Veggie Meals: Rachael Ray's 30-Minute Meals [Hardcover]

 

 

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No Photos in this book! How do you know what it should look like, or if it even appears appetizing? I need photos in my recipe books, I wont be buying anymore of her cookbooks. Very disappointed!

Having read several of Rachael Ray's cookbooks, I am always struck that she is usually more generous with providing meat or poultry-based choices than vegetarian ones. That made me curious about seeing this book. What would her 30-minute vegetarian choices look like?

I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the dishes don't include eggplant, which I'm not fond of. And many of the dishes call for artichokes, asparagus, beans, mushrooms, peas, peppers, tomatoes, and spinach which I like very much. She also makes generous use of standard Italian cheeses, all of which I like.

The book is organized into six sections:

Menus

Soups

Salads

Risotto, Pasta, and Italian Vegetable Entrees

Make Your Own Asian Take-Out

Snack Suppers: Stuffed Potatoes; Sandwiches; Dips; and Spreads

The menu section is quite brief with four three-course menus and six two-course menus.

The soup section is one of the best parts. Every soup looked great, and many contained helpful time-saving directions. Here's a list of the more intriguing ones to me:

Chili; red beans and rice soup; three bean soup; black bean soup; pumpkin and black bean soup; Southwestern corn and pepper pot soup; escarole and white bean soup; chick pea and cannellini minestrone; and gazpacho.

The salads section is also a treat. She does a good job of upgrading from a standard salad without making a lot of extra work. Here are some of the more intriguing choices:

Asparagus salad; white bean salad; tabouleh salad; anti-pasta salad with bagna cauda dressing; Greek vegetable salad-stuffed pitas; baby spinach salad with pears and walnuts; spinach salad with blue cheese and scallions; and couscous salad with scallions and ginger.

The risotto options seem perfectly good. I wonder how well they will taste without meat and poultry-based stock. I suspect they will need more spices to upgrade the flavor in the absence of those ingredients.

The pasta section starts with some good pesto recipes for quick results. For the most part the other pastas didn't excite me.

The Asian take-out section has only seven recipes in it and seems thin for someone who is willing to eat tofu . . . which isn't included in the cookbook as an ingredient.

In snack suppers, I liked the recipes for spinach calzones, bean burritos, quesadillas, spinach artichoke dip, white bean dip, red pepper and sun-dried tomato spread, wild mushroom spread, spicy hummus, and her four pit-zas.

I haven't gone looking for vegetarian cookbooks lately, but I suspect that there are ones with many more recipes, more variety, and more complex flavors. And I assume that they all take a lot longer to prepare.

But for what I'm looking for, Veggie Meals provides more than what I need.

A lot of cookbooks falsely advertise that they contain 15 or 30 minute recipes, but the two recipes I have tried so far from this book (I just got it last week) both took 30 minutes as claimed. Both recipes were surprisingly good and flavorful-- often vegetarian recipes (Moosewood for example) have less flavor and take more time than I would like. I have a lot of vegetarian cookbooks and so far this one seems a lot more appealing to non-vegetarians than the others-- the meals don't taste or look like "hippie food" (which incidentally I love, but my husband does not!).

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5.0 out of 5 stars Delicious and Versatile
This book was a gift to me~truly. You don't have to see her show to know that she has such a vibrant, earthy style~the book displays that. Read more

Published on Mar 18 2003 by sturdyoaks

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Helpful
I've been trying to cut meat out of my diet at least 2 to 3 days a week, but have had a hard time finding replacement foods that I like. Read more

Published on Jan 11 2003

5.0 out of 5 stars Little book, m-m-m- big reward!
Rachel Ray's book, Veggie Meals turned out to be a big find...I no longer panic when my one veggie sibling or my two veggie friends come by for lunch or dinner. Read more

Published on Jan 9 2002 by Max Crawford

5.0 out of 5 stars THEY KEEP GETTNG BETTER.........
Got the latest version of the 30 min meal.... and even though I am NOT a vegetarian, I have found WONDERFUL recipes for my family and friends. Read more

Published on Jan 7 2002 by VIRGINIA LAVISH

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