Customer Reviews

The New Laurel's Kitchen

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I first encountered Laurel, Carol et al. in 1985, after reading and being impressed by Diet For A Small Planet but feeling constrained by the narrowness of protein complementarity as it was then understood. I had been told by my doctor to lose the fifty pounds I had gained with my first pregnancy or she wouldn't be around to help me with a second one. A vegetarian friend suggested I try changing the way our family ate. Since I did then and still do love to cook, I was ready and willing to make whatever changes might be necessary. Laurel's Kitchen was a light in the darkness for me. The recipes were fun to make and best of all, they tasted great. My formerly meat and potatoes or nothing Irishman husband took to our new way of eating with real enjoyment. I took great heart from the philosophical musings that began the book and were interspersed with the recipes. When the second edition came out, in 1986, I was fifty pounds lighter and beginning a pregnancy as a well-nourished lacto-ovo vegetarian. My 11 pound son's birth left me two pounds lighter than I had been at his conception. I have gone through 3 copies of the 1986 edition, and have memorized (with our own personal modifications) all our favorite recipes, which have become family classics. I have never regained the weight I lost fourteen years ago and am in my twenty-fifth year of teaching high school history. My husband and our two teen-agers are healthy, slim and energetic. My daughter, at 16, takes a lot of static from well-meaning "friends" about her vegetarian diet, but she remains committed but never censorious of others' eating habits. We are happy with our choice and eternally grateful for the wit, wisdom and just plain good eating to be found in Laurel's Kitchen. As Carol states,"Laurel didn't believe just in cooking vegetarian...it had to taste good."

This book really has in-depth information on nutrition that's good for any family. In the nutrition section, vegetables and fruits are listed along with the vitamins they contain. This way, you can plan better on getting vitamins in your meals. Laurel talks about how by eating less meat protein, we absorb vitamins in our fruits and vegetables easier. This makes it easier for the vegan and vegetarian can meet al their health needs. The bread recipes are easy as (forgive me!) rice crispies, but the results are often artisan breads because of their fine, simple ingredients. Try the english muffins, pumpernickel bread, whole wheat french, the black bread and my favorite, oatmeal. My husband loves the tamale pie. The vegetarian shepherd's pie is another staple. I also love the minestrone soup, the baked eggplant parmesan ( you can use any crumbs, not just crackers!) and stuffed peppers. I like the way the menus are layed out. It makes it easy when you first start out. It's also a good book for introducing yourself to the concept of whole foods and getting away from packaged foods if you haven't already. They are very strict about sugar when they talk about nutrition in this book, which makes alot of the recipes great for diabetics. However, it's a little too strict at times, if you're not a diabetic since as the main author states her belief is that, "sugar is sugar is sugar." There are too many important enzymes in fruit to worry so much about the sugar! So much of the information is in depth, and that's what makes this book a standby for me. There are instructions on how to make yogurt at home, also soybean milk. There is eomthing really wholesome about the book, which I find appealing as well. Well-put together and organized I definitley suggest this book for your cookbook and nutrition library.

I first learned of Laurel's Kitchen in the mid-1970s when my parents gave my sister Laurel a copy for Christmas. Being an artist, I really admired the woodcut illustrations. However, I didn't start to use the book religiously until 1978, when I and all my grad-school friends decided to pursue a vegetarian life style. My copy, which I bought at the food coop where I volunteered is now in pieces, but I still use it regularly. I can count on the book to contain information about vegetables I'm not familiar with, and how best to prepare them, plus providing clear instructions for making such things as yogurt and sushi nori. Though no longer a strict vegetarian, having a husband and two children who like meat far too much to give it up just yet,I eat meatless meals at least several times a week. The recipe for Sultana's Spanakopita (a real winner!) has inspired a family favorite: broccoli pie, in which we've substituted broccoli for spinach.

I got this book a few years ago when I wanted to reduce the amount of meat in my diet. I was looking for something that would make it easy for me to prepare vegetarian dishes. My brother, who has been a vegetarian for years, recommended this book, which I understand is considered by many to be the Bible of vegetarian cooking.

And "Bible" may be the right way of viewing this. Because this is no ordinary cookbook. Yes, it has recipes -- lots of them -- but it seemed to me that a typical person new to vegetarian cooking wasn't going to make most of these recipes without going through a significant lifestyle change.

The book makes no apologies for the fact that its approach to food preparation is often painstaking and time consuming. I mean, there's even a section on milling your own flour. That's fine if you are looking for a whole food approach to eating, but if you're just looking for simple ways to substitute vegetables or soy products into your old favorite recipes, this is not what you're looking for.

This is one of my most-used cookbooks, even though I am not a vegetarian. This book is perfect for anyone looking to get more vegetables into their diet. It contains many simple recipes that taste astoundingly good. For example - I never liked cauliflower until I tried the cauliflower soup recipe from this book.

It has really supplemented our low meat diet! My husband was a vegetarian for about 8 years, even through the army, till we got married. For various reasons, in a natural compromise, we do not eat meat every night and very little red, what ever friends serve us as guests and go almost to completely vegetarian come spring and summer. This book was introduced to us while at a vegetarian friend's (also named Laurel) house for dinner where we had the yummy Winter Stew -- which has become a favorite with various variations of our own, ever since buying the book. There are lots of other great simple yummy vegetarian recipes that really refresh the diet and appetite. I found the nutritional information incredibly interesting and helpful to know in order to understand the practical reasons and ways to eat vegetarian. It is also valuable to read & understand about the debunked myths around eating vegetarian. It has helped me to understand how to eat a sensable balanced vegetarian diet AND also see the bonus of weighing less. I feel better morally and physically by eating fewer of my animal friends.

We really like this cookbook because it has a LOT of great recipes in it. The fact that most of them are good for you is a bonus.

My two favorite recipes are the Oatmeal School Cookies -- an excellent example of using whole wheat flour and wheat germ to create a delicious snack -- and the base Tomato Sauce. The tomato sauce can be made as a base and adapted to Italian or Mexican entrees pretty easily.

I would love to see a follow-on edition with some non-US dishes featuring as cous-cous or hummus.

We've been vegetarian off-and-on for several years. After my husband's brother got colon cancer at the age of 47, I switched my kitchen to vegetarian for good. At that time, I went looking for cookbooks that offered something out of the ordinary -- a cookbook that didn't just offer up weird tofu loafs or butterfly-chasing nuts and berries. We're a REAL family in the REAL world. The recipes in this book are just down-home good cooking. Recipes you could make even if you weren't vegetarian. THAT'S what I was looking for. Every recipe can be adapted to suit your own tastes, and you can add and subtract today's convenience items (like prewashed veggies, rice in a bag, gourmet canned sauces and beans). Our favorites are the tamale pie (spiced up more to reflect our heat-loving palates) and the sweet potato salad (very unique!).

In my eight years of vegetarianism, I find myself turning back to Laurel's Kitchen again and again. It never ceases to amaze me how the deceptively simple recipes create delicious food, time and time again. I suspect that the reviewer who complained of "lackluster recipes" just skimmed through, without bothering to prepare any of them. The strength of this book lies in its minimalist recipes, letting the quality of the ingredients shine through. In this respect Laurel's Kitchen is a welcome relief from the many vegetarian cookbooks which rely extensively on fancy techniques, ingredients, or equipment which you may not have at your fingertips. Not that I'm opposed to gourmet vegetarian cooking; but for day to day, simple, hearty food, I refer to Laurel's Kitchen before anything else in my cookbook library.

Bonus material includes guidelines for new vegetarians, wider implications of a vegetarian diet, and a slew of handy nutritional charts.

I'm replacing my copy of Laurel's kitchen after many years because it is literally falling apart. That's how much I've used it. I'm a long-time vegetarian with dozens of wonderful vegetarian cookbooks, but this is the book I turn to the most. The recipes are simple, well-tested, and almost always delicious. The book is chock-full of great nutrition information too. What a classic.