Friday, February 19, 2010

By the Book

While I was recovering from a nasty cold recently, my mom stopped by with a DVD of Julie & Julia. The parts about Julia Child were engrossing; the parts about blogger Julie Powell were not; and the abundant meats were just gross. But it did get me thinking about one thing: If I decided to cook my way through every recipe in a vegan cookbook the way that Powell cooked her way through Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which cookbook would I choose?

Perhaps Great Chefs Cook Vegan, in which Linda Long persuaded dozens of top chefs to present a beautiful variety of dishes? All these recipes are inspiring, and many are very “do-able”—but some are frankly beyond my reach. Really, where would I get hold of the cotton-candy machine required for one of the recipes?

Possibly Vegan With a Vengeance, the first and to my mind the best of the cookbooks written or co-written by the Post Punk Kitchen’s ppk.com Isa Chandra Moskowitz? But the unassuming little paperback, wonderful as it is, may be a little thin to serve as the bedrock of a monumental undertaking.

Erik Marcus at Vegan.com yesterday mentioned that the blogger PinkVegan “has set the insane goal to cook and blog every last recipe from Tal Ronnen’s The Conscious Cook and Colleen Patrick Goudreau’s The Vegan Table .” So those are contenders in someone’s mind.

Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian —with its global range and unfailingly delicious results, excellent all the way from adzuki bean to zucchini—would be a great contender. The only problem is that some recipes include eggs or dairy. Maybe with some vegan tweaks….

But I’m still not sure; what cookbook would y’all suggest for such an undertaking?

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Vegan! Vegan! Read all about it!

Want to know what’s going on in the world of vegetarianism and veganism? I recently discovered a great Web site that compiles links to more blog posts and Web sites on the topic than you could possibly read in one sitting. Click on this page and get lost in the links.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Soup’s on

For a while after Soup’s Vietnamese restaurant opened (at 219 W. Fourth St. in downtown Winston-Salem), I avoided it in disappointment because I didn’t see anything vegetarian on its menu. Happily that has changed.

Informed by kind friends that it now served a vegetarian pho, I was eager to try it. As my group walked in recently, the outgoing owner recognized us from our previous visits to his other restaurant, Downtown Thai, and announced that in addition to the vegetarian pho, many of the other menu items could be made vegetarian.

I chose the Bun Curry. A bowl of flavorful curry with tofu and vegetables was served with a giant plate of noodles, bean sprouts and shredded lettuce. You pour the curry over the noodles, etc., and mix it all together well. As a meal it was warming and filling, yet somehow also light and delicate—and totally delicious. A friend’s bowl of vegetarian pho was also a winner…. We’re talking about going back tomorrow.

For more information about Soups, you can check out its menu here; or read the Journal’s Dinner Belle review here.