Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful Food
Review: I purchased this years ago and still use it, especially for its basic fresh pasta recipes. Deborah Madison is one of my all-time favorite food writers and it is interesting to see that while she has branched out considerably since this book, it still remains fresh alongside her more recent writing. I've served these recipes to carnivores and no one ever asks where the beef is. I also recommend The Savory Way, a book she later wrote after moving away from the resources of California's farmer's markets and learning to work with ingredients that may be more in keeping with what the rest of us find in local stores.
Rating: 
Summary: Not the right cookbook for me
Review: I'm sure every recipe in this cookbook is delicious, but I seldom use it and regret buying it. This would be a good book for people who see cooking as a hobby: something they do occasionally, for fun, without worrying about time, convenience, health or expense. For everyday cooking, it's pretty much useless. The recipes are all quite time-consuming and complicated, requiring, for instance, special stock which must be homemade and for which store-bought substitutes would be unacceptable. Lots of the recipes are heavy on the butter and cream, which is fine for special occasions but not the way I want to cook on a regular basis. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for special-occasion recipes. Everything I've cooked out of it has turned out great, and I would definately consult it for dinner parties or similar occasions. But I don't think it will be a particularly useful cookbook for busy people trying to eat in a reasonably healthy manner.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful book! Great recipes for special occasions.
Review: I've tried over ten or so recipes in this book and all were both delicious and easy to prepare, however, if you can't cut or chop vegetables, then don't buy the book and stick to your macaroni and velveeta or have a bowl of cereal instead. This book is for elegant vegetarian cooking and, like the book "Olives Table", is for special occasions and intimate dinners. I learned a great deal while reading this book, especially about vegetables that I don't use on a regular basis (celery root, parsnips, brussel sprouts). I also learned about making thin-crust pizza and a different way of making homemade pasta. The only problem I found was that she uses measurements like "one celery root" etc. Since her restaurant uses organic vegetables, they tend to be smaller that your average supermarket variety. If you know how to read a recipe and figure out proportions, this should not be an issue. If it looks like you've added too much of one vegetable, then you probably have. But not to worry, the recipes are very forgiving. Let's face it, how can you screw up a carrot?
Rating:
Summary: Too complicated
Review: If I could, I would return this book. Although the few recipies that I have tried turned out to be quite delicious, I usually turn to other books when looking for a good meal. The reason for this is quite simple: The recipe lists are just too long, specific, and complicated. I do live in a town where you can probably find any ingredient that is required here, but I am just not willing to spend all day preparing dinner!
Rating: 
Summary: Yummy but baroque
Review: Many of the recipies in this cookbook are quite cook. On the other hand, the author is extremely particular about ingredients and preparation techniques, and often goes overboard in her expectations of the cook. I kept expecting to find a recipe that started, "First, thresh the wheat that you planted last winter with a hand-whittled oak threshing tool..."
Rating:
Summary: Tasty, but a little too time consuming
Review: Not a cookbook for busy people, that's for certain. The recipes, when finished, are very tasty, but some require many, many steps. The Black Bean soup, for example, requires a puree of chipoltes in adobo, a puree of anchos in oil, a separate sautee of onions peppers and the like, and THEN you get into preparing the actual stock and soup as one would normaly. Precise timing is needed, for all the materials go into the finished soup at the same time, making one feel that an octopus as an assistant might be a good idea. Now it's true, when the soup comes from the pot, it is outstanding, (especially after sitting a day or so... yum!) but I've often lost four hours making dishes like these that looked simple, but were far more complicated underneath the surface. (In some cases, much more than it needs to be.) I've taken to trimming corners (heaven forbid) and I find that I can modify the recipes a little to get a good result, with less work. In case you are interested, in the book there is an incredible looking recipe for port-portabella mushroom lasagne, but the author warns us to save it for special occasions, because it is a "labor of love." I shudder to attempt it... Maybe when I become a millionaire...
Rating:
Summary: Not the right cookbook for me
Review: The Greens restaurant in San Francisco was one of the greatest things ever to come along for vegetarians. A true gourmet dining experience where not even the most die-hard meat eater would have a bad experience. Nothing earthy-crunchy here. That said, my title says it all -- don't try this at home. At least not unless you are an extremely experienced cook with lots of time and patience. The ingredients are difficult to work with and the instructions are given only with using them completely from scratch with fancy equipment, for instance, grinding whole spices in a spice mill. No powdered spice equivalents are given. Instructions seem simple, e.g., peel the winter squash and dice it into one-inch cubes, but until you have tried to peel and work with winter squash, you don't realize how difficult and time-consuming it is. I thought I was going to end up in the E.R. The book also doesn't give you any idea of prep and cooking time. I've started out in the afternoon making a meal out of the most uncomplicated sounding receipes in the book, so I'd have plenty of time to relax before dinner, only to find myself still working on the meal at eleven p.m. And most of the recipes are more complicated. Frankly, the results aren't worth the bother. The resulting food is, for the most part, good, but not great. It may be worth it to you if you really love to cook and have lots of spare time, but for the rest of us, there are books on the market that are more helpful and lead to quicker meals that are just as tasty. This one is strictly for the pros.
Rating:
Summary: Don't try this at home!
Review: The Greens restaurant in San Francisco was one of the greatest things ever to come along for vegetarians. A true gourmet dining experience where not even the most die-hard meat eater would have a bad experience. Nothing earthy-crunchy here. That said, my title says it all -- don't try this at home. At least not unless you are an extremely experienced cook with lots of time and patience. The ingredients are difficult to work with and the instructions are given only with using them completely from scratch with fancy equipment, for instance, grinding whole spices in a spice mill. No powdered spice equivalents are given. Instructions seem simple, e.g., peel the winter squash and dice it into one-inch cubes, but until you have tried to peel and work with winter squash, you don't realize how difficult and time-consuming it is. I thought I was going to end up in the E.R. The book also doesn't give you any idea of prep and cooking time. I've started out in the afternoon making a meal out of the most uncomplicated sounding receipes in the book, so I'd have plenty of time to relax before dinner, only to find myself still working on the meal at eleven p.m. And most of the recipes are more complicated. Frankly, the results aren't worth the bother. The resulting food is, for the most part, good, but not great. It may be worth it to you if you really love to cook and have lots of spare time, but for the rest of us, there are books on the market that are more helpful and lead to quicker meals that are just as tasty. This one is strictly for the pros.
Rating:
Summary: The Green Way
Review: This book is from the ether. Really great cookbooks draw you into a world that you had not understood before. Many people who love the Marcella Hazan book love it because it includes the comfort foods of Italy they are familiar with, but also has tons of wonderful, varied surprises. This book is kind of similar. There are recipes that you will realize are the province of the vegetarian and are very appealing, and then there are new things to be discovered that will make you feel, upon their discovery, almost ashamed. The first recipe I prepared was for the White Bean and Tomato Soup with Parsley Sauce. I just about lost my mind. I had only recently started using the mortar and pestle for prepping garlic and this recipe made use of that technique to stunning effect. With a piece of crusty bread, it is as fulfilling as anything you are going to find to eat with animal parts in it. I also like DM's 1400 recipe book but this one is more exciting as a cookbook, the other more encyclopedic. The soups section is especially amazing. I've made almost all of them now. Also, as some people may know, many cookbooks have blunt wrong recipes. I haven't had any recipes miss yet from this book.
Rating:
Summary: One of my favorite cookbooks!
Review: This is a really wonderful cookbook. It is vegetarian, but even the entrees are so good that people don't miss the presence of meat. I've never made anything from this book that I (and whoever else I was eating with) didn't *really* enjoy. The recipes as written are pretty much from scratch, and often call for slightly exotic cultivars of vegetables and so forth. I used to live in Pennsylvania, with a pretty decent garden and farmers' markets galore, and with those resources available, I could pretty much just follow the recipes, and the food was truly wonderful. Since I moved to Barrow, many things either can't be obtained, or the price to FedEx them here is ridiculous. So I make substituions with what is available in any grocery store, and the results still taste excellent. There are even some savings in prep time. So, if you don't have lots of time to cook or are worried about exotic ingedients, don't be! This book will work just fine for you too. Favorite recipes: winter squash gratin, white winter vegetable casserole (bet you didn't know parsnips could be really good!), cheese sandwich with smoked chilies & cilantro.
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