Customer Reviews

Gary Null's International Vegetarian Cookbook

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This is a great book for people who enjoy ethnic foods and are looking to cut meat and dairy out of their diet. There are a lot of fish recipes which I find really refreshing. It's very difficult to find a vegetarian cookbook that is not full of recipes containing dairy. Just as it is impossible to find a vegan cookbook that contains fish recipes. So if you are like me and don't fit neatly into the vegetarian or vegan catagory, you will find this cookbook to be a wonderful addition to your library! Happy eating.

It is true that there are several fish and some chicken recipes in this book, for true vegetarians this is not the book to buy. If you are interested in a healthy and very tasty meals, however, the recipes are wonderful. I bought this book for my daughter for Christmas who must have a very restricted diet due to a very sensitive body system and we have all enjoyed her cooking!!! I truly reccomend this book for anyone who wants to eat right and stay healthy and still have a great variety of dishes that are fun and different. You definitely will not be bored with the food and will impress your friends and family!

Returned this book the day I received it; to call it a vegetarian cookbook is false advertising.

Gary Null, one of Americas best leading advocates on health and nutrition has provided us with another winner! His recipes from international countries are sure to please every nationality as well as give us the opportunity to sample dishes from other heritages. The recipes are simple to follow, are nutritionally based, healthy to eat and best of all, taste wonderful. From having an appetitzer to a desert, you can plan a menu that will delight your family and guess.

After years of respecting Gary Null and what he has stood for, I bought this book because my family and I are vegetarians and are always on the lookout for new ideas for recipes. It did state in the promo that there were some optional recipes containing fish but being resourceful about cooking, I thought it would be a valuable book for me. When I received the book I was very surprised and disturbed to see that in a large number of the recipes fish was not just optional. The recipes were FISH RECIPES. And there are quite a large number of them. We are vegetarians for several reasons-moral, ethical and health. We are all animal rights people and feel that all living beings have a right to life in their natural habitats. We do not eat flesh and have a reverence for all life. Having said that, we respect other people and their viewpoints. If one chooses to eat flesh, we can't change the whole world overnight, but it is a much better way to live to be a vegan vegetarian. The most salient point is that if Gary Null is going to call his book a vegetarian cookbook, it shoudn't contain fish recipes. Contrary to what some people may believe, fish is not a vegetable! That isn't honest. Thanks, Carol Bayard Bayardtom@AOL.com

Hello, I was not going to buy this book if it was truly vegetarian, but when I read all the reviews below commenting on the all the fish recipes, I realized, this is truly the perfect book for me, so I ordered it!! I eat more organic fruit, vegetables, nuts and whole grains than anything and most of my health books include fish as part of a healthy diet.This book would sell better with a different title though as this is misleading. But what do you call those of us who eat fish, eggs, (and some poultry in my case) and avoid red meat, dairy, sugar, starches, junk food, processed food, non-organic vegetables and fruit, etc.?

I was in a hurry at the library today, so grabbed this book off the shelf based solely on the title. I hoped to find lots of recipes to make yummy vegetables. I was surprised to flip through the soup section of the book and find at least EIGHT recipes based on fish or shellfish. Scanning the table of contents for the chapter on main dishes, I was appalled to find more than twenty five recipes with fish in the name. TWENTY FIVE! There are more recipes for fish than for vegetable main dishes. Yes, fish is healthy (when it's not full of mercury), but it is not something most vegetarians want to eat.

Fish aside, this cookbook was poorly edited. In the recipe for Seitan Coconut Fritters, you are instructed to blend several ingredients to make a paste, then mix the paste in a bowl with the seitan and coconut, then fry your fritters for 3-4 minutes. There are no instructions on forming the fritters for frying. If you have done a lot of cooking, you'll probably figure out that you need to roll your mixture into two balls before frying, but there is no excuse for such poor instructions as there is plenty of extra space on the page.

The recipe for the Virgin Sangria Drink includes jalapenos (in which they put the tilde over the o instead of the n), dill, tomato juice, celery seed, chili powder, onion powder... Umm. That is NOT sangria. That is a Bloody Mary. If this writer and his editors do not know the difference, they have no business telling anyone else how to cook. I also found it insulting that he dumbed down and did not include the native names for dishes. For example, he calls Tom Yum "Shrimp Hot and Spicy Soup". Tempura becomes "Japanese Fried Vegetables". He could have included both the native name and the dummy descriptions if he was worried people wouldn't know what he was talking about.

There is a recipe for guacamole which he calls "Zesty No Dish Avocado". You are instructed to puree all of the ingredients in a food processor, then put it all back in the avocado shells. That is nice, but then he tells you to put it in the refrigerator for an hour before serving. There is no need to refrigerate guacamole before serving, unless you are preparing it in advance. In that case, you should really leave the puree in the bowl of your processor or transfer it to another dish, toss in the avocado seed, and cover tightly with plastic wrap. Immediately before serving, remove the seed, put the puree into the shells, and garnish. The seed and the plastic wrap will help retard the browning that occurs as a result of exposing the avocado flesh to air.

This book is not suitable for vegetarians, and I think it will annoy people who know anything about cooking. Or people who are sticklers for detail. It is also unsuitable for very literal people who haven't done a lot of cooking and cannot read minds to know what they are supposed to do when the author leaves steps out.

I'm not a vegetarian, but am married to and the mother of vegetarians so I do a lot of cooking to suit their needs. I think Gary is amazing from a nutritional perspective and find that the recipes in his books are delicious, not hard to prepare, and quick. While I agree that calling this book vegetarian is misleading, it is oriented toward vegetarians and very much toward eating healthy and well. I highly recommend his work.

This is NOT a vegetarian cookbook. Shame on you for adding to the confusion.

At the time I bought this book I knew vegans did not eat meat. I wanted to know how to approriately balance my diet to be effective. This book did not answer this question, but it did have many delicious recipes that I still use. The Eggplant Parmigana is a family favorite. I'd buy the book again just for that recipe.