across earlier. No worries, though. Sometimes serendipitous cooking is the best kind.

I dig raw food. I used to be a skeptic, but I became a believer. I don’t worry myself about the sub-110 degree rules or the enzymes or any of that: I’m just impressed with it as a cuisine.

Two new raw cookbooks found their way into the Veg Blog PO Box, so I thought I’d give them both a look and compare and contrast them a bit.

First up is Ani Phyo’s Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen. Over the last 15 years, Ani’s tried, shall we say, a variety of things. According to her friend, Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz, she’s designed video art for raves, written a well-respected book on information architecture, and then most recently, founded SmartMonkey Foods, a company that makes packaged raw convenience foods.

Ani’s book is attractively designed and filled with conversational discussion of raw foods. There’s plenty of attractive food photography as well as photos of the author out and about in Portland, buying vegetables, walking her dog, and eating fruits. The recipes themselves are generally quite reasonable, though like most raw authors, she recommends the Queen Mary of blenders, the expensive Vita-Mix. Recipes are VEFH and only occasionally require a dehydrator.

We’ve made a number of recipes from Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen thusfar with good results. The Ginger Almond Pate tasted wonderful as part of the Ginger Almond Nori Rolls, a simple dish where the pate is wrapped in nori sheets with spinach, burdock root (yeah, fat chance we had that around), and mung bean sprouts. A sharp knife is essential for this recipe. It’s really delicious and is one of those that will win over skeptics if they dig things like sushi.

The Sun Burger recipe was another success. Though we just ended up eating the burgers on regular bread (heresy!) and had to “dehydrate” them on our toaster’s “warm” setting rather than in a dehydrator (double heresy!), they were still delicious, with the celery, onion, bell pepper, sunflower seeds, and spices binding well with the flax seeds. These can be eaten right after they’re made or dehyrdrated for a more familiar burger texture.

We had slightly less success with the tasty-sounding Strawberry Kream Swirl, a cold dessert soup that would have been great except for the fact we couldn’t get the almonds “creamy” enough in our food processor. Maybe the Vita Mix would have done a better job.

There are two more recipes I’m really itching to try out soon: the Coco Kream Pie with Carob Fudge on Brownie Crust and the Fruit Parfait, which looks to be very similar to the one served at Blossoming Lotus in Portland.

Next up is World’s First Supermodel Carol Alt’s The Raw 50, co-authored with David Roth. Alt lends her name to the book, but all of the recipes come from others including familiar names like Dan Hoyt and Sarma Melngailis.

The Raw 50 is significantly different from other popular raw cookbooks in that it’s not vegan (or VEFH). It includes raw dairy, raw eggs (ick), and even fish. She includes proscuitto (cured pork) as an essential pantry item. Alt addresses this in a section titled “Vegan or Not?” She equates not being vegan with not being a 100% raw foodist, which of course requires completely avoiding the ethical issues. “I believe your body will tell you what it needs,” she writes, “Although you may want to be vegan, you may find that your body is genetically adapted to animal products; you may even need them.” She does add that if you are vegan, “my hat’s off to you,” but her casual coverage of veganism focuses only on the health issues and barely even touches the ethical side of things. If you’re not 100% raw, you’re only affecting yourself. If you’re not vegan, you’re also affecting other animals.

More frustrating, though, is the introduction by Nicholas J. Gonzalez, M.D. where he makes an awkward connection between vegetarianism and the low-fat diet trends of the 1990s. Gonzalez spends a liberal amount of time quoting the research of Weston A. Price. The name may sound familiar: the Weston A. Price Foundation spends a lot of time promoting raw milk while spreading somewhere between half-truths and outright mistruths about vegetarianism and soy. It reads like a New York Times op-ed piece by Nina Planck. A lot of time is spent in the opening pages telling readers why being vegan isn’t important to a raw foodist, which had me in a foul mood before I even got to the recipes.

I’m not being hypersensitive about that, am I?

So. The recipes.

There are actually more than 50 of ‘em, split between breakfasts, lunches, dinners, drinks, and snacks. While I won’t be touching Tuna Ceviche or Raw Egg Mayonnaise with a ten foot pole, there are some interesting vegan inclusions worth mentioning. For instance, we enjoyed Muriel’s Sticky Granola, a simple, yummy blend of agave (subbed for that damned honey), ground cinnamon, dates, and raisins. The recipe calls for 12 hours of dehydration, but at the time we didn’t have a dehydrator on hand, so we just heated it at 200 degrees for a few hours.

We did have a dehydrator on hand for the deliciously-simple sounding Almond Coconut Cookies from Chef Dan Hoyt. We made the variation, which processes raw almonds and dried coconut flakes into a dry powder, then mixes them with salt (is it pretentious that it calls for specifically Himalayan salt? Yeah, kind of.), vanilla extract, and agave. It’s then dehydrated for 15-18 hours. No one ever said raw food was for those who needed instant gratification!

Unfortunately, while the cookies were a good consistency and had nice hints of almond and coconut, the saltiness was overpowering. Perhaps using sea salt instead of the Himalayan salt was a mistake after all.

In summary…

Ani Phyo’s book is a pleasure. Its recipes are reasonable, don’t generally call for bizarre ingredients, and are things you might actually serve to guests. Unlike Raw Food, Real World (which I love, but, seriously, there’s no way I’m buying a machete to hack open coconuts), this is a raw food book the average vegan could use on a regular basis. Ani’s personality comes across in the book, so it really does feel like a friend that’s sharing something she’s passionate about.

On the other hand, Carol Alt’s The Raw 50 made me more frustrated than inspired. There are some good recipes from a wide variety of raw chefs, but the almost anti-vegan sentiment is very off-putting and the inclusion of recipes with raw eggs, dairy, and fish alongside the promotion of raw meats keeps me from recommending this book.

Find out more about Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen and view video demos of some recipes. The book is available for $19.95 from Marlowe & Company. Carol Alt’s The Raw 50 is available for $17 from The Crown Publishing Group.

Quick-Fix Vegetarian
by Robin Robertson
2007, Andrews McMeel Publishing

Even if you don’t know Robin Robertson by name, you probably know her cookbooks. She’s responsible for over a dozen cookbooks, including the omnivore favorite Vegetarian Meat & Potatoes, the clever Apocalypse Chow (recipes to make when the power goes out), and the enormous Vegan Planet. Robin’s recipes are accessible yet varied, a testament to her 25 years as a chef, caterer, cooking instructor, and food columnist. Quick-Fix Vegetarian: Healthy Home-Cooked meals in 30 Minutes or Less is Robin’s latest, offering up (as the title suggests), fast and easy meals for those in a rush. All recipes are vegan, even though the title avoids saying so outright.

The chapters are pretty much what you’d expect, covering everything from appetizers to sauces to sandwiches and desserts. There’s also a chapter on slow-cooking and “one-dish wonders.” There are 150 recipes in just under 200 pages, each recipe featuring a one paragraph introduction, something I really appreciate in cookbooks. I like context to a recipe before trying it.

We’ve made a number of the recipes over the last couple of months and they’ve all come out nicely. The Potato “Dosadillas” are an interesting dosa-quesadilla hybrid. We thought they needed a little more spice (which could be because we doubled the amount of peas), but they were surprisingly good and easy. The Curried Couscous and Vegetables is another simple dish that stretches a long way. A few minutes in the kitchen will serve you well for dinner and several lunches thereafter. The Couscous Shepherd’s Pie was also plentiful — the only change we’d make to this one is to steam the tempeh first if you use it instead of veggie crumbles or tofu.

Perhaps the best recipe we’ve made thus far is the Panko-Crusted Tofu Cutlets with Lemon-Caper Sauce. Panko is basically flaky Japanese breadcrumbs and it provides a great crust when fried up on the tofu. And the sour-salty combination of the sauce is wicked good. The only complaint here was that it took significantly longer than 30 minutes to make (we had a similar issue with the Stir-Fried Tofu and Vegetable Teriyaki). That said, it was well worth the effort.

Even if you have some of Robin’s other books, you’ll probably want to take a peek at this one. There are a number of other interesting recipes I’m looking forward to trying: PDQ Pot Pie (the pot pie from Vegetarian Meat & Potatoes is a holiday stand-by around here), Green Onion Hummus with Lime, and Linguine with Edamame Pesto are all on our to-make list.

The book is simply laid out and the recipes are easy to follow, with one per page. The only complaint I have is the same one I’ve had with a few other of Robin’s books: there are no pictures of any recipes. Sure, there are some food pictures, but they’re all stock photos, and that’s no fun. People are inspired by seeing food photos, which is why food blogs are so popular. It’s a shame that there aren’t even a few nice color panels in the middle of the book.

So, thumbs up for Quick-Fix Vegetarian. A few recipes took longer than the promised 30 minutes, but the results have all been quite good so far. I suspect a year from now, this will be a well-worn book on our kitchen shelf.

The Veggie Queen
Jill Nussinow, MS, RD
Vegetarian Connection Press, 2005

It really is a great time for vegetarian cookbooks. If you’re into easy-to-make comfort foods, there are plenty of choices. If you like gourmet-style cooking, one of the Millennium books has you covered. If you’re into the tofu, seitan, tempeh, and fake meat, great choices abound. Jill Nussinow’s The Veggie Queen will appeal to those that want to focus on fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables and not mess around too much with meat analogs.

Much like Nava Atlas’ excellent Vegetarian Soups for All Seasons, The Veggie Queen is organized by season. Since eating locally grown, seasonal vegetables is the best way to ensure great taste and nutrition, this style of cookbook is a good one to have on your shelf.

The book starts off in the Spring and offers up unique and fresh choices like Minted Pea Soup, Orange and Onion Salad on Greens, and Mediterranean French Green Lentils. Summer brings warm weather favorites like an Italian Bread Salad, Smoky Gazpacho, and Andean Corn and Quinoa Salad. We had very good success with the delicious Summer Squash Vichyssoise served cold. During the summer we get an awful lot of squash through our CSA, and this recipe helped us make good use of them. It’s not terribly complicated, either, as it just has garlic, onion, potatoes, squash, basil, soy milk, and a little veggie broth powder.

The Autumn recipes include a Lemon Scented Spinach Spread, Potato and Kohlrabi Gratin, and Polenta Triangles with Roasted Red Pepper Relish. We had moderate success with the Pear and Toasted Walnut Salad, noting that it would be best to buy the ingredients the day we made the salad.

For the Winter, hearty soups and salads are the orders of the day. Curried Pear and Squash Soup, Lemony Lentil and Potato Chowder, and Tempeh and Wild Mushroom Stew are included. We loved the Layered Polenta Casserole which, while moderately intensive, had a nice payoff. Polenta is really satisfying here, used in combination with tomatoes, parsley, and soy cheese.

Two other chapters close out the book, one for “Anytime at All” and one with recipes designed for a pressure cooker. In the “Anytime at All” chapter, I loved the Seasonal Sweet and Sour Veggie Stir-Fry. I’ve never much cared for sweet and sour, but this is by far the best I’ve had.

Nussinow’s recipes range from relatively easy to time intensive. Her ingredient lists won’t throw anyone who belongs to a CSA or shops farmers’ markets for a loop, but they may be a bit daunting for vegetarians new to cooking. The recipes are all vegan, save for a few with honey, but do the standard agave-for-honey swap and you’re good to go. The book is well organized, printed on starkly bright white paper and features lots of fun and informative sidebars. There are a few mock meat-ish recipes like a Chinese “No Chicken” Salad, but they’re few and far between with fresh vegetables taking center stage throughout the book.

The Veggie Queen is one of those cookbooks you may have overlooked in favor of more heavily marketed tomes, but this great little volume is a worthy addition to your collection. For those days when you want to really and truly feel good after you’re done a meal, The Veggie Queen proves she’s up to the task.

If history’s your thing and you’re vegetarian, there’s a new book on the shelves that may be worth your time to check out: The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times by Tristram Stuart.

When the book’s press agent (a vegetarian, it should be noted) sent this along, I got really excited about it. It’s got to be the most comprehensive and thorough book on the subject of the history of vegetarianism. But here’s the thing: there’s no chance I’m going to get a chance to read and review this book with the attention it deserves anytime before Rasine goes off to college.

At over 450 pages of content, it’s a dense book, to say the least. The bibliography is insane. The references are impeccably noted. It’s an impressive book and (from what I can tell so far), a well-written one, to boot. Here’s a brief rundown of what you can expect:

How Western Christianity and Eastern philosophy merged to spawn a political movement that had the prohibition of meat at its core

The Bloodless Revolution is a pioneering history of puritanical revolutionaries, European Hinduphiles, and visionary scientists who embraced radical ideas from the East and conspired to overthrow Western society’s voracious hunger for meat. At the heart of this compelling history are the stories of John Zephaniah Holwell, survivor of the Black Hole of Calcutta, and John Stewart and John Oswald, who traveled to India in the eighteenth century, converted to the animal-friendly tenets of Hinduism, and returned to Europe to spread the word. Leading figures of the Enlightenment–among them Rousseau, Voltaire, and Benjamin Franklin–gave intellectual backing to the vegetarians, sowing the seeds for everything from Victorian soup kitchens to contemporary animal rights and environmentalism.

Since there won’t be a proper review here for The Bloodless Revolution before 2024, I encourage you to check the book out if history’s your thing. It may well become one of those books that we’ll be referring to 15, 20 years from now.

I got into zines pretty late in the game.  I have a few from high school that friends put together, but didn’t really start tuning into the “zine scene” until well after I should have.  There’s something special about the personal, handmade nature of zines that’s hard to resist. And since Portland is both the “zine mecca” and “vegan mecca,” it should come as no surprise there are a load of good vegan zines and cookzines out there.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, and while I was working on it, I came across this page of vegan zines. It’s far more complete than this post will be. Here, I’ll just cover a few that I’ve collected over the last couple of years.

Cookzines:

• Soy Not Oi!: The classic that everyone’s heard of. Lots of recipes, essays, and nifty little illustrations. I wonder what the Hippycore Krew is up to ten years later.
• We Need to Eat: Similar in style to “Soy Not Oi!,” “We Need to Eat” focuses on affordable, quick meals.
• The Frugal Vegan’s Harvest & Holiday Survival Guide: We use this one a lot, all year long. Some successes we’ve had include the super easy curried potato-broccoli soup, the buckwheat pancakes, and the veggie pot pie. Also has fun holiday gift ideas (why did I never think of packing the dry ingredients of cookie mixes with a card about how to finish the recipe?).
• Don’t Have a Cow: Recipes from varied sources and lots of well thought-out writing on veganism and animal rights. This is one of those zines that you’ll read over repeated sittings so that you can take it all in. I’m sorry to hear, though, that the author’s not a big fan of Herbivore. But he is a fan of the veg blog, so I guess that gets him some bonus points.

Two (well, three, technically) cookbooks that are compiled from several issues of vegan cookzines — full reviews are forthcoming:

• Hot Damn and Hell Yeah/The Dirty South Cookbook: Two cookbooks in one here with lots of great stuff for people who want a little grease with their food. And for only $5? C’mon now, it’s a given. (You can hear my audio review of this on episode 41 of Vegan Freak Radio.)
• Please Don’t Feed the Bears: Every recipe has an obscure metal recommendation along with it. I just got this one and we’re still working our way through it, but holy seitan the chocolate chip cookies are amazing.

Some non-cooking zines from veg*ns (this is a very incomplete list since it seems lots of zinesters are vegans, so I’ve just included ones from veg blog regulars and folks I’ve talked with):

• Geraniums and Bacon, et al.: Lots of varied goodness from a veg blog regular.
• Invincible Summer: An Anthology: This anthology of Nicole J. Georges’ stuff is a great read and includes some gems about her time interning at Farm Sanctuary California.
• sisu: A thought-provoking zine by long-time veg blog reader johanna. #3 turned me on to a kind of fun book titled The City, Not Long After that I would have never stumbled across otherwise.

Any to add?

Isa and Terry’s youngest fan (click through for a larger photo):

The Glad Cow Cookbook
Summer Keightley
Glad Cow Publishing, 2005

Summer Keightley’s The Glad Cow Cookbook would be easy to overlook if it were on the shelf at Borders. It’s a small, unassuming book, coming in at just 64 pages, with no pictures and a very simple layout. One might mistake it as a bookmark for Vegan Planet.

And that’s why I like it.

We all have loads of cookbooks with tons of recipes that may or may not have been tested as fully as they should be. But when you flip through The Glad Cow Cookbook, it’s clear that Summer has taken time to develop and test these recipes. Each section (Baked Goods, Biscotti, Dips and Spreads, Main Dishes, Sides, Soups and Salads, and Sweets) is tiny, with less than a dozen recipes in each, but it’s easy to tell that what’s there is what you’re likely to find in Summer’s own fridge on any given day.

I was stoked to see a section on Biscotti, which features four recipes. My wife and I made up the almond biscotti and the oatmeal chocolate chip biscotti, put it in a nice jar and gave it to my mom for her birthday along with some Newman’s Own orange dark chocolate to melt and dip into. She loved them and they were gone quickly.

The Lemon Garlic Pasta is a delicious and simple alternative to the standard spaghetti with marinara sauce. It’s a perfect go-to dish on those busy nights. Another favorite is the Road Trip Quinoa salad, a very bright and light summer salad. This is the type you can make on a Sunday night and have for the rest of the week for lunch. Great stuff.

For a little something different, give the Tofu Piri Piri a try, a veggie take on a classic Argentinian dish. It came out a bit sour using all of the lemon and lime juice called for, so considering cutting back a little.

In terms of sweets, you can’t beat the Miracle Creamy Coconut First Try Pie, an experimental recipe of Summer’s that turned out right on the first try. It calls for a pound of silken tofu and a 16 oz. can of coconut milk, but it turned out just fine with 13 oz. of tofu and a 13 oz. can of coconut milk. It lives up to its name… it’s plenty creamy and is miraculously easy.

About the only place where Glad Cow came up short was on a black bean casserole recipe. It wasn’t bad, it was just kind of bland compared to the other very flavorful dishes we’d made from the book. It may have been the subbing of beet greens for kale on my part that did it, though.

While $12.95 may seem a bit steep for a 64-page cookbook, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to recommend it. There’s more variety in here than you’d expect and the recipes are inspired and unique. Plus, you’re supporting a fellow Veg Blog reader and a small press. So, really, it’s a no-brainer.

You can pick a copy up directly from Summer or through our friends over at Food Fight. And if you’re reading this and it’s still June, you can enter to win a copy!

Vive le Vegan!
Dreena Burton
Foreword by Erik Marcus
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004

Dreena Burton’s The Everyday Vegan (2001, Arsenal Pulp Press) is one of those great general purpose vegan cookbooks, the type that you can lend to a non-vegan friend and they’ll get a lot out of it. Dreena’s latest, Vive le Vegan!, takes the next step with an even better batch of recipes.

Both The Everyday Vegan and Vive le Vegan! accomplish one important thing: they collect recipes that are accessible, but not the same ones you’ve seen a hundred times before. You’ll see a lot of ingredients you may not be familiar with, but used in such a way that you’ll be anxious to try them out. For instance, the recipe for Miso-Curry Roasted Potatoes takes basic yukon potatoes and tops them with miso, one of those ingredients that a lot of people don’t find until they become vegan and start exploring international cuisines for the first time. It’s an easy dish with complex flavors. And if filling, spicy meals are your thing, the Last-Minute Chili and Taco Filling will do the trick.

Breakfasts are well-represented with some wonderfully delicious, but easy choices. The Orange Mango Smoothie and Creamy Raspberry Oatmeal are both healthy choices, but the real stand-out comes in the form of Apple Oat Pancakes. We’ve made this recipe more than any other in Vive le Vegan! so far. It’s one of those recipes that as you’re making it, you think, “There’s no way this will turn out,” but magically, it does. The fresh slices of apple are the perfect compliment to the the oatiness (oatiness!) of the pancakes.

The Apple Phyllo Strudel was a bit tricky since we had never worked with phyllo pastry before, but the end result was a deliciously crispy and lightly sweet. Other desserts came out equally as well. I made the Pineapple Lemon Bars for a potluck and they got a good reception (though I think I ate more than everyone else combined… I had trouble keeping my hands off of them) and the homestyle chocolate chip cookies will be going into my cookie repertoire. But the real winner in the dessert chapter is the recipe for Coconut-Lime Cookies… holy crap they’re good. Thanks to the tanginess of the lime and the sweetness of the coconut, I’d rank them among the best tasting homemade cookies I’ve made.

In addition to the all the great recipes, one small–but very important–thing that Dreena and her publisher got very right with this book is the format. It’s attractively laid out, easy to read, and best of all: all of the recipes are listed in the table of contents rather than just the section headers. See, around our house, we rate recipes on the front page of each cookbook by noting the page number and + (good!), – (don’t make again), and ~ (requires changes) and then a longer comment on the recipe page itself. With all the recipes listed up front, we can put our notations right next to the recipe name and see everything at a glance, making life just a tad easier. It’s the small things, folks.

While The Everyday Vegan offered up a solid introduction to veganism, Vive le Vegan!‘s big bonus is the “Feeding Your Vegan Baby and Toddler” section. Dreena’s done a lot of research on how to properly introduce foods to baby to avoid potential food allergies while also exposing them to a wide variety of flavors. It’s a handy guide and I’m glad Dreena shared what she learned.

The Everyday Vegan is a very good cookbook, but Vive le Vegan! is a great one, one that we’ve come to rely on. Dreena’s also been quick at responding to my stupid questions (“How much oat flour should I use if I don’t want to grind oats myself for the pancakes?”)… there’s something nice about that personal touch. I don’t think e-mailing Julia Child would have worked so well.

Well done, Dreena! We’re anxiously awaiting the next one to see what you come up with next.

La Dolce Vegan!
by Sarah Kramer
2005, Arsenal Pulp Press
Visit Sarah at GoVegan.net

I may be one of the only vegans that doesn’t have copies of How It All Vegan (maybe because I’m stupid) and Garden of Vegan on my shelf. I realize that admitting this will probably get me kicked out of the vegan club and/or encourage Sarah Kramer to come to my house and stab me with a tattoo needle, but I have to come clean.

I do, however, have a copy of Sarah’s latest, La Dolce Vegan, her third cookbook with the trademark funky design. After using it for the past few months, I’m not quite sure why I her first two books are missing from my collection.

La Dolce Vegan is packed with recipes. And though Sarah went the solo route this time around (her first two books were co-authored with Tanya Barnard), many of the recipes are gleaned from friends and GoVegan.net forum members. I don’t know exactly recipes are included, but every time I open the book, I find an new recipe–or an entire section–that I missed before. How’s she do that?

The recipes I’ve tried thusfar have all been easy to make and really tasty. The Cinnamon-Spice Roasted Veggies with Couscous hit the spot and is a great autumn go-to dish. Jessica’s “Cures What Ails Ya Garlic Soup” is… well… garlicky. Really garlicky. Two large servings contain an entire head of garlic. So, yeah… that’ll clear our your sinuses. And pores. I love me some garlic.

My wife is a big fan of the Mocked Clam Chowder recipe, which I also enjoyed. Nice and creamy and the potatoes stand in well for the clam. And we’ve gotten a lot of use out of a simple spice mix recipe called “Needs a Little Extra” Spice. It’s a blend of common spices that you use when something like potatoes or fries need a little extra kick. We put some in an old spice container and use the blend weekly.

There are a couple of recipes we’ve returned to a number of times, rare around our house since I’m so far behind in my cookbook reviews. One is the Veganica.com Cajun Sweet Potato Fries. We used this recipe a lot last fall when we got more sweet potatoes from our CSA than we knew what to do with. They’re spicy and really flavorful. The other recipe is Cindy O’s “Chicken” & Rice Soup for the Soul. Let me tell you something: if you’re sick and looking for a good chicken-ish soup, this is the one. The “chicken” is made with wheat gluten flour and is about as easy as can be (2 tbsp gluten flour, 2 tbsp water, mix, knead a few times, slice, use) and the soup has all sorts of great flavors from the spices and stock (use Unchicken broth if you can). Great stuff.

While I haven’t tried any of the dessert recipes yet, I did make the Coconut Pie Panckes, which are as good as dessert. These have a nice, sweet coconutty flavor and a very strong banana flavor. If you’d prefer not to have the banana-y flavor, use ground flax seed and water instead.

Of all the recipes we’ve tried, we’ve only run into a couple that we haven’t enjoyed or that we really needed to tweak to fit our tastes. Like the Festive Butternut Squash, which has a lot of spices and nuts, but came out surprisingly bland. Thankfully, these types of recipes are few and far between. I love how modern vegan cookbooks are weighed so heavily towards good recipes these days.

Sarah’s a strong personality and a distinctive aura, so it’s no wonder that she frequently gets recognized when she’s out in public. She sort of reminds me of Aunt Martha in Sleepaway Camp, but in a good way.

Huh. That’s the sound of a movie reference going over an entire audience’s collective head.

Anyway, her personality really shines through in this book. Indeed, some of the best stuff here is in the “Kitchen Wisdom” section, which has loads of great tips on how to use salt, how to make your own cleaners, and why you shouldn’t use old baking powder. She also takes on, with grace, complaints of people who say that they “could never be vegan.” Her response to “I’m too lazy to be vegan”?

“Good luck with that.”

I’m sorry that it’s taken me this long to introduce myself to Sarah’s work. La Dolce Vegan!‘s a great cookbook and Sarah’s a genuinely good person. (Be sure to check out her interview on episode 28 of the Vegan Freak podcast.) Go snag your copy. Then, go forth, cook, and eat well.

Vegan with a Vengeance
by Isa Chandra Moskowitz
Foreword by some jerk
2005, Marlowe & Company

Last year was a pretty amazing year for vegan cookbooks. High profile ones like La Dolce Vegan and Vive le Vegan! as well as ones released more quietly like The Veggie Queen and The Glad Cow Cookbook are well worthy of note. They’re all part of a new wave of vegan cookbooks that not only make vegan cooking accessible to the mainstream, but also bring new, creative dishes to vegans who have tried everything.

One of the most entertaining and useful of the new wave of vegan cookbooks is Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Vegan with a Vengeance. Isa and her partner Terry made a name for themselves starting in 2004 with The Post Punk Kitchen, a Brooklyn-based public access cooking show. The show is shot a small apartment kitchen and features not only creative recipes, but some great music and personality. It’s the one show that most deserves to be on The Food Network and for that very reason, never will be.

Isa’s debut cookbook is as entertaining as it is useful. “Punk Points” scattered throughout the book give helpful cooking tips and shortcuts while Isa’s cat Fizzle keeps you filled in with further detail about ingredients. In addition, Isa includes short essays about running a breakfast cafe, shopping for kitchen gear at thrift stores, and the Food Not Bombs program. Vegan with a Vengeance at times reads more like a zine than a cookbook. (That’s a good thing.)

Even though it came out at the end of the year, we’ve already tried more recipes out of this cookbook than any other one we own. It’s fast become a favorite in our house. One big reason: we’ve rediscovered breakfast.

We’ve had more weekend breakfasts and weekday breakfasts-for-dinner in the last four months than we’ve had in the last four years, I think. We have yet to come across a mediocre recipe. The Pumpkin Waffles are like having pumpkin bread in waffle form: absolutely delicious. My wife declared the Oatmeal Banana Raisin Waffles “the best waffles ever” and combined with some well-marinated tempeh bacon, they make the perfect breakfast. And if you’re the type that always used to order chocolate chip pancakes as a kid, you’ll love Isa’s Chocolate Chocolate Chip pancakes. They’re sweet enough to be eaten for dessert.

Other American fare is well represented. The recipe we’ve made more frequently than any other is the Tempeh Reuben, a truly amazing creation that captures the flavor and texture of the original reuben without the disgusting ass corned beef. And even if you don’t make the whole sandwich, the vegan thousand island dressing part of the recipe alone is worth the effort.

It’s not all Euro-centric fare, though. The Potato-Edamame Samosas with Coconut-Mint Chutney is one that fans of Indian fare will want to try. Though my attempt came up short, it was probably due to my own poor skills with dough than the recipe itself. The filling was extremely tasty, so I suspect that this one will become a favorite once I stop being so lame with dough.

Among the other internationally-flavored meals include Falafel, Ethiopian Seitan and Peppers (one I’ve been meaning to make for months now), and Kabocha Squash Stuff with Butternut Vindaloo.

And, it should come as no surprise to anyone that’s tried any of the sweets on the Post Punk Kitchen site (five words: Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies), the dessert section of Vegan with a Vengeance will help you on your way to a sugar headache mighty fast. One taste of the Pumpkin Oatmeal Cookies will have you rethinking the boring old pumpkin-in-a-can recipes you’ve come to rely on. Also wicked good: Blueberry Coffee Cake. Favorites on the PPK forums include Fauxstess Cupcakes, Raspberry Blackout Cake with Ganache-y Frosting, and Fig Not-Ins. Believe me, they’re all on my “to make” list.

In addition to being packed with great recipes, Vegan with a Vengeance is a pleasure to use. It’s well-indexed, features eight pages of gorgeous food photography (“food porn”), and history behind the recipes. It’s nearly as much fun to read as it is to cook from.

Since it came out, when someone asks for a recommendation of a vegan cookbook to try, I immediately recommend Vegan with a Vengeance. The food is accessible, the recipes are well varied in difficulty, and it fights the notions that vegan food is either uninventive (does anyone really still believe that?) or that it’s too reliant on processed faux meats. Plus, the stuff just tastes good. Can’t ask for more than that.

Last night I made a potato and brocolli soup recipe from The Frugal Vegan’s Harvest and Holiday Survival Guide, a cookzine I picked up in New York last year. The zine itself is nicely laid out with lots cheap, tasty recipes and fun commentary and gift ideas. This recipe in particular was perhaps the easiest soup recipe I’ve ever made and may become a good go-to dish when time or patience is short. The base recipe was a bit salty, probably due to the vegetable stock (in this case, a Better Than Bullion base). Otherwise, it was a thick and creamy soup worthy of repeat performances. I’ll post the recipe shortly.

As a side note, I’m not that enamored with the Better Than Boullion vegetable base. Sure, their slogan (“You’re in for a Treat! It’s the Bouillon Made from Meat.”) sucks, but it’s more that the flavor really doesn’t offer anything over a decent low salt powder. (Time to come clean: I rarely make vegetable stock from scratch. I know I lose points and may be kicked out of the vegan club.)

I’ve got seven books in the queue to be reviewed. This is the first of those seven, with the rest of them following in the coming weeks. This one’s long overdue.

An abbreviated version of this review will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Clamor Magazine.

Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World
[ Purchase - use code punkrocks111 for 20% off! ]
Bob Torres and Jenna Torres
Foreword by Isa Chandra Moskowitz
Tofu Hound Press, 2005

There have been a couple of “Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World”-type books written in the last few years (Erin Pavlina’s Raising Vegan Children in a Non-Vegan World and Carol J. Adams’ Living Among Meat Eaters come to mind), but our friends Bob and Jenna‘s Vegan Freak takes a fresh look at the challenge of living an animal-friendly life (apologies to Eric) in a world that makes it hard to do so.

Vegan Freak sets itself apart right from the start, letting us know that the “health nut” and “the hippie” aren’t the intended audience for this book. Rather, the focus is on ethical vegans looking to recharge their batteries and lacto-ovo vegetarians who are looking for that last nudge. They also let you know that you’ll be seeing the word “fuck” a few times in their book, something you probably won’t come across in the more family-friendly books. Reading Vegan Freak on a lunchbreak at work is like sitting across from your favorite swearing friends at a restaurant: they’re hilarious to be around and you love every minute, but you hope your first grade teacher doesn’t walk in and hear them talking like that.

The first chapter, “Vegan and Freaky,” takes a look at how the authors came to veganism and what it really means to be vegan. They advocate the “cold tofu” approach—going right to veganism for three weeks rather than slowly transitioning. It’s an interesting idea, one that’s worked well for a number of people. That said, I don’t think it would have worked for me. My gradual transition wasn’t about not being able to give up cheese, but was slow because I didn’t have all the facts yet. During my transitional phase, one that was admittedly too long, I was educating myself about the dairy and egg industries as well as learning to cook without both. Once I was fully informed, however, the phasing out of dairy and eggs was a fast process. So the “cold tofu” approach will probably work best for those lacto-ovos whose favorite line to vegans is, “I know I should be vegan, but…”

In the first chapter, Bob and Jenna also discuss their own pathways to veganism and take on the vegan police.

Chapter two, titled “In Which We Get All AR On You,” takes a high-level view at the ethical arguments for veganism. While most of the material in this chapter won’t be news to those who have memorized Diet for a New America and Meat Market, it’s thorough while also being concise. A nice, thick recommended reading list is included.

With all the reasons to go vegan laid out, next up comes the most difficult part of going vegan. It has nothing to do with nutrition or finding suitable substitutions for cheese. Nope… the worst part is having to deal with other people, particularly if you’re the quiet, non-confrontational type. Chapter three, “Hell is Other People,” deals with exactly this issue. The recommendation: don’t be aggressive, but don’t be meek. This includes when dealing with anti-vegan vegetarians (because milk doesn’t kill the cow!) and perhaps the worst group of all: the vocal ex-vegan. The personal antecdotes stand out, particularly the rant on Bob’s Uncle Bill (listen to podcast 22 for a rundown on Bob and Jenna’s Christmas 2005 run-in with the unapologetic meat-eating uncle).

Chapter four covers what to eat, both at home and in restaurants. This is a great chapter to show your parents (unless there’s a lot of cursing in it, which I can’t remember if there is) so they can see exactly what a vegan is and what types of things are off-limits. One omission I was surprised at, though, was in the paragraph about eating out in Italian restaurants. While they mention that you should ask about what’s in the sauces, they don’t mention that a lot of freshly prepared pasta contains eggs. A lot of restaurants will stick with dry pasta which is less likely to contain animal products, but it’s still worth asking the first time you eat somewhere if their pasta contains eggs.

The fifth chapter focuses on what to wear. This includes not only alternatives to leather and wool, but what you wear when you’re playing like Marvin Gaye and getting it on (vegan condoms) and what you wear on your skin (making sure your tattoos are vegan). While many vegan books cover the issue of wool, leather, and even silk, not many touch upon tattoos, condoms, and sex toys. Bravo.

I would liked to have seen some discussion of the environmental issues surrounding the production of pleather, a petroleum-based leather alternative suggested in the book, but I think it’s outside the scope of what they aimed to cover. Perhaps they’ll discuss it as a topic on their blog or something.

The book closes out with a basic, but important wish: Go Vegan, Stay Vegan. Bob and Jenna realize that it’s not just about transitioning to veganism, but living a vegan life for the long-term. Vegan Freak will help you do just that.

As with any good non-fiction book, the learning doesn’t stop when you finish the last page. You’re not left out to dry here: Vegan Freak has an accompanying website, blog, podcast, and forum as well as a great resource appendix I think they’ll even come to your house and talk you down from a cheese-induced high if you ask them to.

There’s more support now than ever for new and transitioning vegans. 2005 saw the release of more vegan-themed books and cookbooks than any recent year that i can remember and of those, Vegan Freak is one of the essential reads, particularly for young vegans. Vegan Freak reminds us that being different is OK… and it’s OK to be a freak. Thank goodness.

Apparently, Vegan With a Vengeance is shipping almost a month early from Amazon. Go order now!

(In case you haven’t heard me mention it about a thousand times already, Vegan With a Vengeance is the awesome new cookbook from Isa at the Post-Punk Kitchen. I wrote the foreword. If you love me and you love puppies and you love all that is good in this world, you’ll buy the book.)

(First of all, I’ve gotta say I’m pretty embarrassed about this. I got this book several years ago from Dreena to review and thought I had reviewed it. Recently, I checked back and realized I hadn’t. So, this is a late review with many apologies to Dreena.)

The Everyday Vegan, Dreena Burton’s first cookbook, takes a different approach to vegan cooking than other cookbooks near it on the shelf. Since veganism is usually associated first with ethics and animal rights and secondarily with health and environmental issues, most of the popular vegan cookbooks have been written for those that gave up meat, dairy, and eggs for ethical reasons. However, as time goes on and “vegan” becomes a less alien word for the world at large, I think we’ll see more cookbooks marketed towards people who are simply interested in eating a vegan diet and learning more about it, no matter what path led them to it.

Here, Dreena starts out with a surprisingly lengthy section introducing veganism, food information, and the health side of things. In fact, a full quarter of the book is dedicated to covering ingredients, food preparation and storage tips, and individuals’ stories of coming to a vegan diet. The nice thing about The Everyday Vegan is that it’s about as far from heavy-handed as could be, so it’s extremely accessible for people who are just looking to add more vegan recipes to their repetoire.

Dreena covers everything from gravies and sauces to main dishes and desserts. About the only thing you won’t find is a dedicated breakfast section, though the “Muffins and Snack Loaves” section offers up some tasty suggestions that would work well in the morning.

One of the benefits of being extremely late in writing this review is that I’ve gotten the chance to try out quite a few recipes. Among the many that I enjoyed are warm, hearty recipes like the Creamy Potato Leek Bake, a very garlicky alternative to the standard mashed potatoes. It uses two bulbs of roasted garlic and five cups of leeks to form a base with mashed russet potatoes. It’s combined with a tasty sauce of vegetable stock, molasses, spices, and tamari.

Even more garlicky is the Creamy Garlic Tomato Sauce, which uses three bulbs of roasted garlic. This sauce took a somewhat long time to prepare and cook–about an hour–but it’s a great weekend sauce for those of us that love when a garlic aroma comes out of our pores.

The Everyday Vegan is single-handedly responsible for introducing my wife and I to the correct way to eat kale. Before this, we got kale and looked at it a little funny, trying to figure out how the heck to prepare it so that it didn’t taste bitter. Dreena’s simple recipe combines just the right amount of olive oil, sea salt, and shallots to result in a perfectly balanced set of flavors that make eating those dark leafies quite the pleasure.

There are a number of other quick and easy recipes for less-than-standard veggies, like asparagus (Quick Asparagus Saute) and fennel (Roasted Fennel with Carrots and Shallots).

I had slightly less success with a delicious sounding recipe in the dessert section, Blueberry-Orange Crisp Cake. Seriously, how good does that sound? While the flavorof the dish was fine, my version of it came out squishier than I would have liked. I suspect this was because I used a baking dish rather than a baking pan, because I didn’t have a pan of the right size at the time. I definitely want to give this one another shot, because just looking at the ingredients makes me hungry.

The recipes are well organized and the lists of ingredients very easy to read. Though the instructions are presented in paragraph form rather than step-by-step format, even longer recipes are easy enough to follow. There are eight pages of gorgeous color photos of the food in the center of the book, which will certainly inspire you to try them. There are no washed out, embarassing pictures of brown lentil loafs here.

The Everyday Vegan is a great addition to your cookbook shelf. Not only are the recipes accessible and tasty, but the information early in the book is a great read for people new to cooking or new to veganism while also making the reader excited about what they’re learning. It’s like, “Who put that reference book in my cookbook?” “No, who put that cookbook in my reference book?”

The Everyday Vegan is available from Arsenal Pulp Press. Dreena’s second book, Viva le Vegan was published in 2004.

After being vegetarian for almost five years and vegan for ten months, I feel like I’ve read most of what there is to read when it comes to animal rights literature as related to veganism. I’ve read Slaughterhouse, I’ve read Fast Food Nation, I’ve read Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, I’ve read The Food Revolution. But when I got Erik Marcus’ wonderfully written and impeccably-researched and -reasoned second book, Meat Market: Animals, Ethics, and Money, I realized that there are a lot of new ideas floating around worth thinking about.

The first three chapters cover material that will be familiar to long-time AR activists. But even so, there are still some worthwhile nuggets in there that will surprise you. Erik starts off by talking about the economics of animal agriculture and how dramatically the farming landscape has changed over the last fifty years. Long gone are the days when small farms ruled and you knew where your eggs were coming from. Now animals are grown more quickly, forced to produce a higher output (whether it be meat, eggs, or dairy), and are killed at an earlier age. One fact that struck me: in 1950, it took 70 days before a chicken reached slaughter weight. Now, it’s down to 47 days. And on that 47th day, the chicken is 2/3rds larger than a 70-day old chicken from 1950. Even if the argument that “eating meat is ‘natural’” is true, that kind of physiological change in an animal is anything but.

The “Farmed Animal Lives” chapter summarizes the pain and suffering animals go through throughout the meat/dairy/egg production process. Not too much new ground here, but the ethical argument for not eating meat is summed up so succinctly here, I wouldn’t hesitate recommending this as the one chapter to show to meat-eating friends and relatives. The facts are presented in such a straightforward way with just enough detachment that it’s powerful and moving without being preachy. This chapter made an impression on me, causing me think very differently about eggs. Erik contends, and it seems correctly, that egg-laying hens are the more tortured animals in all of food production. The pain and suffering they endure goes beyond even what veal calves endure. Clearly, it’s not a walk in the park for any animal subject to such a life, but if you’re a lacto-ovo vegetarian considering veganism, this might be the chapter that helps push you the rest of the way. I got this book just before I completely gave up eggs and dairy, and it was definitely one of the deciding factors in nudging me the rest of the way.

In the “Possibilities for Reform in Animal Agriculture” section, Erik discusses how it’s technically possible to provide slaughter-free eggs and dairy, but it is economically unfeasible in our current climate (it would cost about a dollar an egg). I always thought about how one could perhaps ethically eat eggs since hens will lay unfertilized eggs, but finding a place to get such eggs proves to be an extremely difficult task. Free-range and organic labels are intended to make consumers feel better about their purchases, but truly, the difference is miniscule, if anything, to the animals. Eggs are a torturous business, no way around it.

The main focus of the book comes in part two which talks about “dismantlement.” Sure, you’ve heard of animal rights, animal welfare, and vegetarianism as approaches to reducing animal suffering, but Erik introduces this idea of dismantlement as the ideal fourth movement that all animal activists can get behind. It’s a lofty goal: bring down the industry systematically not by telling people “You need to change your diet!” but by introducing them to the cruelties of factory farm life. “Animal agriculture takes a small hit whenever somebody becomes vegetarian or vegan,” Erik writes, “but the loss of one customer is something the industry can live with. What the industry won’t be able to endure is a steady stream of new activists [from the general public] seeking to put an end to animal agriculture.”

The argument for dismantlement is a strong one, and Erik does a very good job of outlining the problems the animal rights movements have had in the past and how they can be avoided. Everything from poor use of money to hostiliy towards hierarchy has hurt the movement, and these organizational issues need to be addressed before the dismantlement movement can really get off the ground.

It can be frustrating for an activist to look at the animal rights/protection movements over the last 20 years and see that while there have been incremental gains, public awareness of the issues isn’t really noticeably higher. Or, at the very least, the number of people that have converted to veganism has only increased slightly. Whether or not the idea of dismantlement is the answer remains to be seen. But perhaps the most valuable thing that Meat Market will do is cause activists to talk and consider new ideas. Erik wants his idea critically examined, just as he wants every other aspect of animal rights and protectionism examined. As a movement, it behooves us to make sure we have not only rock-solid science behind health and environmental claims, but a firm, clearly stated argument about the misery caused by factory farming.

Erik argues that the movement has been split evenly between health, ethical, and environmental issues and that it needs to shift primarily towards ethical issues in order to be most effective. I’m not completely convinced this is the best route to take. Perhaps it’s because I’m becoming a bitter old man when it comes to my view of humanity. I feel like people, in general, care more about taste and their “right” to eat what they please a lot more than they care about how animals are treated. Sure, organic and free range meats have gained in popularity, but I’m convinced it’s more for taste and health reasons than anything resembling a true and honest concern for the animals.

That said, I think that what Erik suggests as a new direction and focus can be true. What we have to do first, though, is help the average person not cringe when they hear the phrase “animal rights.” We have to show them that for every goofy PR stunt PETA pulls, they do a world of good that doesn’t get reported helping farmed animals. We have to remind people that there really isn’t a difference between their dog and a pig other than that one winds up on their plate in a particularly heinous fashion. I think that once we can shift public perception of the animal rights/protection movement, we’ll be able to drum up a lot more support for fighting the factory farm machine. We’ve begun to see this shift on the vegetarian side of the movement, where even though not significantly more people are becoming full-fledged vegetarians, more people are becoming aware of vegetarian foods and don’t automatically think of someone eating tofu raw out of the carton. I’m not completely sure how we can cause similar change in perception on the AR side of things, especially on a large scale, but I think it can be done. And once it is, then the concept of dismantlement will be ready to roll full-force.

The next section of the book features guest essays from activists on topics such as leafleting, working for school lunch reform, and promoting vegetarian diets as a nutrition expert. There’s a lot of inspiration in these brief essays and everyone will find something here that will encourage them to get up and make a difference in their own way.

Meat Market closes out with a set of appendices that take a critical look at the facts behind the arguments the movement uses, like the difficult question of hunting and how it’s not as black-or-white of an issue as either the traditional AR stance nor the hunter’s party line. This is what makes Meat Market a successful endeavor: it has a crossover appeal and it doesn’t lay everything out as “this is the only thing that is true and the other side is totally wrong about everything.” It’s a refreshing take on the issue and one that we have to consider, debate, pick apart, and act on in the coming years in order to keep our movement from stagnating and losing its true focus.

You can order Meat Market in both hardcover and paperback.

I’ve plugged Isa’s upcoming Vegan With a Vengeance cookbook here a few times before, but expect the plugging to be even more pronounced in the coming months.

Why? Well, Isa kindly asked yours truly to pen the foreword. And so I did.

While I always hoped that I’d have a book published by the time I was 30, I’m perfectly happy having a foreword in someone else’s super crazy awesome book a month after I turn 30.

More fun announcements to come. But now, go pre-order!

Isa, the Mighty Queen of The Post Punk Kitchen, is coming out with a cookbook later this year. Want a sneak peak at some of the photos from the book?

You got it.

Tell me that Chocolate Orange Pudding with Citrus Macadamia Creme doesn’t look freakin’ amazing.

I’ve just posted an overdue cookbook review (and have a couple more waiting in the wings). This one is for Nava Atlas’ The Vegetarian Family Cookbook.

Cookbook author Nava Atlas has penned a series of successful vegetarian cookbooks with a special appeal to families and those looking for simple ways to prepare unique meatless meals. Books like The Vegetarian 5-Ingredient Gourmet, Vegetariana, and Vegetarian Soups for All Seasons have been go-to books on my shelf since I became vegetarian and her latest, The Vegetarian Family Cookbook is a great addition to her previous publications.

One of the notable differences you’ll find in The Vegetarian Family Cookbook is that while not all the recipes are vegan, there are many expanded vegan options, a difference that reflects a change in Nava’s own life since her previous book. In the lengthy and informative introduction, she discusses soy mayonnaise, non-hydrogenated margarine, and soy milk as well as the reasons she and her family have eliminated cheese and eggs from their diets.

Also included in the introduction are a list of compelling reasons to “go organic,” a list of essential cooking tools, and the best oils to use for cooking.

Onto the recipes.

One of the first recipes I tried was for “Seashells in the Sand,” a simple couscous/bulgur-based dish with small shell pasta. The recipe as it’s listed is quite bland, but the recommendation for “adults” is to season it with fresh herbs or pine nuts. For me, a little marinara sauce did the trick.

A more successful pasta recipe was Pasta with Enlightened Alfredo Sauce. I opened for the vegan version and the end rich was light, yet relatively creamy.

The Baked Tofu Nuggets were tasty, but could have used a bit of a kick. They were made a bit better, though, with an excellent, very easy-to-make vegan tartar sauce on the next page.

One of the best, and simplest, dishes I tried was the Macaroni and Cheese with Secret Silken Tofu Sauce. Why “secret”? Because most people won’t even notice it’s in there. Again, I made the vegan version using Soymage vegan cheddar and the end result was very good. One of those simple, kid-friendly comfort foods that doesn’t require a disgusting packet of powdered cheese. But while this one is good hot, it’s even better cold the next day. This one is served well by some steamed spinach (I needed a whole bag) and some sun-dried tomatoes mixed in. It would probably also work well with some of the new Tofurky kielbasa or Italian sausages chopped up and tossed in.

The favorite around our house, though, was the exceedingly easy but fresh-and-tasty Middle Eastern Pita Bread Salad. With plum tomatoes, cucumber, scallions, parsley, and a few other ingredients, this fattoush is a great go-to meal, especially in the summer when bread salads taste even better with fresh, locally grown vegetables.

The Vegetarian Family Cookbook features over 275 recipes in the normal categories (breakfast, soups and stews—something Nava Atlas excels at, as seen in her excellent Vegetarian Soups for All Seasons, main dishes, side dishes, and sandwiches) as well as a few categories you won’t normally find in “family” cookbooks (tofu and seitan get a thorough treatment as do “wholesome baked goods”).

What’s great about Nava Atlas’ latest effort is that while there are good “family-style” cookbooks and good vegetarian cookbooks, the two categories have not been married in such a successful way to this point. The recipes are simple and while some may be too simple for advanced adult palates, the “Embellish It” tips suggest easy ways for adults to spark up a dish. Who knows, perhaps this cookbook will inspire families to actually eat the same meal, or only slight variations thereof. That would be quite an accomplishment.

Visit Nava Atlas’ web site In a Vegetarian Kitchen and order her book through the Veg Blog’s affiliate link.

The new issue of The Green Goat, a vegan zine, is out and it has a fun article by our buddy and yours, Vegan Porn‘s Herman Thrust. The article is titled “Cookbook Archeology” and discusses vegetarian cookbooks of old and how people in the future will view our vegetarian cookbooks:

In the future we’re faced with two possibilities. In what we’ll call Evil future, all cookbooks will be meaningless because so many plant species will have been wiped out due to rampant strains of genetically modified crab grass (animal-based cookbooks will have similar problems with extinction). In Good future, people won’t have any trouble finding the products mentioned in today’s cookbooks because they’ll be all that people eat. Hey, we never said how far we’re going into the future! In fact, the real puzzle may be over comments like “this tastes a lot like chicken,” because people will figure that’s just a sick joke, like “this tastes a lot like grandma.” Let’s take a moment to be thankful that the grandma phrase never showed up in the books of the past, shall we?

Herman’s all over the place these days. In addition to VP, he writes columns for both The Green Goat, Herbivore, and his own blog. I suspect there’s some sort of plan for world takeover in the making, but I can’t prove it yet.

Herbivore Clothing, makers of the super-cool “Praise Seitan” shirts I mentioned recently, are preparing to debut a new “vegetarian culture” magazine titled Herbivore.

“Vegetarian culture?” Sure. Because being vegetarian (and, especially, vegan) goes beyond just diet, it becomes part of what you stand for and how you live. The debut issue will cover ethics and environmental issues, music (” Family life with hardcore band H2O”), vegan roadtripping, and the bound-to-be-interesting “White trash vegetarianism.” They’ll also interview people active in the vegetarian movement like our friends over at Vegan Porn and they’ll have reviews of new vegetarian products. I pre-ordered the first issue and look forward to receiving it at the beginning of May.

When Mollie Katzen wrote the original Moosewood Cookbook 20 years ago, I doubt she ever imagined that her collection of vegetarian recipes would become one of the ten best selling cookbooks of all time. Well-known amongst vegetarians and meat-eaters alike, Katzen has developed quite a name for herself. Sunlight Caf� is Katzen’s latest vegetarian tome, providing over 350 breakfast recipes for those looking for some bright morningtime tastes without the use of meat.

Sunlight Caf� is organized into 12 sections, including beverages, fruit, grains, eggs, vegetables, and “breakfast bars, coffee cakes, and sweet somethings.” Each section offers a good number of recipes and numerous variations on many. Most of the ingredients are readily available from the grocery store or a health food market and should appeal to everyone, not just vegetarians. Though there is a section dedicated to tofu and other soy products (I’d imagine that tempeh makes a great breakfast accompaniment), there’s not a heavy emphasis on them like in many vegetarian cookbooks.

The recipes are all appropriate for lacto-ovo vegetarians, as many use butter, eggs, or milk. However, in most cases, it’s perfectly acceptable to do the magic vegan ingredient replacer trick and swap in some soy milk, non-dairy spread, or Ener-G egg replacer. There are no fish recipes, as in many of the Moosewood cookbooks (and you’d be surprised how many cultures include fish as part of their breakfast).

The recipes and ingredient lists are presented in a visually appealing, easy-to-follow way, most peppered with great little tidbits of information about specific ingredients or the history of certain dishes. It was through one of these sidebars that I learned about the best way to extract pomegranate seeds (hint: it involves a bowl of cold water), usually a very messy job. And did you know you can freeze pomegranates for months? Or that egg whites will keep in the freezer for up to a year? These introductory sections and sidenotes are what really make Sunlight Caf� a joy: this is one of those rare cookbooks that you can sit down with, open to a section, and just read it without any intention of cooking. The ingredient information is useful and well researched, and the anecdotes provide good context for a recipe before you try it.

Though no pictures of the dishes are included, the chapters are headed with attractive illustrations by Katzen herself. You may not get a good visual idea of how a dish should be presented, but the illustrations give the book a pleasing aura.

Now, let’s get to the good part: the food.

I’ve eaten oatmeal perhaps five times in my whole life, and I never really liked it. But I decided that if there was ever a time to give it a shot, now was it. For dinner one evening, I opted for Chai Oatmeal, a warm, simple, blend of oatmeal and chai spices (cinnamon, coriander, cardamom, and turmeric) with some optional saffron and vanilla. I swapped in soy milk for cow milk with no adverse affects. The optional minced pistachios and (soy) yogurt were a great touch. One bowl was quite filling and this is the type of meal that’s easy enough to make with a few extra minutes in the morning (total preparation and cooking time was about 20 minutes).

Masfouf worked great as a dinner one night and, indeed, seems more like a dinner recipe than something you’d have for breakfast. This dish combines couscous with pine nuts and pistachios with dates (something else I never thought I’d like), a bit of lemon, olive oil, and yogurt. The dish is simple enough to prepare, but the end result is surprisingly complex, with a nice blend of flavors and textures from the nuts, yogurt, and couscous grains.

As a diner lover, I tried the Basic Home Fries recipe with great anticipation. Though they’re not the healthiest thing on the menu, some hardcore home fries with ketchup are the perfect accompaniment to any greasy diner breakfast dish. The preparation time was a bit long, but I’m happy to say that with Katzen’s recipe, diner home fries have truly come home. They were just salty enough and the nice, crispy, browned potatoes had the proper texture. And using an oil like high oleic safflower oil—Katzen’s oil of choice for frying like this because, unlike olive oil, it’s not damaged by high temperatures—it’s not quite as unhealthy a choice as if you ordered a batch at a greasy spoon.

One recipe that didn’t come out quite as expected was a batch of Amazing Amaranth Wafers. I was pretty psyched to try these out, as amaranth is one of those grains that’s not very common, but is quite distinctive in its taste and texture. Though they were easy to make, the cooking time listed varied widely from what was appropriate for my gas stove. I cooked mine in a high oleic safflower oil (as suggested) for 6 or 7 minutes at a slightly lower temperature than the recipe called for. Katzen recommended at least 10 minutes, but after 7, the wafers were more like solid bricks of charcoal. I plan to give this one another shot, keeping a closer eye on the wafers in the final minutes. I think it has potential, with some adaptation. I have high hopes for getting this one right, though, as the side note about amaranth points out its many health benefits: it has more protein than beans, more fiber than wheat or soybeans, and more iron than brown rice! Not to mention that it’s an affordable grain.

Mollie Katzen’s Sunlight Caf� may be one of the most appropriately named cookbooks this year; the recipes will lift your spirits and bring some light into those dreary winter mornings and add a splash of fresh flavor to a Sunday in the spring. The range runs from quick and basic dishes to creative recipes that encourage experimentation. Katzen’s friendly, conversational style makes the stories and recipes feel like they were shared over a light brunch. If you really enjoy breakfast (at any time of day), you’ll certainly want to consider Sunlight Caf� for your collection.

Find out more about Mollie Katzen at MollieKatzen.com and keep an eye out for an upcoming Veg Blog interview.

Sunlight Caf� is available for purchase through the Veg Blog store. You are also invited to try out one of the recipes from the book, Polenta Waffles with Berries.

I’ve been reading the absolutely outstanding The Food Revolution by John Robbins (that’s Robbins as in “Baskin-Robbins,” incidentally) and one section really hit me when I read it. I knew that for a long time cow parts were rendered into feed for other cows resulting in “cow cannibalism,” if you will. Fortunately, in 1997 a law was passed in the United States to prohibit this (in order to prevent the spread of Mad Cow Disease), but the naturally herbivorous cow is still fed a variety of other animals that wind up at the rendering plant.

And here’s the crazy part… for all those people that joke about how Asian countries eat cats and dogs: if you’re eating beef, you are too. To quote cattle-rancher-turned-vegan Howard Lyman, “Another staple of the renderer’s diet, in addition to farm animals, is euthanized pets—the six or seven million dogs and cats that are killed in animal shelters every year. The city of Los Angeles alone, for example, sends some two hundred tons of euthanized cats and dogs to a rendering plant every month. Added to the blend are the euthanized catch of animal control agencies, and roadkill.” Believe it or not, it gets more disgusting… but I’ll let you read more through the previous link, if you’re so inclined.

I don’t intend to gross out the visitors to the Veg Blog, but I feel the need to mention things like this because it continues to astound me what has become common practice in the meat industry. These are things I simply never knew and only learned about after I became vegetarian. Sometimes I wonder how much sooner I would have stopped eating meat if I had known what I know now…

An artist by training, a cookbook author by happenstance, Nava Atlas has become one of the more unlikely successes in vegetarian cooking. Because of her initial training as an artist, Nava has released some of the more unique vegetarian cookbooks on the market, including Vegetariana, her labor of love that features not only healthy and hearty recipes, but also a nice dose of history and quotes related to vegetarianism as well as a bookful of original illustrations done by the author herself.

Nava’s cookbooks aren’t all for the eye, though. Her focuses range from regional American cooking (Great American Vegetarian) to holiday cooking (Vegetarian Celebrations) to simple, quick dishes (the new Vegetarian 5-Ingredient Gourmet and Vegetarian Express) to soup-by-the-season (Vegetarian Soups for All Seasons). She’s received positive reviews from Shape magazine, the Burlington Free Press, and the New York Daily News, and rightfully so: her recipes provide great taste and texture in a healthy fashion that’s accessible to the amateur home cook.

When did you become vegetarian and for what reasons? Why type of vegetarian are you now (and did it come in stages?)?

I’ve been a vegetarian for nearly 30 years, though for about 5 or 6 of those, I occasionally ate fish, so my sons don’t think those “count.” I became a vegetarian primarily because meat just viscerally made me uncomfortable. All the other reasons came later. My two sons, ages 12 and 10, are already lifelong vegetarians. I can officially call myself a lacto vegetarian now. I gave up eggs not long ago. But I only use organic dairy products.

What are the differences and similarities in the vegetarian movement when you stopped eating meat versus today?

I became a vegetarian 30 years ago or so. It was still considered quite an oddity and novelty. It provoked a lot more questions, and though many people are still confused about what vegetarians eat, for the most part, people accept it as an alternative. Today there are more vegans, and there is greater availability of vegetarian proteins such as tofu, tempeh, and the various soy-based meat alternatives. Vegetarian cookbooks in the 60s (the few that there were) were the “sprouts and brown rice” variety, as were vegetarian restaurant menus.

In the early 70s, people like Mollie Katzen (Moosewood Cookbook) and Anna Thomas (The Vegetarian Epicure) made vegetarian meals very luscious and rich; perhaps more so than we do today, but it put across the point that vegetarian cuisine could be delicious and not look like a plateful of brown glop. From there, things gradually evolved to where they are today.

Today, I think the strongest movements are veganism, due to ethical concerns, and far more kids and teens are also deciding to become vegetarians on their own, again, mainly for ethical reasons, and from the e-mail I get from them (or their concerned parents), they don’t really know much about how to make the transition; the desire to do so is greater than the means to implement it.

What are the main obstacles for vegetarians today?

I honestly don’t think there are any! There are so many resources, books, web sites, and foods, that it’s more a matter of holding to one’s convictions than anything else.

What kind of issues have your children faced as life-long vegetarians? Have they ever come home and shown any doubt in their vegetarian lifestyle?

Luckily their path has been easy. They go to a progressive school whose lunch program is primarily vegetarian (though they still want Mom to pack their lunch every day). If anything, they are getting ever more militant, at ages 10 and 12. They curse fast-food commercials, and are even concerned that most of their food is organic. We’ve become more aware of the issues surrounding agribusiness, so as a family we have become more strict about limiting non-organic produce, etc. The boys still like milk and eggs but we always use organic versions.

Wow — concerns about organic foods at ages 10 and 12. That’s impressive. Have other parents in your community been supportive of your decision to raise your children vegetarian, or do you still encounter the stereotypical, “Are they getting enough protein?”-type response?

The Hudson Valley is a rural/progressive region and there is a lot of sophistication about food. So luckily, no, I don’t get that tired old protein question. What I get more of is people I know calling and telling me that their child wants to be a vegetarian, and asking how to create a more balanced diet for them.

What prompted you to write your first book?

I never intended to become known as a cookbook author! My background is in illustration, fine art, and graphic design. From the time I started to cook for myself, though, I always enjoyed it. Soon after I married, my husband, who gave up meat as soon as we became an item, urged me to write down the recipes for the meals I made for us. As a non-cook himself, he was amazed at my improvisations as well as my attempts to re-create the dishes we had in NYC’s ethnic restaurants.

After a couple of years, I found myself with a slew of recipes and thought it would be fun to try to combine them somehow with my illustration and design skills. The result was my first book, Vegetariana: A Rich harvest of Wit, Lore, and Recipes. It’s really an offbeat cookbook and still my favorite. It was published in 1984 (revised in 1993) and is still available.

With The 5-Ingredient Vegetarian Gourmet, was your target audience recent vegetarian converts or long-time vegetarians looking for a good collection of easier-to-prepare meals?

I actually think this book’s audience might be primarily non-vegetarians or those looking to add more vegetarian meals to their repertoire. A lot of people who I hear from who have bought this book are not necessarily vegetarians. Though one of my former editors said he thought it was wonderful for his lazy/busy vegetarian family. Experienced vegetarians may enjoy the simple approach, though there may be no great revelations for them. Maybe the core audience for this book would be busy people for who healthy meals would otherwise be daunting. I also think it’s good for families with kids, as I have observed that kids are more likely to eat things that are simply prepared.

What do you feel separates your books from, say, Moosewood books or VRG books?

Moosewood’s books, VRG’s books, Mollie Katzen’s books, etc. etc, are all excellent. It’s amazing and delightful that there are so many choices. My earlier books distinguished themselves through my use of my own illustrations and food-related quotations and anecdotes. I think that’s how I made my reputation. In V5IG my illustrations are very simple (like the recipes) and the design, which was done by the publisher, is appropriately minimalist.

After this, I’m working on some new books that are not cookbooks, and which go back to using my original, lush style of illustration, which I stopped doing for some years after my little vegetarians were born.

What types of books will these be?

These will be a fairly wide range of books, once I get the momentum. Most will be women’s interest-type books?gently humorous and inspirational?I hope! A few years ago, I wrote a parody of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” called “Expect the Unexpected When You’re Expecting!” It was published by HarperCollins, though under a pseudonym based on the original authors’ names. It was a fun experience, though I must admit the book didn’t take hold like my cookbooks seem to.

What do you see in vegetarianism’s future?

Quite honestly, I am surprised that there is not a stronger movement toward full-fledged vegetarianism. The numbers have been pretty flat for many years. It surprises me since there is so much more known now about the evils of fast food, the horrendous practices of the meat industry, the proliferation of food-borne illness such as e coli and salmonella, etc. It’s quite an uphill battle, as I see it.

I think it’s only a matter of time before there is a documented case of Mad Cow disease in this country. Unfortunately, and I hate to say it, but it may take such a calamity to make the mainstream rethink their eating habits.

There is certainly more acceptance of vegetarianism, and vegetarian meals are definitely seen as more appealing than ever before. Maybe the future of vegetarianism lies with the current generation of kids and teens who tie their eating habits with ethical and environmental beliefs.

Media events like World Vegetarian Day (Oct. 1) and Great American Meatout (First day of each spring) will continue to create awareness. And I hear a rumor that Oct. 1 to Oct. 7 is now Say No to Fast Food Week. How cool!

Links

In a Vegetarian Kitchen
Nava Atlas’ site, which features a nice selection of recipes and general vegetarian info.

Nava Atlas’ books
Amazon’s listing of Nava Atlas’ books.

Vegetarian Kitchen Newsletter
Subscribe to Nava’s e-mail list.

Tonight Huyen cooked up some tempeh burgers from Nava Atlas’ Vegetariana. We hadn’t tried any variations on the recipe before, but this one turned out really well and made enough for lunch for the next few days. They were a nice consistency and had just enough spice to compliment the naturally smoky flavor of tempeh (tempeh is fermented soybeans, for those of you that haven’t tried it).

The book itself is a great read. It has a nice little history of vegetarian cooking and is smattered with quotes from famous people as well as illustrations by the author herself. Nava considers Vegetariana, her first cookbook, originally published in the mid-1980s, to be her baby, since her touch is prevalent in every part of the book.

Is there really a need for a book called The Recovering Vegetarian Cook Book: 12 Easy Steps to Eating Meat Again?

Yesterday I got my copy of Nava Atlas‘ The Vegetarian 5-Ingredient Gourmet, a cookbook based around the idea that cooking a healthy, tasty vegetarian meal doesn’t have to be the most complicated thing in the world. All of the recipes have five or less ingredients (not including water, salt, and peper) and are relatively easy to make. But that also doesn’t mean that they’re the same-old-same-old, either. There are some really tasty sounding dishes (curried lentils and spinach, leek and potato soup, and a few tasty sounding bean and chili recipes) that can be prepared from a few easy ingredients.

I really like her philosophy on cooking, too, as it mirrors my own: cooking can be as relaxing or meditative as any other activity. She also believes that cooking simple dishes doesn’t mean that you’re taking an easy way out, but rather that you’re preparing a meal that will allow you to focus on the fun part of cooking rather than rushing around the kitchen trying to make three complicated dishes at a time.

The Poughkeepsie Journal also has an article on her today.

I imagine that over the next couple of weeks, you’ll see a bit more commentary on specific recipes as I try them out.

Nava Atlas’ The Vegetarian 5-Ingredient Gourmet sounds like a worthwhile cookbook. I’m also kind of jonesin’ for Lorna Sass’ new one, The New Vegan Cookbook and Donna Klein’s The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen. And they’re all on my half.com wish list. :)

Last night I finished the aforementioned Slaughterhouse by Gail Eisnitz. It’s a great book (especially as a companion to Fast Food Nation) that details not only the cruelty to animals in slaughterhouses (and why so-called “humane slaughter” is almost never practiced these days thanks to insanely demanding production rates), but the cruelty to the workers. And unfortunately, that cruelty to workers directly affects the quality of the meat.

For instance, on many pig, chicken, and cow slaughter lines, workers are only given two seven minute breaks in a day. The few available toilets are occupied very quickly and workers often have no choice but to relieve themselves on the floor or on themselves as they work.

I’ll refrain from passing along any of the other gross, inhumane, and digustingly foul information that Eisnitz uncovered during her research for this book and let you pick it up if you’re ready for some stomach-churning reading.

One interesting thing to note is that the word “vegetarian” is never used in the book. Rather, it’s information presented with a minimum of preachiness, leaving the final decision with you as to how to use it.

I recently picked up a copy of Simply Vegan on Half.com (it was nearly perfect condition, too!). While the recipes don’t look nearly as unique and appetizing as the ones in Lorna Sass’ book (still my favorite, so far), I am looking forward to trying out some of the quick, easy, vegan recipes. I think I may give the curried chickpeas a shot this evening.

The book Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating is now available to download in PDF format for free (yes, the whole thing!) at Vegan.com. The book is 216 pages long, but the PDF file is only a little over a meg.