Supermarket Vegan: 225 Meat-Free, Egg-Free, Dairy-Free Recipes for Real People in the Real World

Easy and accessible.
This is one of the easiest and most accessible vegan cookbooks I’ve ever seen. I’m not a vegan, but I want to make more of my meals meat-free for health and monetary reasons. I date a vegetarian, too, and I wanted more things we could eat together. I was very pleased by this book — it fits the bill on all counts.Often vegan cookbooks have the goofiest, weirdest flavor combinations possible (think “The Adventures of Captain Cumin and His Loyal Sidekick Agave Nectar”), are prohibitively ethnic, or feature ingredient lists you won’t find anywhere on the planet except mail order from Kaly’s or the fanciest Whole Foods-ish supermarkets if you fortunately happen to live somewhere really trendy. I’d utterly despaired of finding a cookbook that actually looked like how normal people ate. While it does expect that your supermarket is reasonably well-stocked, meaning that if you live in Schoenschoen, Kansas, you might have some problems finding its ingredients, I didn’t see anything really out of the ordinary in it. Moreover, there weren’t any ingredients in it that I had not at one time actually purchased at my local supermarket here in Idaho.Best of all, the recipes were quite good. I’ve already made several things in it, including a barley and lentil bean dish that tasted really good and will be making a future appearance on my table. Some of the recipes I made I did some big substitutions, but they really do lend themselves to experimentation and I didn’t suffer for the lack of this or that in the larder. If you’re missing something, chances are you have something else that’ll work in a given recipe just fine.The science sounds somewhat outdated, namely in the “complete proteins” arena; the author puts a whale of a lot of stock in the concept but I was under the impression that it wasn’t the end-all be-all she was claiming, but maybe that’s just how I read her introductions. The food itself is marvelous and looked very nutritious. Seasonings are kept to a light hand. She uses whole grains, but also a lot of convenience foods like canned goods. I didn’t notice much in the book that’d require an unusual amount of cooking time or prep work. Some party foods are also introduced and I liked how she got around the whole cheese and dairy situation for dips and other finger foods.All in all, I haven’t ever seen such an easy to use vegan cookbook. Definitely recommend for beginners and even for old-timers, and for those who have to avoid dairy products for health reasons.

Some nice recipes but many are too samey and variations on the theme of tomatoes, chillies and beans. Would have liked to see more creativity but it’s an okay book for beginners. Ideal for student get together or for parents wondering what meals they can serve the family that will cater to their resident vegans and vegetarians.

I bought this book hoping it would help me broaden my repertoire with a good collection of simple, healthy vegan recipes. Far too many vegan cook books either rely heavily on meat and dairy substitutes (tofu, tempeh, vegan cheese and so forth) or entice you with mouth-watering dishes which, upon closer inspection, are impossible to make because they call for an assortment of exotic ingredients that are unattainable for anyone who doesn’t live near a health food stores in a major city like London, NY or Paris.I was looking for a vegan cook book full of healthy, tasty recipes that used easy-to-find ingredients; something that used imagination and ingredients attainable by most mortals to replace meat, eggs and dairies; and recipes that were feasible on a daily basis and didn’t involve elaborate & lengthy vegetable voodoo rituals. And based on the book’s description, it looked like this was the perfect candidate. And I quote: “[…] a wonderful cookery book showing readers how to use readily available ingredients to create healthy, delicious, simple, low-cost family vegan meals”.It arrived this afternoon and after flipping through it for a little over an hour, I decided to return it. There’s nothing wrong with the book or recipes, per se, it’s just rather misleadingly titled and marketed. “The Walmart Vegan” or “The lazy American vegan” better describe the kind of recipes one might find inside. Perhaps it’s just me–I’m used to cooking everything from scratch–, but I can’t say I was impressed when I began seeing “a can of this” and “a package of frozen that” in nearly every recipe. I understand we’re all in a hurry these days, but the list of canned goods in the recipes herein just goes on and on: canned asparagus, frozen spinach, canned mushrooms, frozen butternut squash, a package of shredded coleslaw mix, instant couscous, quick-cook barley…Although it’s marketed as healthy vegan cooking “for real people in the real world”, it feels more like it’s target is to help stressed and hurried vegans whip up a meal using almost exclusively what’s in their pantry and freezer. There’s even a recipe for a microwave risotto… Call me old-fashioned, but with a bit of forethought, planning and imagination (cooking large quantities, recycling left-overs, saving the broth vegetables are cooked in for making rice with), one can easily manage much healthier results without that much extra work.I haven’t tried any of the recipes, and I’m sure some of them are delicious (although the ace up the author’s sleeve appears the be the addition of [canned, mind you] vegetable broth to every dish), but the entire approach is too at odds with my understanding of what veganism and eating healthy involve. There’s a common denominator driving people to choose plant-based diets or simply reduce the amount of meat in their diet, and that’s HEALTHY (a consideration also taken into account by those who go vegan for environmental reasons or empathy towards our fellow earthlings) . If that’s what you’re after, there are much better options out there. And just to reassert my point, give some though to the sentence printed on the cover: “As easy as opening a jar or a box – as good as Mother Nature intended”. I now realise the joke is on me and I ought to pay closer attention to the cover in the future. :’D A pity the back cover wasn’t available in the “look inside” feature, as it reads “Using fresh, frozen, canned or boxed ingredients…”

Just the cook book I was looking for. After I got all the ingredients together (some are not a staple in my kitchen) I found the recipes easy to put together and tasty. I had excellent results to convert to gluten free.