Rating: 
Summary: Good overview, bad on details.
Review: The strength of this book is that it gives you a great overview of different vegetables, grains etc. and the variety of things that can be done with them. On the negative side, the instructions often lack detail. For example, she might tell you to heat oil and saute a particular ingredient, but neglect to tell you how high the heat should be. Also, if you tend to like highly spiced food, many of her recipes are totally bland and really need to be spiced up. For every real "winner" in the book, there have been 2 or 3 things I wouldn't bother making again.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for ideas, but inaccurate and UNCLEAR
Review: I did my research before buying this book. James Beard award, Julia Child Cookbook award - how could I go wrong? Unfortunately, I did. This book, while beautiful and expansive, is neither accurate nor helpful. For example, in the Potato Leek gratin on p282, Madison does not tell you whether the milk you should pour into the baking pan is the same milk you boiled the potatoes in. Furthermore, she does not advise that you use a thickener in the milk and so the end result is a watery mess. Far from a creamy potato gratin. The Cranberry-Nut Bread on p636 is another example of poorly written instructions. The ingredients list includes 2 different types of sugar. And in the step-by-step instructions, she does not tell you which type of sugar to use when. Additionally, you are not told whether to discard or include the cranberry boiling liquid into the bread mix. And to top off this frustrating experience, I am never told what size bread pan to use. I'm simply told to "Spray or butter and flour a bread pan or 18 muffin cups." Anyone who has baked bread knows that there are a plethora of bread pans available! These are the only 2 recipes I have tried so far and I'm honestly hesitant to try anymore. A good writer of a cookbook, travel guide, or software user manual should TEACH someone how to do something well. Unfortunately, in this case, I am lost in her recipes. And the only way I am able to pull off a decent meal is by applying my previous culinary knowledge to putting together the fragments of her recipes. Use at your own risk.
Rating: 
Summary: Informative and comprehensive
Review: Although it focuses on meatless cookery, this impressive volume belongs in the kitchens of vegetarians and nonvegetarians alike. It is packed with practical information and clearly written, appealing recipes for simple everyday meals as well as for entertaining. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced cook, "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" is bound to be a very useful addition to your library. Also recommended: "Recipes and Remembrances from an Eastern Mediterranean Kitchen," by Sonia Uvezian. If you are fond of Mediterranean food (as I am), you will find this book a revelation. It is filled with extraordinary vegetarian recipes, many of them not available elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: A bit overwhelming...
Review: While I thought a number of recipes in this book were great - for the most part I found it overwhelming. There is just SO much in this book that if you are looking for a quick recipe, this probably isn't for you. I'm no gourmet, and therefore, found this cookbook a bit difficult at times. However, if you truly love to cook, I'll bet this is one book that would make a great addition to your collection.
Rating:
Summary: New Vegetarian
Review: I would like to just say that this book is absolutely outstanding! My perspective is that of a novice vegetarian who enjoys cooking immensely. So, if you are starting out as a vegetarian, or if you just want to lighten up your diet I stongly recommend this book. Another key aspect is the presence of so many basic and easy-to-find ingredients with cooking techniques easy to execute. The recipes that I have tried so far are unbelievable!
Rating:
Summary: Best Book On Vegetable Cooking Ever!
Review: To be honest, I have never had a cookbook dedicated to only vegetables, but this one fulfilled my every curiosity. Of the ones I had grown up eating and had prepared many times over the years, Deborah Madison's techniques transformed the flavors of the common everyday into gourmet delights! The recipes range from simple to complex, but all extremely doable and delicious. I read this book like a novel, and tried various vegetables that I was both familiar and had never tried before. This is an excellent and very comprehensive book on the subject of vegetables, and I highly recommend it. Caveat: This is not a diet book--no nutrition information is given, and no low or non-fat substitutions are provided. So, if that is what you are looking for, move on.
Rating:
Summary: a comment for the publisher
Review: My comment is in no way to disparage the quality of the recipes or of its contributors. I have a comment for the editors regarding the photographic inserts in the book. I should preface that all the recipes in this cookbook are extraordinary, including the exquisite illustrations by Catherine Kirkwood, the formatting of the recipes, down to the side bar information and references printed on the endsheets. Very easy to use. Deborah Madison's writing style is delightful, reading it reminded me of the cookbooks by James Beard and Marion Cunningham. Commanding and comprehensive, but non-confrontational. The wealth of information on ingredients, techniques, and tools is staggering! This cookbook is text-laden, and not just with recipes, it's the sort of cookbook one actually enjoys reading through, if you know what I mean. Now here is my quibble and (please don't hate me), something I just can't seem to get past. Maybe it's because I spent the last 13 years in publishing and have seen my share of color inserts judiciously used, or not... In this book, there are 3 generous sections devoted to photographs, but only one photograph appears per page. No doubt the original photographs were beautifully taken, but I suspect most of the photographs were enlarged to fit or bleed off the page, thus making several of them blurred. Some dishes photographed in the background are blurred beyond recognition, yet still captioned! For a book of this calibre, with so much care put into the general layout and illustrations, I could not get past the flawed inserts. There is valuable space wasted on the enlargements; they could have been cropped. I might suggest, say, 4 sharp photographs reduced to a page, thus giving readers 96 photographed dishes instead of a mere 24. After all, this is a cookbook with 1400 recipes...I'd rather see reduced but sharper quality images, than large blurry dishes, which do nothing to whet the appetite.
Rating:
Summary: Yummy.
Review: My mother and mother-in-law made delicious things with vegetables, and neither used much meat. Out in the real world, that is, the one I'm stuck in, 'vegetables' meant overcooked frozen peas and carrots, and iceberg lettuce salads with bottled dressing, that we shoved out of the way to get to the meat. Later, nouvelle cuisine did 'rediscover' vegetables, and presented three intimidating pea pods and a kiwi slice on a Villeroy & Boch plate, not to be devoured, but adored and worshipped. Vegetarianism itself was downright scary, with dour and greasy nut burgers, and more recently, Textured Vegetable Protein ersatz turkey. If you say, "I hate vegetables," in a crowd, you'll bond with a lot of people. The unfortunate thing about this is, most of us actually love vegetables, given half a chance. Admit it. For example, it's the side dishes, with the mushrooms, fried onions, herbs, sweet potatoes, garlic, lemon, fresh bread, ginger, salads, and so forth, that make Thanksgiving or Christmas a glutton's paradise. This cookbook has mercifully killed off decades worth of misconceptions. The recipes are delightful, with just enough seasoning to enhance without overwhelming, or making them unreasonably complicated and time-consuming. I'm not confident enough on my own to know what to do with fennel or choy sum when I see it in the stores and I appreciate finally having a guidebook that gives me the most basic ways to use them, as well as in more elaborate main dishes. You will likely have to plan ahead and go shopping, most of us won't have all the ingredients for the more complex recipes in our pantries, but they are widely available in larger centers. I haven't tried all the recipes, and there are some I probably never will, but everything that I have made from it has been delicious. This is one of the more useful cookbooks I have, and I have way too many. Since Ms. Madison refrains from nagging, it's not appropriate for me, but I cannot resist making two points. One, if you become at all aware of factory farming with its inhumane treatment of animals, toxins, and the impact on the environment, you're a soulless wretch if you continue to shovel in meat in the quantities to which we're become accustomed in recent years. Two, there are many very unpleasant diseases that can be avoided with a vegetarian or mostly vegetarian diet, or at the least, more vegetables and grains. And unless you have religious commitments, no one is saying that you must never, ever, again eat a cheeseburger. But you don't want me to tell you about all those diseases, now, do you?
Rating:
Summary: My favorite cookbook
Review: This has become my favorite cookbook. I have been vegetarian for nearly 20 years and I am an avid cook, and this book has provided nothing but perfect food, without meat, every time I have used it. I love good food. Food that is merely nutritious and not really good, also, is a bane to humanity. This food is not generally low-fat, but it is still whole, nutritious food. The desserts are great, the salads are great, the vegetable dishes are great. You name it, in this book, it's good. The other thing that I love about this book is that Deborah Madison is not only a great chef she also knows how to translate her cooking talent into recipes that really WORK. I am disappointed by some chefs' cookbooks because it's obvious that they are excellent cooks, but their recipe-writing skills are sub-par. These, on the other hand, are well-tested, well-written recipes. The food in this book is what I'd call fine food. Some recipes in other cookbooks are for everyday-type food that will get you by, and others are for trendy food that are novel to make once in a while. The recipes in this book direct you to make the kind of food that will have you talking the next day about how good it was, and they're not trendy. Most are also uncomplicated. The flavors are refined and you might call them sophisticated, but that's misleading because there's nothing pretentious about the recipes or the presentation. The sophistication comes from a cleanness to the palate that is presented here. I have a large collection of cookbooks (200+) and this one definitely stands out. If you have others of Madison's cookbooks, such as the Savory Way or the Greens Cookbook, which are also both excellent, I suspect that you will find this one more accessible. There's a hint of preciousness in those other two books that I find lacking here. Madison seems less concerned about impressing us in this book and more relaxed in her approach. This has improved her style and has improved her food, as well.
Rating:
Summary: it's turning me into a vegetarian
Review: These recipes are easy and delicious. As I'm pretty inept at cooking, this is high praise. She also provides enough information so that you can figure out how to use the leftovers. Because the food is so consistently good from here, I've almost completely stopped buying meat.
|
