Veggies from heaven (The Moosewood Cookbook - Mollie Katzen)

Member Name: ermintrude

Product:	The Moosewood Cookbook - Mollie Katzen
Date:	06/10/00 (142 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Includes classic recipes and innovative dishes; handwritten, homely style

Disadvantages: Really need measuring cups (but it's only a small investment!)

Hailing from the renowned Moosewood vegetarian restaurant in Ithaca, NY (well, it's renowned in New York State at least!), this book is from first glance obviously a labour of love.

For a start, almost the entire book is handwritten (all bar the index and cover). Illustrations and doodles are dotted around the pages, and the recipes are written in a chatty style, all of which give it an instantly friendly, comforting feel. The introduction reveals how the recipes have been refined and updated since the first 1977 edition, every single one having been rewritten and tested numerous times. The author's personal history of the book (and the restaurant itself) draws you in and gives a flavour of the friendly, dedicated people behind what can only be described as an institution.

Recipes are divided into soups, salads, sauces, "baked things and sandwiches", entrees (that annoying USism for "main courses") and desserts. Now, for a full selection of desserts you need to see the mammoth Moosewood Dessert Book, but as Ukrainian Poppy Seed Cake and to-die-for Moosewood Fudge Brownies are included among the 40-odd sweet recipes here, you can't really complain. This is a general cook book, after all.

Savoury recipes include such classics as Gazpacho Soup (a cold soup, as all Red Dwarf fans know <grin>), Spanakopita (Greek spinach/cheese filo pie), and Tabouli (tabbouleh, whatever - bulgur wheat with lemon, garlic, parsley, etc.). Other, more unusual recipes include lentil-walnut burgers, cauliflower curry, and "Sri Wasano's infamous Indonesian rice salad" (I must try that one day!), so you can't say there's any lack of variety, or that it's trying too hard to be unusual and trendy.

The recipes are mostly fairly simple - not no-brainer, but you don't need to be Cordon Bleu to use this book. Although there are "recipes" for sandwiches, they would be more accurately descr
ibed as ideas for fillings - the book certainly doesn't stoop to the level of a student cookbook I saw, which actually went the the lengths of "butter the bread on one side..."(I still can't believe it was aimed at people who presumably had some kind of A-levels). But with fillings such as "yoghurt cheese with roasted cashews and minced candied ginger", this is a step beyond cheese and pickle, and so may not suit everyone's taste or budget (I admit that's an extreme example, though!).

I can honestly say that everything I've tried from this book (and I've had it since 1998) has been delicious. Admittedly I've made substitutions when my supply cupboard didn't run to things like fresh coriander at 8:30pm on a wet Wednesday, but the recipes survived. In fact, there's a page on substitutions, but these cover substitutions by choice (for low fat, or to avoid dairy products and eggs) rather than by necessity. There's is a section on the various types of ingredient used in the book, and tips on when to substitute canned and frozen ingedients for fresh ones, which is helpful. A bit of thought about substitutions when it's necessary and all will be fine, I'm sure.

The list of "useful tools" is a bit less daunting than the Moosewood Dessert book, with nothing too out of the ordinary at all (except maybe the oven thermometer). And, like the aforementioned book, there are extra indices of low-fat, fat-free, egg-free and dairy-free recipes, which are definitely Very Useful (except maybe that the dairy-free and egg-free lists aren't combined - they do differ). With it being of US origin, it's nice that the book contains a page on conversions of dry, liquid and "bulk" (cheese etc) ingredient quantities, but it's not *that* comprehensive (I'd recommend investing in a set of measuring cups instead, and in fact I find them easier than messing about with scales), an
d the all-important oven temperature conversion is missing.

However, these are small flaws, and don't really detract from the book itself. It comes acoss as being for enthusiastic cooks with imagination, so I'm sure they wouldn't be a problem anyway. I'd recommend it to everyone, meat-eater and veggie alike (I can't really speak for vegans, although it looks pretty good to the inexperienced eye), as a cookbook with head, heart and, most importantly, soul.


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Note - I've only seen US import editions of this book. The UK-published Moosewood Classics is a smaller version, although I'm not sure exactly how it differs. Larger Waterstone's usually have the import on the shelves, so scout around.

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