56 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kind of like "Joy of Cooking--Veggie Style", August 13, 2002
This review is from: Moosewood Restaurant New Classics (Paperback)
Is this a "new classic" and what's in this book for the average cook who wants to cook vegetarian food? This heavy tome is packed with useful recipes and is all over the map, both ethnically and in types of recipes. As other Moosewood cookbooks, this is a vegetarian cookbook, but with asides into fish, which I don't mind--being one who limits meat but has not problem eating it. Some people do view fish as living creatures, which, of course, they certainly are.
What's also new here compared to the dairy-laden earlier books is a venture into a few vegan recipes that leave out all milk, egg and other animal-source product, including a recipe for very useful mock sour cream. So there's a little something for everyone, vegetarian, limited vegetarian and even vegan. The recipes tend to the family-style rather than super-gourmet.
One of the most useful recipes for me is a vegetable broth. This is a very good recipe base all kinds of soups. I despise the taste of canned broths and it's a nuisance to make chicken stock from scratch. Vegetable stock freezes well and this recipe makes a particularly flavorful version, using carrots, onions, celery, potatoes and garlic. The potatoes, in particular add consistency to the broth. The recipe offers either sweet potato or carrot for that sweet-spicy element and the sweet potato version also adds body to the broth. There is a version for mock-chicken broth, and an Asian ginger flavored broth base as well.
Italian dishes dominate the recipes, lots of pasta sauces, including a vegetarian kind of Bolognese (meat gravy), a good basic tomato sauce, frittatas, risottos and cioppino fish stew. There are also plenty of diversions into novelties such as an interesting peach salsa.
The breads lean more to biscuits and cornbread than to yeast breads and the dessert section is loaded with cookies. There are also sections on sandwiches, wraps and mock burgers.
In summary, this is a very good vegetarian-based home cooking book, maybe something like Joy of Cooking - Veggie-Style. In that respect, this is a new classic, and certainly found a welcome home on my cooking bookshelf.
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42 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wow!, December 1, 2001
This review is from: Moosewood Restaurant New Classics (Paperback)
I bought this volume, along with another Moosewood collection, a little over a month ago. To say that I'm totally hooked would be an understatement. I've done more than twenty five of their wonderful recipes. Most are SO good I can't wait to make them again, but I keep finding more and more new ones to do and never get back to them. The soups in here are simply extraordinary, wonderful bean soups, rich vegetable soups, and the many vegetable sides are their equal.
I suspect that Jane Brody's excellent Good Food Book, my kitchen bible, has been displaced by the Gospel according to Moosewood.
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32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Others by them are better, March 26, 2002
This review is from: Moosewood Restaurant New Classics (Paperback)
This book could be great, like so many of their others, but I think that it's gimmicky in that they rely way too much on soy products in this one. I'm all for adding soy to foods if it belongs there, but not if it is added just to add nutrition only. It can really ruin the texture of a dish, but they claim repeatedly that "no one will even know it's in there!" I think that if you have to hide something in your food, maybe it shouldn't be there at all. The one good thing about this, though, is that there are a lot of dishes for vegans in here.
Where they don't rely on the soy gimmick, the food has been really wonderful, as always. Try these: lemon ricotta pancakes, Indian curried potato wrap, marinated feta with pita, and Muhallabia (cardamom-cinnamon) ice cream.
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