Customer Reviews

New Vegetarian

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

New Vegetarian is the real deal, a book of 75 global recipes, some of them vegan, that are delicious and inviting. If your motto is "Try something new every day," this book will keep you sated and happy. Practically speaking, I would classify this as a special-occasion vegetarian cookbook for a couple of reasons:

a) many ingredients (mock abalone, goji berries, kamut, coconut cream) require an extra stop to an ethnic or health food store...or, at the very least, some advance planning if ordering via the internet.

b) many, but not all, recipes are more time or labor intensive than most people can manage Monday through Friday

Still, this book has its place on my bookshelf because the recipes are delicious and the food presents well. It's what I'd reach for when I'm tired of the same 30 or so ingredients I tend to use over and over. It's also perfect for impressing guests. The book is divided into the following sections:

1. Appetizers/small plates - full of beautifully presented dishes that will impress any guest.

2. Salads - one of my favorite sections of the book, because the combinations of fruit, vegetables, nuts and cheeses are unique and mouth-watering

3. Soups - another favorite section, because she understands the importance of good soup making...which always starts with a good homemade broth.

4. Main Courses - I was less impressed with the main courses here, if only because there is a slight emphasis on "mock" meat dishes, a pet peeve of mine, since vegetarian eating shouldn't be construed as a way of pretending to eat meat. Many would argue otherwise and I see their point. I just enjoy honoring wholesome ingredients as they are.

5. Desserts - all vegan, a great idea, since there is an overabundance of great desserts that call for butter and eggs. good section with an offering of both traditional American goodies and some international sweets that may be less familiar to readers.

Some observations on the book overall...the food photography does its job, bringing the author's recipes to life with mouth-watering images. The food styling is excellent.

Valuable information in the introduction about how vegetarians get their nutrients. Also helpful is a resource guide for some of the harder-to-find ingredients.

As briefly mentioned above, this book contains both vegan and vegetarian recipes. Many of the vegetarian recipes could be amended to accommodate vegan diets with simple omissions.

One gripe I have with this book (and some other Chronicle Books publications I own) is this: while I appreciate the clean negative space on the recipe pages, my eyes do NOT enjoy reading such a small typeface, especially when many critical measurements have fractions in them, at what I estimate to be about 4 pt. type. Much, much too small.

Recommended.

I love to get new vegetarian cookbooks, I usually experiment with them for weeks until I've tried many of the recipes. As background, I've been a vegetarian for the past 30 years and own more than 150 vegetarian cookbooks.

I received New Vegetarian as part of the Amazon Vine program and I must say, I'm glad that I didn't spend any money on it.

If I had seen this book in a bookstore, I would have put it back on the shelf after glancing at it briefly. For me, cookbooks are tools that I use again and again. There are certain design aspects that are important. First and foremost, legibility. This book reminds me very much of a visit to the optometrist when they ask you to read the line with the smallest print that you're capable of seeing. I think that most of the print is in a size 9 font with the italicized items and the index in a size 8 font(it might be even smaller - a size 4 or 6). The book is very difficult to read and you certainly wouldn't be able to glance at it casually while preparing a recipe. For this reason alone, I would never buy this book or give it as a gift.

Another reason that I am not interested in using this book is that almost every recipe has a very LONG list of ingredients. Each recipe will inevitably require the reader to purchase one or more exotic items, that will probably then sit unused in the pantry. I live within a mile of a Whole Foods Market so I have access to a variety of interesting vegetarian ingredients. However, I live in a city with a very limited selection of ethnic foods, so that it would be difficult to obtain many of the ingredients in this book. The author does not offer suggestions for substitutions for these ingredients. I have a well-stocked kitchen and pantry and I still feel intimidated by the items needed for these recipes.

The recipes may be delicious, but they look like too much trouble to be bothered with.

Here are a few unfussy cookbooks that I would recommend instead:
The Roasted Vegetable
366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans, and Grains
Vegetarian Classics: 300 Essential and Easy Recipes for Every Meal
Quick Vegetarian Pleasures: More than 175 Fast, Delicious, and Healthy Meatless RecipesSimple Vegetarian Pleasures
Main-Course Vegetarian Pleasures
Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites: Flavorful Recipes for Healthful MealsMoosewood Restaurant New Classics
Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day
Moosewood Restaurant Simple Suppers: Fresh Ideas for the Weeknight Table
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison

We've tried several recipes from this book, and not a single one has come out well. They've all been edible, but not much more than that. (And i know that a mere human cooking from a recipe should never expect their finished product to look exactly like the picture, but i've had a few that were so different that no one would ever guess they were supposed to be the same dish.)

I'm ambivalent about the author's choice to make the dessert section vegan. On the one hand, it's true that making vegetarian dessert is pretty darn easy and you don't need a special book for such recipes. On the other, there are also dozens upon dozens of other vegetarian cookbooks out there, but the author seemed to think she was providing something novel with the savory dishes, why not something novel with the sweet as well? I wish that, instead of doing vegan desserts, she'd done something like suggest full meal plans from the book, and the perfect dessert to finish the evening for each. That would have made me much happier than a list of vegan desserts. If i wanted to make a vegan dessert, i could get a vegan dessert cookbook.

I can imagine flipping through this book for imspiration, but i doubt i'll ever bother actually trying to follow one of the recipes again.

This is the most user unfriendly cookbook I've seen in a long time. What's wrong? For starters, the tiny, tiny font size, the refusal of the book to lay open, the large list of ingredients required for almost every recipe, the frequency of unusual ingredients and the lack of photos (23 for the 77 recipes.) I needed a magnifying glass to read the fractions - and as has been noted, forget trying to read the index, not that it matters, because the page numbers are also too small to decipher.

The benefit of cooking vegetarian dishes is that, in general, they are delicious, healthy and economical. I own many vegetarian cookbooks including those named and recommended by other reviewers, and frequently cook from them, but out of the 77 recipes I could only prepare a small number of the dishes without making numerous purchases of items I would use infrequently at best, and in some cases, never again. And if another reviewer could prepare three separate recipes and be disappointed with the results of all of them, why bother to potentially waste the time and money when it appears the recipes were not properly tested.

This book simply isn't for me. I don't want to eat duck, so why would I want to eat Mock Duck? I don't want prune oatmeal baby food in my brownies and I don't want to add 3/4 of a cup of pure maple syrup to a small batch of chocolate chip cookies increasing the cost ten-fold.

The book needed a good editor, tested recipes, photographs for each recipe and a more practical approach because cookbooks, although creative endeavors, are also tools used to accomplish a task, and they need to be constructed with that in mind.

I love cookbooks. I own dozens and dozens of them. I use many of them but this is likely to be one that gets little or no use. Cookbook editing and layout is a very specific skill and this book suffers from lack of that skill. As beautiful as the book is, the layout and the font make it not practical for in the moment, real time kitchen use. In addition, many of the recipes have inconsistent, illogical or impractical instructions along with many specialty, difficult to find ingredients.

Every recipe I've tried has been quite tasty, and some have been really remarkable. This book is brimming with restaurant-quality fusion recipes, including many classic European and Asian recipes that have been retrofitted for healthy veg cuisine.

I like that the recipes in this book don't pile on the fat to make up for the loss of meat when re-imagining dishes, a trick that much vegetarian cooking (including my own) is guilty of. Instead, they rely on complex combinations of spices, many of them exotic (this will be no problem if you live in/near a city--even the nice Dillon's in Topeka, KS carries fresh lemongrass!). This means that the recipes can have a fair amount of prep, but the cooking is generally fairly quick (few recipes extend beyond the small page), and you'll appreciate the flavor.

(My one quibble is that there's a lot of fake meat--lots of mock duck and pretend fish--which kind of turns me off, and which is also a pain in the neck to get at a reasonable price if you live in the country where the nearest town is a dinky midwestern city with one tiny Asian market. I realize that most people have better access to ingredients and the author is probably trying for more variety of flavor and texture than your typical seitan and tofu, so I'm not knocking it down a star, just mentioning it.)

Some favorites so far: the Smoky Herb Salad, Indonesian Hot & Sour Soup (add 1/4 c. fish sauce if you're not vegetarian--there are some ingredients you just can't sub & I'd recommend any non-veg or flexatarians adding fish sauce if it's a recipe that would traditionally use it); and Garbanzo Chole.

Many of these recipes are quite labor intensive, with unusual ingredients. That said, beautiful photographs--so if you need photos of dishes to motivate you, this is a cookbook for you. "New" is another word for "fusion"--many of these recipes use Asian and other countries' ingredients. I think this is a good cookbook for company--fancy and labor intensive recipes that most people would not cook on a daily basis, but would impress and look lovely for a gathering.

The first thing I would like to say to anyone who is contemplating or in the process of creating a vegetarian cookbook. WE KNOW HOW TO MAKE SALADS!!!!!

This might be the most telling aspect of any cookbook geared towards these type of eaters. If it's got a huge salad section, steer clear - I've found a big salad section means filler for the author who doesn't really focus on this type of cooking, or is really that familiar with these type of diets. Compare the fabulous and groundbreaking How It All Vegan and the Moosewood series to books like this and you'll see what I mean.

I'm giving 2 stars because I actually did find one recipe that was new to me - and I've been a vegetarian with on and off periods of complete veganism, for about 13 years - and that I actually will make. Most veg. cookbooks can't say the same.

TO THE READER: Completely and profoundly ignore and skip over the intro to the book where the author talks about the supplementary needs of different veg. diets. TO THE AUTHOR: Please do some research in nutrition dated after 1970 and update your internal databanks before you publish another book.

And for all of you future cookbook authors and publishers - if you're going to spend all of that money on very nice glossy weighty pages and charge more, include more eye candy! Photos severly lacking.

When I saw the picture on the cover of this book I thought maybe the recipes would be too time consuming to make, but as I read through the recipes I found that most of them are very simple. I've already made the Tofu Caprese Salad and it was outstanding. The book is divided into Appetizers and Light Meals, Salads, Soups, Main Courses and Deserts. The Appetizer section has some really interesting recipes I want to try, for example Thai Red Curry Deviled Eggs and Lemon-Parmesan Asparagus Spears in Phyllo. They both look very simple to make. The main dish section also looks great and I'm planning on making the Spicy Italian "Meat" Loaf and the Garlicky Roasted Potatoes with Spinach, Green Olives and Pine Nuts soon. There are Mexican recipes, Italian, Greek, Indian, Vietnamese and more. It's not a great big cookbook, but definitely one with lots of variety. It also has pictures of quite a few of the recipes which I always love to see.

I was very disappointed with this cookbook of so-called "simple" vegetarian recipes. While there is good information in the introduction of the book such as 'How to Get Your Protein' and a source guide for getting unusual ingredients online, most of the recipes required some ingredients that are either not stocked in my pantry or not available at all in stores where I live.

I don't consider these recipes simple when:
1) Ingredients aren't normally on hand
2) They can't be purchased locally or
3) They must be purchased online, therefore having to wait to even try most recipes. Not to mention the extra money spent on them.

I thought simple means easy! This was the deciding factor that made me choose to get this book.

The book is attractive enough, although the font is small, but had I known the recipes were more for someone that is either a chef or has enough time and energy to cook for a while, I would never have gotten it. Had I picked this up when I first became a vegetarian twelve years ago, it might just have turned me off the whole thing. Also, it would have been nice to include a glossary for the unusual ingredients and a substitute chart for more easily found items to replace them. I shouldn't have to go online to research so much just for a cookbook. I do appreciate having vegan desserts included, as I am trying to eat less dairy.

I'd advise anyone interested in buying this cookbook to either get it from the library first or browse through it at a bookstore. I have a feeling this will be one that gathers dust more often than not.