When I got this cookbook home from the library and started flipping through it, it wasn’t long before disappointment set in.  Though the subtitle is “A New Way with Vegetables”, this is not a vegetarian cookbook, and even those recipes that did not include meat as an indispensable component rarely enticed me.  Lots of raw vegetables, lots of weird feature vegetables like celery and radishes.  Initially I only found three recipes that I wanted to try.  And the first one seemed about as bland as you could imagine: “cauliflower ragu”.  But I gave it a go, and… it was startlingly good!  (The gimmick is that you add the cauliflower in two batches, so the first batch ends up dissolving into a sort of jam while the second batch stays solid enough to add texture.)  I went looking for some other recipes to try, and found an eggplant rigatoni dish that looked like it could probably still survive even if I kicked the sausage out of it.  I gave that one a go, and not only did it survive, it was memorable!  These recipes are not parti­cularly complicated, but they do have that alchemy that marks a great cookbook: that eggplant dish had serious depth of flavor to it, and yet that depth emerged from some pretty straightforward techniques and combinations.  So while I’m not going to end up buying this cookbook, I do recommend it to those who might find more of the recipes worth a go.

This, on the other hand, is a vegetarian cookbook, but I do not recommend it⁠—none of the recipes really did anything for me.  It’s one of those cookbooks that has the word “quick” right in the sub­title.  This one even goes so far as to organize its recipes by cook time.  But these sorts of cookbooks are pretty much always busts.  Apparently whipping up something really good really fast is tricky business.  Who would’ve guessed.  Now, I can see how some people might find utility in a book like this.  Some people are responsible for cooking dinner night after night and just want to get it out of the way.  Some people live in areas with no good restaurants around, or at least none they can afford.  But I don’t cook because I have to; I cook because it’s fun and be­cause I have a stack of recipes in my library that beat out the vast majority of restaurant food at a fraction of the price.  If a recipe I make doesn’t beat out the vast majority of restaurant food, then I’m probably not making it again because I can just, y’know, go to a restaurant instead.  And if that approach to cooking means that I have to spend a little extra time in the kitchen, well, my apartment is small enough that I can hear that day’s recommended Youtube videos from there.

One video Youtube served up to me a few years back involved Gordon Ramsay running a contest to find the best restaurant in Britain.  Coming in second place was a vegetarian Indian restaurant in Bradford called Prashad.  When I happened across this cookbook, I made the connection and decided to check it out.  Good call!  Nothing in here is revelatory⁠—these are just really good renditions of standard dishes, using a few recurring gimmicks (to wit: start by making a masala using some combi­nation of green chiles, garlic, and ginger; add a little garam masala right at the end; and let the dish sit for ten minutes or so before bringing it back up to temperature and then serving).  But I tried thirteen recipes and eleven of them beat out anything I can get in my neighborhood, and my neighborhood has a lot of good Indian restaurants.  This is my top pick out of this batch, and I will definitely be checking out the sequel.

All I knew about this cookbook when I checked it out of the library was that it was generally well regarded.  It was not until I started into it that I discovered that the author, Jeremy Fox, was the guy from Ubuntu.  Ubuntu was a vegetarian restaurant in Napa attached to a yoga studio.  In the late ’00s it received ecstatic reviews⁠—the New York Times ran an article calling it the second-best restaurant in the country⁠—and as I had a tutoring student in nearby Sonoma, I went to check it out.  Here’s what I wrote afterward: “I got an appetizer consisting of a dollop of romesco sauce that tasted like water and a plate of fried ‘sunchokes’, which turn out to be evil incarnated in vegetable form; ‘delicate greens with grilled straw­berries’ that came with two (2) strawberries and which consis­ted of a tangle of needly stems; and a ‘rhubarb citrus float’ in which the rhubarb and citrus turned out to have sunk rather than floated, making it into a fruity soda with some junk at the bottom. Total cost: over $30! And I even had to specifically ask for a fork and a napkin.”  The “evil in vegetable form” business, by the way, refers to the fact (which I discovered much too late) that sunchokes contain high levels of inulin, which is responsible for severe gastrointestinal distress in some people.  It turned out that I was one of the unlucky ones.  It’s been 13½ years and I can still remember the hours of searing pain.

Anyway, this cookbook is ridiculous.  It is clearly designed to show off all the fancy crap this chef does rather than provide a tasty dinner to a home cook.  Most of the recipes feature ingre­dients that are actually recipes of their own elsewhere in the book⁠—I’m sure that at this guy’s new restaurant they start the day by whipping up two dozen pots of this and that so they can combine them as needed during the evening service, but that’s way too much work in order to make one plate.  Recipes often require fancy equipment and/or absurd spans of time (e.g., “place in your dehydrator for 48 hours”).  They also frequently feature obscure ingredients (“crosnes”, “oca”, “puntarelle”, “sea moss”, “spigarello”) or weird combinations of ingredients (peas, white chocolate, and macadamia nuts, or rhubarb, ricotta, and radishes).  Instructions include such gems as “Gently squeeze each pea to remove the two halves inside the skin” (each indi­vidual pea!) and “Preheat an outdoor grill” to make… toast.  I decided to try three of the simplest-looking recipes.  One was for a broccoli dish that, I discovered halfway through, included the line “refrigerate for at least 1 week” (no joke); even without following that step, the recipe was a significant amount of effort for about three mouthfuls of broccoli in a weird sauce.  One was for a soup that Fox said was his homage to Progresso lentil soup, and sure enough, that’s exactly what it tasted like.  The best of the three turned out to be the recipe for chickpeas in broth, the secret to which was to dump in an absurd amount of olive oil.  It also required that I make a “sachet” of herbs and vegetables using a cheesecloth, assuming that the reader will just so happen to have been making cheese at some point and put the leftover cloth in a drawer.  By some miracle I actually had, but even so, these soup recipes didn’t really work for me as written, as the amount of water indicated was inadequate and I kept having to add more.  Put it all together, and I think I have to say that in twenty years of reviewing cookbooks, this is the single worst.

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