Customer Reviews

Food for the Spirit: Seasonal Vegetarian Recipes to Warm the Kitchen and Nourish the Soul

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I bought this book for the "seasonal" and "vegetarian" recipes heralded in the title. While the recipes were that, I really disliked having to wade through lectures on "The Body as a Temple," "The Miracle of Rice," and "The Prehistoric Diet" to get to those recipes. This book takes a moralistic approach to vegetarianism, and uses the cook book as a tool to promote that agenda.

The recipes are very similar to what you'll find in the Moosewood cookbooks (without the lectures!). Some readers may not be able to find many of the ingredients at their local grocer's (agar-agar, kudzu, and gomasio, to name a few). This coookbook more heavily emphasizes Indian and Asian cooking than Moosewood cookbooks do, however, so access to a good Asian food market would definitely help.

This is an interesting cookbook if you enjoy very earthy, holistic-type eating, or are interested in the authors' lifestyle recommendations. For me, I'll be donating my copy to the library in hopes someone else will find a use for it.

The subtitle of this book is "Seasonal Vegetarian Recipes to Warm the Kitchen and Nourish the Soul". The recipes are vegan. The first part of the book is about nutrition, the ritual of eating, evolution of what humans have eaten over the centuries, meditation and diet, and other spiritual aspects of eating. Then there are the recipes - starting out with "the basics" like sauces and dips that are used in the larger recipes. There are also some excellent breakfast recipes (cereals, pancakes). For the recipes there are salads, sandwiches, lentil burgers, tofu dishes, and some great grain recipes. One of the ones we tried recently was Kasha with spinach and pasta. The recipes use delicious herbs for flavor - using garlic, rosemary, sage, thyme - all things you can find easily and may already have on hand. Tonight I'm making mushrooms with swiss chard and almonds. I'll likely serve it with brown rice. The neat thing about this recipe is that there's also pesto and breadcrumbs and parsley thrown in which I wouldn't have though of. I highly recommend this book. Only negative is that there are no photos but the recipes definitely make up for it.