Customer Reviews

Veggie Meals: Rachael Ray's 30-Minute Meals

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Rachel Ray's book, Veggie Meals turned out to be a big find...I no longer panic when my one veggie sibling or my two veggie friends come by for lunch or dinner. They enjoyed the meals so much that a book for each was "the" Christmas present. I have also become a big fan of these recipes from the veggie snacks, Portobello parmigiano sandwich with roasted pepper salsa, YUM, to delicious full meals. Oh, did I mention the soups? THE SOUPS, YES! Little book, big reward, a great bargain. Thanks Rachel and give us More.

This book was a gift to me~truly. You don't have to see her show to know that she has such a vibrant, earthy style~the book displays that. The recipes are so good and the simple book format is refreshing. So many cookbooks spend too much time on "pretty" pictures that they omit good recipes like those contained in this book.

Special cookbooks in my kitchen find a special place where they can be seen and are accessible. I use this book almost everyday! The pasta recipes are authentic and the sauces can be made ahead of time and then used with any of the pastas. It took me one day of making a dish from this book to put it on my favorites list~we eat it once a week or more (spinach pesto and penne pasta)! The ingredients marry together and create an incredible aroma. Even our choosy two year old loves all of her sauces and pastas.

I take special care of this book~and I take it on vacation to share the recipes with others. You will not be disappointed!

`Veggie Meals' is an early Rachael Ray book, reissued by her original publisher, Lake Isle Press, probably in light of her great recent success with her latest books and TV shows.

This is a hard book to recommend, in spite of the fact that I am a major fan of Ms. Ray's cooking show and the value I find in her '30 Minute Meal' books for people who would like to cook, but who have little time to search through the `Joy of Cooking' or similar encyclopedia for quick cooking meals, especially when they don't know the background behind fast versus slow cooking techniques.

One thing to consider is that while Ms. Ray does give menus of three dishes at the beginning of the book, it is not her classic `three dishes together' recipe presentation where all three recipes are done in the way she does it on her `Thirty Minute Meals' show.

The issue is probably a lot easier if you happen to already be a big Rachael Ray book fan and have many of her other, later books, and, you do not have a lot of cookbooks from other authors. This means that you can get these 95 vegetable recipes for a list price of $14.95 and have little fear of overlapping other books. This price of 15 cents per recipe is good, but not great as celebrity recipes go, but then, these are not really `celebrity' recipes in the same sense as those from Thomas Keller or Rick Tramonto or Eric Rippert. We are buying this book for versions of classic recipes that can be done quickly. And, I believe you should only get this book if:

1. You are primarily interested in fast recipes.
2. You really like Ms. Ray's twist on recipes and writing recipes.
3. You do not have other good books on vegetarian recipes.

This last condition is important because there are a whole lot of very good books of vegetarian and vegetable based recipes available from some pretty famous names in the culinary world. The three leading names are Deborah Madison, Jack Bishop, and Peter Berley. If you are really interested in vegetarian cooking and speed is not your major concern, and then you must get Madison's `Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone'. This big book is comparable in scope and quality to Julia Child's classic `Mastering the Art of French Cooking'. Another excellent Madison book is `Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison's Kitchen'. Equally authoritative is Jack Bishop's `A Year in the Vegetarian Kitchen' or his book on Italian vegetarian dishes. Berley has done two very good vegetarian books, the second being `Fresh Food Fast' which presents fast vegetarian cooking in far more depth than does Ms. Ray.

The moral of this paragraph is that Ms. Ray is treading in a field that already has its share of major league experts.

The recommendation on fast recipes is important because while there are a lot of `classic' recipes in this book, they may not yield `classic' results because of the shortcuts taken to speed up preparation time. The other side of the coin is that this book reassures us that, in a pinch, we can in fact make risotto, pasta Primavera, ratatouille, and eggplant Parmigiano in less than a full afternoon.

So, I suggest that you give just a little thought to parting with your 15 bucks for this book, but that you will probably not be disappointed if you are in Ms. Ray's favored audience.

I like Rachael Ray's show on the Food Network, so I was happy to see she had a vegetarian cookbook. Most of the book is mediocre, the pastas are pretty standard (the Northwoods Pasta is worth trying though, it's very original and quite good), the salads you don't really need recipes for, and the sandwiches are basically "everything you could think of to do with a portobello mushroom".

The shining stars of this book are the soup recipes. These are not the gourmet soups with complex flavors that you would get from simmering all day, but most of them are pretty darn tasty considering they take about 20 minutes to prepare. I usually turn to these soup recipes to serve with a veggie burger or a crusty roll and salad as a really quick meal.

If you like Rachael Ray, are not a vegetarian, and want to get some meatless ideas then check this book out. If you are a vegetarian and have some other cookbooks already, take a second to look at the soup section and decide if the purchase price is worth it to you. I would probably pass on buying the book now that I've had it for a while and tried it out. If you are vegetarian and want a fabulous cookbook check out "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" by Deborah Madison and if you are interested in a vegan cookbook check out "Vegan Planet" by Robin Robertson.

I've been trying to cut meat out of my diet at least 2 to 3 days a week, but have had a hard time finding replacement foods that I like. These recipes are not only good, but their also simple and have "normal" ingredients. I'm not vegan, and it's nice to find recipes that don't omit beef or chicken stock - just the beef and chicken. I also don't live in a large city; so it's nice to find recipes with ingredients I know and have on hand.

Many of these are even good with meat added in for the other nights of the week when I'm not "meatless."

A lot of cookbooks falsely advertise that they contain 15 or 30 minute recipes, but the two recipes I have tried so far from this book (I just got it last week) both took 30 minutes as claimed. Both recipes were surprisingly good and flavorful-- often vegetarian recipes (Moosewood for example) have less flavor and take more time than I would like. I have a lot of vegetarian cookbooks and so far this one seems a lot more appealing to non-vegetarians than the others-- the meals don't taste or look like "hippie food" (which incidentally I love, but my husband does not!).

I'd recommend this for people who don't know what to feed their vegetarian guests.

The book is unhelpful for most vegetarians. The book's not bad, but it's not very good either. Ms. Ray doesn't offer much in the way of ingredient substitution suggestions or interesting commentary, and the number of truly interesting recipes is very limited for the money, especially if one's been cooking vegetarian for a while. The recipes also tend to call for a lot of ingredients one doesn't have on hand. (The soups are quite good, and some of the supper snacks are interesting, but she leans too much on risottos and pasta for main dishes.)

Rose Elliot's "Vegetarian Fast Food" has only 4 main ingredients per recipe, keeps her recipes short, offers ingredient substitution suggestions, and offers interesting commentary on most of her recipes. Christine Ingram's "Vegetarian and Vegetable Cooking" has an amazing number of recipes, some very simple and tasty.

While it's great to see Rachael Ray co-write a vegetarian cookbook, I have to say, this is both the most ambitious and the least practical tome this Food Network superstar has turned out. Always in the past (see my other reviews for her cookbooks, all of which I own) a reader could take confidence in the fact the recipes there were kitchen-tested, simple, had wide appeal, and above all were realistic as far as ease of preparation, but here I was struck over and over with how intimidating to most cooks many of the planned dishes were, and how they were anything but simple as in the thirty-minute style that helped make Ms. Ray as well-known as she is today. Furthermore, while these certainly all qualify as vegetarian, it should be noted that not all are especially more "healthy" than many meat dishes are. So let me bottom-line my feelings this way: this is a well-written, ambitious vegetarian cookbook that makes for great reading but I'd bet 1/3 of the recipes are beyond the skills and motivation of avocational cooks, and more than a few also struck me as too daring for the family dinner table. Veggie Meals is worth having for fans and the bold, but not entirely useful under most conditions for committed vegetarians or those wishing to incorporate elements of vegetarianism into their lifestyle. At times impressive, at others equally not. Three and a half stars.

I've made several dishes from this book, but I have to say a lot of them are so similar that it's not like a new recipe. I'm a big fan of RR's cook books, and granted this is one of her earlier ones. Her other cook books don't have many vegitarian meal- she loves her meat. So, this was a great idea. As she says in the beginning that her fans asked her to make it, and that's what she did. I gave it 3 stars because the recipies are good, and easy to follow. But there are too many that are so similar.

Having read several of Rachael Ray's cookbooks, I am always struck that she is usually more generous with providing meat or poultry-based choices than vegetarian ones. That made me curious about seeing this book. What would her 30-minute vegetarian choices look like?

I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the dishes don't include eggplant, which I'm not fond of. And many of the dishes call for artichokes, asparagus, beans, mushrooms, peas, peppers, tomatoes, and spinach which I like very much. She also makes generous use of standard Italian cheeses, all of which I like.

The book is organized into six sections:

Menus
Soups
Salads
Risotto, Pasta, and Italian Vegetable Entrees
Make Your Own Asian Take-Out
Snack Suppers: Stuffed Potatoes; Sandwiches; Dips; and Spreads

The menu section is quite brief with four three-course menus and six two-course menus.

The soup section is one of the best parts. Every soup looked great, and many contained helpful time-saving directions. Here's a list of the more intriguing ones to me:

Chili; red beans and rice soup; three bean soup; black bean soup; pumpkin and black bean soup; Southwestern corn and pepper pot soup; escarole and white bean soup; chick pea and cannellini minestrone; and gazpacho.

The salads section is also a treat. She does a good job of upgrading from a standard salad without making a lot of extra work. Here are some of the more intriguing choices:

Asparagus salad; white bean salad; tabouleh salad; anti-pasta salad with bagna cauda dressing; Greek vegetable salad-stuffed pitas; baby spinach salad with pears and walnuts; spinach salad with blue cheese and scallions; and couscous salad with scallions and ginger.

The risotto options seem perfectly good. I wonder how well they will taste without meat and poultry-based stock. I suspect they will need more spices to upgrade the flavor in the absence of those ingredients.

The pasta section starts with some good pesto recipes for quick results. For the most part the other pastas didn't excite me.

The Asian take-out section has only seven recipes in it and seems thin for someone who is willing to eat tofu . . . which isn't included in the cookbook as an ingredient.

In snack suppers, I liked the recipes for spinach calzones, bean burritos, quesadillas, spinach artichoke dip, white bean dip, red pepper and sun-dried tomato spread, wild mushroom spread, spicy hummus, and her four pit-zas.

I haven't gone looking for vegetarian cookbooks lately, but I suspect that there are ones with many more recipes, more variety, and more complex flavors. And I assume that they all take a lot longer to prepare.

But for what I'm looking for, Veggie Meals provides more than what I need.