Customer Reviews

Moosewood Restaurant New Classics

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I bought this cookbook recently and have already tried about a dozen of the recipes. The strawberry salad dressing was excellent, even made with frozen berries. The Greek lasagna with eggplant and chocolate cherry biscotti also were quite good. I made the asparagus leek strudel for guests, and the entire panful was devoured in no time flat. The recipes that I've tried have been interesting and well-seasoned as written. I have even enjoyed just sitting at the kitchen table, reading this cookbook like it's a novel.

The first recipe I tried in this book was the Moosewood Muffins -- which I have now made over fifty times. Yes, they are that good! I actually wrote out the recipe and taped it on a kitchen cupboard so it would always be handy. You can vary it to include *anything*. Even graham crackers. Even three different types of nuts. It accomodates everything; that recipe is magic.

And all of the other recipes in this book are fabulous too. Like every Moosewood cookbook, there is a lot of variation; expect this book to take you everywhere from France, to Japan, and back to America for some vegetarian down home cookin'. The few fish recipes that are included are also excellent.

There are also menu suggestions, which make planning meals easy. And the recipes in this book are also more simple than The Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special or Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates -- though not quite as much as Moosewood Restaurant Simple Suppers, so it's a good middle ground.

If you like cooking, and you also love eating, and you want the food you serve to be healthy and delicious -- I highly recommend this book.

I bought this book a few months ago and use it at least three times a week. It includes everything from dips to desserts, to larger dinner dishes that can be made and refigerated and brought to work for a cheerful, filling break in the day!
I have even convinced my dad that you don't need to put meat in every meal to make things taste good. My personal favorites are the lasagna primavera, italian gratin, vegan chocolate cake, apple zuchini muffins...I guess I could go on and on!
good stuff here. I recommend it to anyone who likes to cook, eat, and feel healthy afterward.

Moosewood tries to broaden its horizons once again with this new classics cookbook. Since the previous reviewer has already gone into detail some of the recipes, I'll just go directly to the overall impression.
First of all, the recipes themselves range from ok to decent. The American-style cusines fare better, but not great. A truely great dish should not taste like a sum of its parts, which unfortunately a couple of the recipes in this book do. The ethnic-inspired recipes are pretty ho-hum. The Thai curries are some of the blandest curries I've had (and I've had some bland ones). It's not even an issue of spiciness of the dish, it's simply that the spice combination left me feeling something is missing inside a dish. Lastly, the book itself does not feel like a unified cookbook. Rather, it feels like just different recipes thrown together into a book. There's no theme to it, no personal touch, and in fact, no great or terrible recipes. It's just an average, decent fallback for something you need to make quickly, if you're not looking for a mouth-aweing dish. If you're new to vegetarian cooking, the book will offer tons of ideas but little personlized touch for you to feel for the fundamentals of cooking, and if you're experienced, there are better recipes to be found. If you want a great new classic, try Martha Rose Schulman's 200 new vegetarian recipes instead.

This has quickly become one of my favorite cookbooks. Almost all of the recipes we have made are wonderful- the squash and tomatillo soup, the Indian curried potato wrap, the mushroom pecan burgers- all are great and easy to prepare. Many of the recipes draw from world cuisine, some even combine ingredients from several cultures. Sure, some of the combinations sound strange, but they manage to come out wonderfully. This book is full of creative main and side dishes.

This is one of my favorite cookbooks. I purchased it as I was beginning to explore a vegeterian lifestyle and found a cook book that I come back to again and again for new recipes and ideas.

The Flaxseed Banana Bread has become the favorite banana bread in our household.

This book makes vegeterianism fun as well as delicious.

I have made several dozen of the recipes contained in this book, and almost all have been something I would definitely make again! One feature I really enjoy is an estimated time required to both prepare and cook each dish, so you can easily thumb through, looking for something which fits your time schedule. One thing I did not appreciate was the excessive use of refined sugar in every single one of the dessert recipes. I assumed that Moosewood would be more concerned with making desserts and cookies with maple syrup, honey, etc., but unfortunately, I was wrong.
Overall, I think the book is great and am planning to buy it as a gift for several family members.