Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - Deborah Madison

My other favorite cookbook (besides How to Cook Everything). We cook mostly, though not exclusively, vegetarian, and I love this book. Encyclopedic, and Deborah Madison has a knack for breaking down a class of recipes into its constitutent parts. She explains the different steps involved in all stir-fries, for instance, so you can riff on the theme.

Ten years ago I bough Madison's book, The Greens Cookbook, on the advice of a friend who said it was the one vegetarian cookbook he could cook from for meat eaters and they would not feel disappointed. But I found The Greens Cookbook too fiddly - because it is based on a restaurant, the recipes all have 20 ingredients and 9 steps. Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is much more friendly to the home cook. You can do fiddly stuff if you want, but you don't have to.

This book is a real boon if you belong to a CSA and have to figure out, like I do this week, what will I do with a whole mess of corn, tomatoes, tomatillos and edamame?

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
Deborah Madison
1997
Available from Amazon