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?
