With more and more people becoming concerned by the health effects of meat, vegetarianism has gone from being regarded as the preserve of cranks to being a mainstream lifestyle choice. It is now quite common to find vegetarian ready meals in your local supermarket and vegetarian options on restaurant menus. Correspondingly, the market for vegetarian cook books has exploded. Amazon lists nearly 2000 titles. In this article, we will look at three of the best selling vegetarian cook books.
Month of Meals: Vegetarian Pleasures
Vegetarian Pleasures is a vegetarian cook book for diabetics prepared by the American Diabetic Association. It is spiral bound for ease of use and contains enough recipes for 28 days worth of meals. Each page is split into three and mixing and matching produces over 20,000 different combinations.
Each recipe contains carb and nutrient counts, and the carb count is the same for each meal: 4560 grams for peakfast, 6075 grams for lunch and 7085 grams for dinner. Recipes include Eggplant Italian, Stuffed Zucchini, Vegetable Lasagna, Red Pepper Dip, and Eggplant "Caviar".
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food by Mark Bittman is a vegetarian version of the cook book How to Cook Everything, Bittman's previous best seller in which he outlines simple techniques that even the novice cook can adapt to create recipes of their own, in addition to the 2000 or more already contained in the book. How to Cook Everything Vegetarian has the same aim, but for recipes that don't include meat, fish or poultry.
Bittman is not a vegetarian, but believes that the amount of meat contained in the average western diet is unsustainable, both for the environment and for our health. He hopes that by showing how to make delicious meat-free meals, the book will encourage people to cut down on their consumption of meat, even if they are not ready to make the leap to full-blown vegetarianism. Buy both books together if you wish to become a part-time vegetarian (a concept that will be familiar to Catholics and Orthodox Christians, who fast from meat at certain times of the year).
Veganomicon
Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero is a 300-page vegetarian cook book that bills itself as an alternative to anemic vegan cook books that give you a few things to do with pasta and/or tofu. Like the Bittman book, it also covers some basic cooking techniques, but in the appendix rather than the main body of the book. The main focus is on recipes, and there are lots of them, including some mix and match combinations of vegetables, tofu/tempeh, grains and beans, for almost infinite variety.
The book has been getting rave reviews on Amazon. One commenter called it "The Joy of Cooking for vegans", another said "Forget all the stereotypes you may have heard about vegan food being, bland, funky textured, and boring. This book will shatter them forever...really", while yet another said "This isn't the typical vegetarian cookbook. It has recipes for REAL food". Of the 221 customer reviews on the site, 185 (84%) were 5 star, which ought to tell the reader something.
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