Monday 26 October 2009

Vegan MOFO Post #11: In celebration of new cook books!

So, today's post was inspired by finding a vegan cookbook in a cut-price book shop on Charing X Road (the one which is a bookshop upstairs and a XXX shop downstairs). It's called 'The Ultimate Book of Vegan Cooking' - a pretty bold title.

The big pull for this book is the 'more than 750 full colour photographs' the book claims to have. Too many vegan cook books don't have photos, and I for one really enjoy looking at pictures of food. There are a few repeats, there are a few photos that dispite using fancy crockery, lighting, and camera FX still show food that looks stomach-turning. But the majority of the photos (of the food - there are some really dodgy ones of 'real life vegans'. Including a woman wearing head to to beige. And a beige bumbag.) are good and amazing and delicious.

There's a fair bit of nutrition information at the beginning, which would probably be useful if you are taking your first faltering steps into a vegan lifestyle, but for the rest of us...well. We've heard it all before. There's only so much vitamin B12 info I can reread and stay sane. There is also a page on why people go vegan, which is pretty weak in my opinion.

As for the recipes, there is a definite 'health food' feel to this book. Health food as an idea is not something I am particularly bothered about either way, but if you hate health food, this is probably not the book for you. If you are a health nut, this probably isn't the book for you either!
The recipes are, on the whole, interesting - Scooped Pear and Red Wine Sorbet, a Parsnip Cake, a few curries and a few stir frys, a few breakfast ideas. Somed of the nutritional information is listed below each recipe, which is kind of cool.

The book itself is massive - way over A4 size. It's big, and substantial, and very heavy.

I've got my first recipe in the oven at the moment, so I will give that a full review when it's done.

1 comment:

Monique a.k.a. Mo said...

I've never heard of this before. I'm going to see if I can find it!