The Vegan Cook's Bible (Paperback)

~ Pat Crocker (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Teaches you the value of leaner, cleaner eating and shows how to whip up dishes with exciting flavors. (June Naylor Star Telegram (Dallas-Fort Worth) )

Product Description

Discover the delicious delights of a vegan diet.

Pat Crocker's recipes capture the natural flavors at the very core of plant-based foods. This collection proves that a vegan diet can be rich, varied and delicious, responding to modern, sophisticated palates.

Using a rainbow of natural whole foods, these 250 recipes offer a wide range of combinations and a host of ideas for preparation. Some of the featured recipes are:

Sweet potato wild rice cakes accompanied by braised greens with cherries and pine nuts

Gingered carrot and turnip puree

Green bean, pecan and pomegranate salad

Pan-seared artichokes with pomegranate molasses

Mushroom-stuffed fennel and red peppers

Rice with red curry cauliflower.

What elevates this book are the profiles of 150 fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains, nuts, soy foods, sea vegetables, herbs and flavorings, with data on their healing actions, uses and storage. These prescriptive vegan meals will have a positive impact on all of the body's major systems, from the cardiovascular to the immune.

The winning combination of delicious recipes and the extraordinary health benefits of a vegan diet delivers meals that will please non-vegetarians and vegans alike.

(20090429)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Robert Rose (March 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0778802175
• ISBN-13: 978-0778802174
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #312,473 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Why bother?, June 1, 2009

By	Michelle (Saint Paul, MN) - See all my reviews

I was browsing at a local bookstore and decided to take a look at this book. Initially I was excited by the recipes - the looked pretty good. Then I was reading through the recommendations for foods to eat for various health benefits only to find that the author is telling people to eat fish!

Why in the world would you bother creating a VEGAN cookbook only to tell people they need to eat fish??? And not only a vegan cookbook - The Vegan Cook's Bible at that. Does she think that her audience - the majority of whom are probably vegan and therefore don't eat fish - will really want to read that she thinks that you MUST include it in your diet? I'm baffled by this logic.

So despite the fact that there were some recipes that looked good, I will not be buying this book, and hopefully if others follow suit it will send the author a message that fish is not necessary and including it as a dietary requirement in a VEGAN cookbook is ridiculous.

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Non-Vegan writing a cookbook?, June 10, 2009

By	Compassionate Cook - See all my reviews

What is the point of a non-vegan writing this cookbook? It is supposed to be the bible of veganism--the authority, the guidebook on how vegans should prepare foods--yet it is written by someone who doesn't even follow its doctrine. And then, within the pages she recommends fish and honey. It's insane that any vegan "bible" would recommend such things--it would be like the organic growing bible preaching the value of pesticides or the real bible spreading the idea of sin! It makes no sense. I would avoid this book at all costs.

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Vegan? She uses honey and recommends fish, May 27, 2009

By	Vegan Symphony "Vegan Symphony" (Smithtown, NY) - See all my reviews

This is from supervegan.com :
But while I enjoyed the dishes I tried, I take real issue with the book's title. First off, there's the honey mention; while some vegans do eat it, it has no place in an authoritative tome on vegan eating. There are no seitan recipes here (and oddly enough, seitan is listed as a whole food, despite the fact that it's so highly processed). There are also a limited number of tofu and tempeh recipes. A bible is a complete work from which all else stems, and you can't claim completeness from a vegan standpoint by eschewing seitan and using tempeh and tofu to such limited degree. There's also no breakfast section, and the desserts didn't go to the heights of decadence that they could have.

My biggest problem with the book, though, is the Healthy Body Systems section. It looks at everything from the immune to the musculoskeletal to the cardiovascular system, including the diseases that can afflict them and the best foods for combating or preventing those diseases. And in every single one, as well as in the overall guideline to Healthy Living, Crocker recommends fish. Not only that, fish is the #1 food in the Cardiovascular section. Mind you, there's no fish in any of the recipes, but there's no place for even a mention of fish in a vegan cookbook, much less a vegan "bible," unless you're talking about a substitute.

When I asked Crocker about this, she told me, "the fact that vegans don't eat fish does not change the fact that fish is an excellent source of, for example, omega3 fatty acids." But as we all know, flax and other nuts and seeds, as well as marine sources like algae, provide the same benefits without the health risks associated with eating fish and without causing environmental damage, not to mention the pesky little problem of pain and death for the fish themselves. At the very least, if Crocker felt so strongly about the issue, she could have listed the best "plant-based" foods for each system and left it at that. But there is absolutely no excuse for recommending fish, and doing it multiple times, in a book with the words "vegan" and "bible" in the title.