Book Review

Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook
By Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero
Review by Tammie Ortlieb

I'm reading this cookbook as if it were a novel—a pain-in-my-side-from-laughing, tell-everybody-I-know-about-it, potboiler type of novel. And I say I'm reading it because I don't ever want it to end. It's the type of book in which you race to get to the last page but start backpedaling once you get there. I might just read the last few words and then flip right back to the front and start all over again. I could do that. Moskowitz and Romero have such a side splitting writing style that even an ordinary event like boiling potatoes seems like a day of bungee jumping with your grandmother and her best buds. Who wouldn't appreciate that kind of humor when it comes to something as potentially mundane and fraught with stress as making dinner?

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Their down to earth, chatty style lends itself well to teaching the beginner the how-to's and where-to-for's of finding one's way around the kitchen as well as refreshing the veteran cook on the fineries of such techniques as chopping and dicing. Hope and Romero devote entire chapters to this stuff! They throw down pages and pages on stocking the vegan pantry, shopping for proper kitchen utensils, grilling and roasting veggies, and understanding and cooking beans and grains. Just a side note—I finally learned what capers are, thank you very much. I also discovered that garlic can be roasted whole, a fact I was not aware of prior to this reading. And did you know that oil is not always the evil stepmother everyone makes it out to be? Sometimes, in fact, it's Cinderella all dressed up for the ball. This book is so cram-packed with explanations of foods, tools, cooking methods, and consequences of using any of a combination of these that I quickly ran out of sticky notes to mark what I wanted to remember.

Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook—and you might say to yourself, well, duh, Tammie—is strictly a vegan cookbook. But that's an important point. It means that you never need to alter. You never need to skip recipes. You never need to beat yourself up because you didn't buy something with no animal byproducts in the ingredient lists. Just open to a page, throw on your apron, and get to work. I love that! I also love that I can find a plethora of low fat and soy free recipes among the collection. I can even, if I so choose, whip up a dish that caters to the gluten sensitive. And, much to my eighth grader's delight, I can find recipes that practically get themselves on the table. Ok, so not quite, but they are fast—forty-five minutes or less fast. So I'm crazy about the book. But am I equally wild about the food?

Let's just say that the Herb-Scalloped Potatoes are my absolute new favorite dinner staple. And the Double Pea Soup with Roasted Red Peppers? This one replaces my auntie's recipe as my turn to comfort food. I did have a little issue with the Sun-Dried Tomato Dip. It tasted great, but looked a bit too much like barf for my liking. Cranberry-Orange-Nut Bread? Yum, yum, and double yum. I feel like Jim Carrey in The Mask. Sssssomebody STOP ME! I just want to eat this book up! And the very best part for a slacker mom like me? Most of the recipes require stuff I've already got sitting on my pantry shelves. Thanks, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. You just saved me a trip to the store and filled my family's tummies at the same time.

Buy Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook Now!

Listen to an NPR interview of the authors of Veganomicon.

Tammie Ortlieb is a freelance writer with a Masters Degree in Developmental Psychology. Her work has appeared in VegNews, Veggie Life, Vegetarian Baby and Child Online Magazine, and Mothering.com. She resides in southwest Michigan with her omnivorous husband, three terrific teenagers- two veg, one wannabe-, and a you-tell-em-like-it-is-sister future green revolutionist fabulous fourth grader.

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