Customer Reviews

Kitchen in the Clouds: The Essential Vegan Guidebook

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I wish I had "Kitchen in the Clouds" five years ago when my wife was near death with ovarian cancer and on hospice. It was then that we started a vegan (no animal products) diet. We credit her continuing survival to switching to a holistic lifestyle, including vegan eating. But that was quite difficult. Being meat and potatoes eaters all of our lives, we were hopelessly confused as to how to select and prepare vegan foods. Over time, we found some folks to help us...even hiring some to teach us vegan cooking. Given our experience, I'd say that "Kitchen in the Clouds" is the perfect book for those needing guidance for creating a healthy diet. The book is easy to read and beautifully written...almost spiritual in its sensitivity to personal health, the environment, and the ethics of eating vegan. And, it is packed with 300 pages of helpful and interesting information, including over 200 practical and easy to prepare recipes for breakfast, lunch, snacks, dinner, and dessert. The narrative portion of the book includes chapters on the rationale of eating vegan, using diet to detoxify and heal, cooking with herbs, the misconceptions of fat, protein and calcium, the politics of agribusiness, nutritional information and much more. I think the 50 page appendix alone is worth the price of the book. Here you'll find menu plans, shopping checklists, a glossary of ingredients and how to use them, food safety and storage ideas, internet, mail order, and newsletter contacts, and cooking tips, times, spice use and equivalents explained. I give this book my highest recommendation for those venturing into the, sometimes perplexing, world of vegan cooking.

jaacee@mindspring

This is vegan food in the classic tradition: overly earnest, ascetically spiced, and aggressively promoting regularity.

If your problem with food has always been that it's just too interesting, I recommend living out of this cookbook for a while. A health-promoting, high-fibre diet of lentil stews and loaves, varied by stewed chickpeas and perhaps the odd chickpea burger, will quickly cure you. The height of culinary adventure, to Ms Alexander, means a portobello mushroom, or "including the turnip" in one of her many almost indistinguishable stewed things. And let's not even discuss her "treats," which include heavy wholegrain muffins and heavy wholegrain loaves, all of which seem to contain banana.

Healthy cooking is my thing; just about anything off my stove will be low-fat and high in fibre. And I like a banana as much as the next girl. However, there's no reason why "vegan" needs to mean this kind of earth-toned slop, interspersed, leave us not forget, with earnest essays about how improving one's diet improves one's soul. Granted, she's got rid of the high-fat truckloads of nuts and seeds and such that were typical of very early veg*n cooking, but other than that, we're still in the seventies here.

If you long to recapture the memory of barefoot days slaving over a hot stove amidst the scent of patchouli, this may be the cookbook for you. Otherwise, there are many, many better ones. Not a keeper.

Kitchen in the Clouds is an exceptionally beautiful cookbook and informative resource guide on vegan living. Inviting to read, with beautiful artwork found throughout, it is simply a feast for the mind, body and soul. The author, Karen Alexander, not only provides over 200 delicious recipes full of flavor, but a new model for optimal health. It is a book that you will want to sit down and read, and re-read--her writing is eloquent and inspiring. It was a powerful reminder to me that I can consciously choose health through my every day eating choices.

Kitchen in the Clouds proves that vegan meals can be flavorful, appealing and satisfying--both my husband and six-year old son enjoy the recipes! Our family favorites include Perfect Pea Soup, Incredible Burritos, Pilgrim's Lentil Loaf, Baked Cauliflower and Chocolate Zucchini Brownies, to name a few. It's been great fun surprising our meat-eating friends with delicious meals they can't believe are vegan. It is quickly becoming the most used cookbook in my collection!

This book is a must have if you want to restore your personal health and experience a vitality you never thought possible--with a side benefit of healing the planet, too. I have many friends I have shared it with who have purchased their own personal copy. I highly recommend it!

This book does not contain the nuts, nut butters, oils, pseudo cheese/meat products, etc. that seem to plague vegan cookbooks. I'm interested in protecting my health- not pretending I'm eating well when I'm actually eating a bunch of fake food.

If you need to get the weight off, the cholesterol down, the arteries unblocked and the cancer stopped, go for this book!! If you want good tasting, all natural, organic recipes, go for this book!

If you want a bunch of fat, you can certainly find food that is richer, creamer, prettier, etc. if you need to get real about what you're eating, this is the best book out there. I've tried a lot of cookbooks- they all contain some clunkers- that's reality. This is a very consistently good one. I keep serving up food to my friends with lots of compliments.

This book saved my friend's life! Actually, eating vegan food is what seems to have sent her cancer into complete remission, but this book makes it so easy and enjoyable that it didn't seem like a sacrifice to her at all. In fact, her husband starting eating this way, and now a bunch of us are doing the same thing. No matter what diet fad comes and goes, the value of fruits and vegetables, grains and beans stays constant. This book is chock full of delicious recipes that are easy to make and SO GOOD. And, we're all glowing and getting thin! I can't recommend this book highly enough. What have you got to lose besides feeling sick and tired and fat? If you're already doing the Ornish or McDougall programs, this book will give you a lot more recipes to add to your collection and you'll be much happier with what you have to eat.

Chapters 1-15 are comprised of 64 pages which address the following topics:

A Philosophy of acting in accordance with nature's principles, The Physical and emotional affects of foods, Healthy lifestyle and disease prevention, The change from an agrarian to an industrial society and lifestyle changes that followed, Plant-based diets and the benefits thereof, Immune and `detoxification' system, Contemporary factory-farmed animal products and their effects on health and wellness, Ecological implications of an animal-based diet, Importance of water, Fats and other nutritional requirements, and Answering skeptics' questions.

None of the chapters is clearly labeled, the table of contents is somewhat vague and it is impossible to tell which topic each chapter addresses without reading the first few paragraphs.

After the informational chapters above, there are approximately 200 recipes, quite a few of which rely on ingredients such as tofu and Ener-G egg replacer. Recipe types and approximate number of each are as follows:

Breakfast: 15 (tofu is substituted for eggs, but there is a great multi-grain pancake mix)
Breads/Muffins: 10
Spreads/Dips: 12 (mostly tofu or bean-based)
Soups/Stews: 33, and this is probably the best section of the book
Loaves (only 4 fortunately), casseroles and dinner pies: 20 total
Burritos, enchiladas, fajitas: 7
Skillet dinners: 17
Pasta dinners: 5
Stir Fry recipes: 15
Meat-analogs, sandwiches, kabobs: 8
Stuffed vegetables: 6
Potatoes, rice, stuffing: 29
Sauces: 14 (some can be found in other sections as well)
Vegetables: 22
Desserts: 20

The recipes section is followed by sections on cookware, cooking and shopping tips, and charts for preparing beans and grains.

The `Index' is actually an expanded table of contents and is not organized by either ingredient or alphabetically.

If you are entirely new to vegan issues and vegan cooking, this might be worth purchasing, but if you already have a few vegetarian or vegan cookbooks and are familiar with the popular books by Frances Moore Lappe and John Robbins, you may not want to add this title to your collection.

This is one of my favorite cookbooks - it has some philosophy in the beginning, words of wisdon to eat up, and delicious recipes. I've taken weeks at a time where all I cook from is this cookbook and it's terrific. Varied recipes, great combinations, nothing too tricky.

After almost a year on Dean Ornish's program to reverse heart disease, I had wonderful results, but got pretty tired of the recipes. McDougall has some offerings (same health program), but this book has wonderful recipes and lots of information for those of us who need it.

It must be easy for vegans and vegetarians to find their way through meat free recipes, but many of us are unfamiliar with this lifestyle and have to it abruptly by heart disease or cancer. We DON'T know the things that seem obvious to long term vegetarians.

This book was a Godsend for my heart disease support group. Thank you so very much.

I bought this book based on the fantastic reviews it has received. So far, I have found the recipes to be uninspired, just simply boring. This may be a useful tool for those truly unfamiliar with vegetable-based cooking - who need a lot of help with cooking basics, but if you are already able to put together a vegan meal of any type, this book isn't for you.

Her recurring ingredients include Sucanat, Ener-G egg replacer, and red wine/cooking sherry. None of these are in my pantry, and I am a vegan who loves to cook. Also, there are a LOT of potato recipes, in fact, there are a couple for which the ingredient list is nothing more than potatoes and garlic powder, or "any favorite seasoning". Your money would be better spent elsewhere, like on "A Celebration of Wellness" by James Levin, MD.

This truly is an essential book for every kitchen. If you're even thinking about eating Vegan this gem will give you all the support and guidance you need to get started. The special appetizers that makes this book a great discovery are the first chapters. They're dripping with common sense, solid info, and timeless wisdom. Then there's the main course of 200 recipes. You don't even have to be Vegan to love 'em. If you've been Vegan for years you'll still find surprises. We've tried a bunch and so far they taste as good as they sound. The recipes are creative, yummy, and most are surprisingly quick and easy. For apres food, check out the resource pages at the back. There's everything from a weekly shopping list to mail order tinctures. What a find!