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Cookbook review: A Year In a Vegetarian Kitchen 6 March 2007 6:02 pm

Posted by Tracy in : books,cooking,eating,friends,kitchen gear,Morning Glory,recipes,reviews,seasonality,soup,vegan,vegetarian , trackback

Today I reluctantly returned Jack Bishop’s A Year In a Vegetarian Kitchen (2004: Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin) to my friendly local public library. I could not renew it again, or I would certainly have done so. As a way of saying goodbye, last night for dinner I finally made “Caribbean Black Beans With Sautéed Plantains,” the first recipe in this cookbook that really caught my eye. Yum. One of my plantains was either under-ripe or maybe just a little dried out from sitting on the kitchen counter browning for more than a week, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to eat all the sautéed plantains while the beans cooked (if I make something like this again, I will make the beans first even if it requires washing an additional pan; the temptation is that strong). Also it was hard for me to appreciate the beans on their own merits, without comparing them to my personal recipe for Caribbean black beans, based on my loving memory of a dish that taught me to stop worrying and love mango. But I managed to muddle through and make an enjoyable dinner of it, so hurray for that.

A few quick thoughts about the other recipes I tried:

Really, not much to complain about, and even as complaints go, not so bad. (Update, 29 March 2007: I just remembered that I also made a butternut squash risotto from this cookbook, and it was pretty darn tasty, too.) After contemplating which dishes to attempt for awhile, I got a little annoyed that almost every single recipe calls for fresh herbs, but really I was almost equally annoyed at myself for not having a suitably sunny window for year-round potted parsley and cilantro and suchforth. Someday an indoor herb garden will be mine, oh yes. But I digress. To get back to the tofu for a minute: I will totally use Bishop’s pan-cooking technique with other favorite tofu marinades, and in particular as the basis of my upcoming experiments in nonstick versus cast iron tofu cookery (hi, Liz! Thanks for the cookbook recommendation!)

I didn’t test as many recipes as I would have liked, mostly because I wanted to stay true to the seasonal organization of the book. (Maybe I’ll check it out again in a few weeks, when the Spring chapter seems more appropriate.) Another thing I liked about this cookbook was that Bishop’s notion of serving size generally agrees with mine — although I love the works of the Moosewood Collective with all my heart, I have learned to be very skeptical when they claim a recipe serves four. Finally, I have A Year In a Vegetarian Kitchen in part to thank for the chef’s knife that has been rocking my world for just a bit over a week now: one of my first thoughts on reading Bishop’s casual “my knife skills are pretty good” comment in the “Oven-Fried Potato Chips” recipe was “Oh yeah? I bet I could cut translucent slices of potato if I had a good knife…” and the rest is spudsy deliciousness and a metric boatload of hearty split pea soup (yesterday I gave in and froze the leftovers, which means the weather will almost certainly go back to cold and rainy, but oh well).

  • Linley

    We initially tried to do Bishop’s pan-cooking tofu technique in a cast iron pan. It didn’t work; the tofu stuck to the pan unless you added enough oil to practically deep-fry the tofu. We switched to nonstick after two or three tries. If you figure out a good cast iron method for tofu, I’d love to hear it!

    I also intend to have an herb garden one of these days. Really.

  • dushenka

    if your cast iron is well seasoned, the tofu won’t stick. whole foods has an article up right now about seasoning cast iron pans.