Customer Reviews

Mustard Seed Market & Café Natural Foods Cookbook (Mustard Seed Market & Cafe)

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The MUSTARD SEED MARKET & CAFE NATURAL FOODS COOKBOOK comes from an early organic retailer founded in 1981: Ohio's first certified organic retailer. It offers up natural food recipes, organic and vegetarian selections from mat and soups to beans, pastas and drinks, and it comes from a chef and food columnist who provides dishes ranging from Green Beans and Gold Potato Salad with Miso Dressing to Chili Bean Salad and Cream of Roasted Fennel Soup. Add a healthy dose of color photos throughout and you have a fun, innovative collection recommended for any library interested in natural foods cookbooks.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Love this cookbook! It is wonderful to enjoy eating healthy and tastefully. Every recipe so far has been delicious.

Bev Shaffer, The Mustard Seed Market and Cafe Cookbook (Pelican, 2007)

I often talk, when reviewing poetry (and sometimes fiction), about message writing: prose or poetry that stops its story in order to get its point across. The usual reason for inserting message into something is a belief on the writer's part that the reader is too stupid to get the message the author is trying to convey. There is another reason that I usually don't go into, because I so rarely encounter it: proselytization. In order for an author to really proselytize, that author must both have a deep-seated belief in whatever it is s/he's proselytizing--which I assume most authors do--and a deep-seated belief that s/he is not preaching to the choir--which I assume most authors don't. After all, message fiction or poetry is usually concerned with something generally accepted (for example, Dennis Lehane's pause to talk about the evils of taking advantage of children in A Drink Before the War). In this case, Bev Shaffer obviously has that deep-seated belief. The thing is, I can't imagine that she doesn't think she's preaching to the choir. This is a cookbook that has the Mustard Seed Market and Cafe's name on it, after all. However, there's no other word I can come up with for this. I've read cookbooks written by militant vegans that are less obnoxious in trying to get their points across.

The Mustard Seed Market's triumvirate of beliefs is this: natural, organic, and locally-produced. (Fair trade also plays a big part, but unless they're talking coffee, it's not quite as obnoxiously presented.) The funny thing is, for the most part I agree with what they're saying; it's how they're saying it that drives me up the wall. The same message over and over again with slightly different language, in introductions, recommendations, and everything but the kitchen sink. Even the choir's going to get tired of hearing it when it's repeated this much.

The bulk of the book is the recipes, and there are certainly some good ones to be found here, but whether you will be able to get through them without choking on the message crap is subject to debate. *