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Rating: 
Summary: Delicious introduction to Asian vegetables
Review: A primer on Asian produce. This book is well-designed and beautiful, and a nice introduction to the innumerable types of produce to be found in any Asian market. It is by no means comprehensive, but neither does it purport to be. Deseran states up front that she has included only the most common vegetables, as well as a few of her personal favorites. The result is a collection of descriptions, photographs, and simple recipes that are a good first step into the incredibly diverse world of Asian produce.For beginners, the photographs will be especially welcome, as will the simple recipes that provide ideas about how to prepare these foods. Deseran also includes an introduction, descriptions of the vegetables and recipes, a glossary, and even a brief list of online resources--all in a conversational, approachable style which is refreshing in the often supercilious world of cooking. The descriptions and recipes are divided into the following groupings: leafy and green; roots, shoots, and bulbs; squashes and gourds; beans and things; and herbs and aromatics. Recommended for those who have little or no experience with Asian vegetables and/or cooking. Unfortunately, if you live in a rural area where people have no idea what bok choy is--not to mention daikon or turmeric--then this book is not going to be of much use. Move or else resign yourself to a culinary life of iceberg lettuce and green beans.
Rating:
Summary: Everything You Need to Know
Review: Next time I go to my local farmer's market I will take this book with me to share with the other shoppers who stand puzzled in front of the Asian vegetable vendor's table. In addition to a complete guide to Asian vegetables with great pictures, this book is full of recipes that are clearly explained and good to eat. The author's style, something one doesn't always notice in a cookbook, is personal and fun to read.
Rating: 
Summary: A little too limited in category
Review: This book would've ordinarily been a very good book, however, with a few of the same kinds of books available at the same time, I believe that you should shop around before purchasing this one. I have looked at several with the same theme and have found that "Asian Greens" is more concise and lists 3x more vegetables than this book and offers 30 more recipes than this book. Yes the pictures are very beautiful but so are the ones in "Asian Greens". For an informative guide, I would have to go with "Asian Greens" -- unfortunately, I picked up this one first and have since bought "Asian Greens" to help me pick Asian vegetables at the markets.
Rating: 
Summary: A poor man's "Amaranth to Zucchini"
Review: This is a good guide to the produce you'll find in an Asian market, and it gives you a decent idea of what you can do with that bitter melon or mustard cabbage after you've brought it home. It's a good book -- but I can't work up my enthusiasm for it.
For one thing: even though the photography is attractive, it's not terribly useful. Presumably to both save money and to give a sense of size-and-scale, most of the vegetable photos have several items in the same picture (Chinese broccoli next to choy sum next to mustard cabbage), with little circles (TOO-little circles) indicating the item highlighted in the text. The veggie photos are also smaller than the recipe photos; personally, I'd rather a good hard look at a healthy bunch of greens than a full-page picture of Asian gumbo with mustard cabbage and chinese sausage (however appealing that recipe might be).
The information given is also... well, not quite minimal, but far from exhaustive. While the entry for Lotus root in Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini is two or three pages (plus recipes), there's really only 3 paragraphs devoted to it here. It's good information, mind you, just not that much of it.
But note that I do give the book 4 stars. If you're completely new to Asian cooking, then this inexpensive book may be helpful (and a fatter book would be overwhelming).
Rating:
Summary: An Average Book, not up to Standards on the Subject
Review: `Asian Vegetables' by first time author, Sara Deseran is a lightweight entry into the world of books about Asian cooking. While there may not be as many heavyweight classics as there are in English for Italian, French, or Mediterranean cuisines, there are important classics against which one's efforts must be measured. The heavyweight in the area of guides to Asian ingredients is `Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients', updated in 2000.
For starters, for roughly the same list price in paperback, Cost's classic has twice as many pages, covers all ingredients, not just vegetables, and presents vegetables and all other products in a greater depth than Ms. Deseran's book. For starters, Deseran does not include the Latin scientific names for her vegetables, which is doubly annoying as she herself says, most of the vegetables have different names, even in different parts of China, let alone different names in Japan and Thailand. So, the only way to be sure we are talking about the same thing is to give the one name that is guaranteed to be the same across all books.
Ms. Deseran has one opportunity to gain a march on Cost's book by providing color photographs of almost all of the plants she discusses, but this feature is, to my mind, done poorly. In an attempt to compare and contrast the appearance of related vegetables, the photographs are all `family pictures'. Thus, for example, one picture of four oriental members of the cabbage family is so small that I am very hard pressed to see the differences between the four vegetables in the photograph, and I am hard pressed to see the difference between choy sum (Chinese flowering cabbage) and the Mediterranean veggie, broccoli Rabe (rapini). This brings up another weakness with the book.
One of the main features of the book is the recipes presented for each featured ingredient. One problem with these recipes is that relatively few of these ingredients are available outside of an Oriental market in a large city such as New York or San Francisco. My local very well stocked megamart probably carries less than a third of the ingredients in this book. One of the virtues of Bruce Cost's book is that since it covers all types of Asian products, including meat, fish, noodles, sauces, and grains, the average coverage is probably better than half, as grains, noodles, and fish are much more common than many vegetables. So, even though Ms. Deseran says that most oriental leafy greens are almost entirely interchangeable with one another, this doesn't help if you can't find any. It would have made the recipes much more useful if the author had provided substitutions, especially for the leafy green vegetables and the squashes.
Even on the subjects on which both Deseran and Cost have articles, Cost's information is deeper and generally more useful. While Deseran has articles on `Ginger' and `Galangal and Turmeric', Cost has several pages on the `Ginger family', including individual articles on `Ginger', `Galangal', `Turmeric', `Mioga Ginger', and `Lesser Galangal'. For the ginger family, both books provide two soup recipes featuring ginger and Galangal. Deseran gives the usual short paragraph to ginger, while Cost gives two pages to ginger, including a discussion of `baby ginger' and ginger shoots. Cost also covers dried and powdered preparations made from ginger and turmeric, which are beyond the scope of Deseran's book. Deseran does cover a fairly sizable number of non-vegetable topics in her `pantry glossary', but most entries offer little substantial information. For example, there is a paragraph on chicken broth, which gives no recipe for same, and makes no mention, like Cost, that the Asian chicken broth is an entirely different preparation than it's French or Italian cousins. She simply suggests you use a commercial western style organic chicken broth. This point alone makes me question the depth to which Ms. Deseran has seriously researched her subject.
Oddly, Ms. Deseran's bibliography is very respectable and includes `Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients'. It almost seems she knows of this important work, but has never read it. Ms. Deseran's patron and inspiration for this book is noted Chinese cookbook author, Barbara Tropp, whose `The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking' has all the cachet and quality of a Chinese `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' by Julia Child. And, Ms. Tropp agrees with Mr. Cost in clearly distinguishing Chinese from French broth by leaving out the vegetables and adding ginger. So much for packaged supermarket stocks!
One attraction found in Ms. Deseran's book is the anecdotes by noted chefs on Oriental ingredients. I found these contributed virtually nothing to the value of the book.
Virtually the only situation in which it seems Ms. Deseran's book may have an edge over Bruce Cost's work is if you happen to live near a first class Asian market which stocks a good variety of fresh ingredients and the color pictures can serve as an aid in identifying the products. But then, Cost's book becomes more valuable, as it offers an excellent guide to how to make the best of Asian markets, something Ms. Deseran does not cover, except to note how to care for the vegetables once you have them.
This is really an average book, so my three stars simply reflects that this book offers virtually nothing when compared to the standard works on the subject.
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