The Vegan Gourmet: Full Flavor & Variety with Over 120 Delicious Recipes [Paperback]

I originally bought this book because a quick flip-through showed a compilation of recipes with very unique food combinations. Many of the main-course dishes mix fruits in with the vegetables/starches/proteins (Lentil Stir Fry with Apricots, Asparagus Orange Soup with Pistachios, Chili beans with Tempeh and Dried Peaches). This intrigued me - I have a lot of vegan cookbooks and this looked really different.

Well, different is not necessarily delicious. I can echo the comments made by other reviewers - these recipes tend towards the bland, require the forethought of ensuring the ingredients are on-hand, and many require a fair bit of work, with little pay-off in the form of satisfying taste.

None of the recipes that I tried made it into my daily "repertoire", and they were too disappointing for me to spend any effort in attempting anything else from this book.

With the plethora of excellent vegan cookbooks available these days, you can leave this one out of your shopping cart.

After some "adjusting" of the ingredients, some of the recipes were a bit better. Perhaps the most annoying thing about the recipes is that they are written like they should be in a low-sodium cookbook, but the author doesn't mention that her suggestions for salt might be on the low side for most people. Thinking there was some reason for the low amounts of salt, I prepared the recipes exactly as written, and found them to be "missing something." Doubling or tripling the suggested amount of salt substantially enhanced the flavors.

Another thing I didn't like about the book is that many of the recipes are what I would call "new food," meaning that they are odd combinations of ingredients made up by the author that aren't based on any particular culinary tradition or cuisine. I realize that "gourmet" usually means trying new and different combinations of foods, and I do applaud the attempt at variety, but I just can't say that I was that impressed by most of what I've tried from this book.

Lastly, the recipes are substantially more difficult to prepare than they're worth. I love to cook, and don't mind spending 2 or 3 hours cooking a dish that is absolutely fantastic, but I'm not going to spend that kind of time for something that's just OK. Here's a perfect example... the Sweet Potato, Wheat Berry, Bell Pepper, and Pumpkin Seed Salad in Tomato-Chive Vinaigrette. For starters, the idea of sweet potatos and bell peppers combined with a tomato-chive vinaigrette simply isn't appealing to me. Then, take into consideration that the recipe takes 6-8 hours of soaking time, 1 hour of cooking time, and another hour of chilling time for the wheat berries, plus grilling of the sweet potato, roasting and peeling of the bell peppers, roasting of the pumpkin seeks, and mixing of the tomato-chive vinaigrette, and you've got an all-day project on your hands for a salad! To be fair, the author warns the reader that this particular recipe takes a lot of time to prepare, but sheesh...

This book does have some good recipes in it, does contain some good ideas for interesting food combinations, and does contain a listing of recipes that "should" take less than 30 minutes to prepare, but overall I found the recipes required too much effort and too much "adjusting" for what I got out of them. I find that I don't use this book much. The Vegan Gourmet is good for experimentation, but not great as an everyday cookbook. I much prefer "The Mediterranan Vegan Kitchen," which is simply an outstanding cookbook that I use all the time.