Joe YonanRecensioni

Red beans and rice

This is my 3rd favorite cookbook, ever. Not a vegan or vegetarian, but don't miss the meat at all. The standout recipe for my family (which I wasn't expecting at all) was the red lentil ful with sumac cauliflower.

This is a rich person's guide to recipes from expensive restaurants using hard to find ingredients and dirtying every dish in the kitchen. Considering the author is the food editor for the Washington Post, it's each to see how he wrote a cookbook that most people aren't going to be able to use.

I found this to be a very pleasing and accessible cookbook – and I fear cookbooks, so that’s saying something. Witty and engaging, with recipes that are easy to follow – more than anything else I really appreciate the thought that goes into how to plan for your leftovers to become something completely different.

I enjoy cooking for myself -- previous roommates have stared in astonishment as I cook a single person's Cantonese dinner most nights -- but there's no way I would attempt the recipes in this book on a weeknight after work.

I have been a pescatarian for 3 years, which means that I eat fish and seafood, but no red meat, pork or poultry. So that means that I eat a lot of vegetarian dishes. I am also single, so that also means that I often have to make way more food than I need.

This book is designed to address both of these issues, as it is vegetarian cooking for one or two people. There is even a handy section that has a list of suggestions for recipes in the book to help you use things like a half of an avocado, or a half a lime, or 1/2 a can of beans, knowing that the biggest problem with cooking when you are single is the leftover ingredients.

The author includes a guide to using the book, and encourages readers/cooks to merely use the recipes as a guide, not as a rule book. I tried several of the recipes. The Fusilli with Corn Sauce (whole wheat pasta, sauteed onions and corn) was fresh tasting and easy to make. The Enfrijoladas with Egg, Avocado and Onion (corn tortillas coated in a bean sauce and topped with copped hard boiled egg, avocado and onion) was a surprising mix of flavors that actually worked well together, despite my reservations. But the best was the Roasted Sweet Potato with Coconut, Dates and Walnuts. Oh so good!

This book was filled with lots of pretty pictures that made everything look so tasty! The only real negative that I have is that there were several things I'm not big on like curry and tofu, and things I'm hesitant about trying like Kimchi. So there were a lot of recipes that I didn't want to try right now-- but that's just me!

My final word: Easy recipes for weeknight dining. Interesting flavor combinations. Nothing ordinary here. If you are looking for some fresh ideas for easy vegetarian dining for one or two, grab this book!

The premise is different, and that is commendable. Vegetarians in a meat-eating household or on their own will thrill to find a book just for them. However, some of the recipes seem larger than a single serving, and some are definitely meant for two or more. The recipes themselves vary in interest--"bold" would be debatable. One useful aspect is the foundation recipes, which include recipes and page numbers to use the batches.½

I tried 2 recipes, Corn Risotto with Roasted Cherry Tomatoes and Tuna Salad.

The risotto took over an hour to make, and was way too rich to be a stand alone dinner. I ate most of the leftovers as a side dish, but I couldn't get through enough of it to call it dinner.

The tuna salad (minus the olives) was great - I really love the notion of cooking the potatoes with the eggs. I doubled it because I was only able to find one can of tuna in olive oil, and it was twice the size he suggested. It was not from Italy or Spain, so he would have found it unacceptable. Also, because then I got to have leftovers and not have to cook the next night!

Many, many of the recipes didn't even make it to my to-try list because either the ingredients were too weird and precious or the level of work involved was ridiculous for the amount of results you got.

I did also copy the recipe for the faux-chicken-fried steak. I'll try the steak part, but the potatoes he suggests go with it add a huge amount of time to the cooking of dinner.

It had some interesting ideas, but it didn't really seem like a practical cookbook for someone aiming to spend less than an hour per meal. It's ok to have leftovers if you're going to spend that long cooking!

Although there are some recipes that sound good, most are fairly complicated with long lists of ingredients. I can’t see someone living alone going to this much trouble - especially as the title prescribes "nightly". There are very few vegetarian options.

Most of the recipes are more time-intensive (well or maybe more accurate would be that they cause more mess) than I'd normally go to for a meal for one, but there are some very nice recipes in here and a lot of good inspiration for cooking for one (I'm rather picky about certain things - I do not eat fruit with meat for example, and some other things that I just don't think go together - fine by themselves, but not together, and this - like most "fancy" cookbooks has a bit too much of that - but it doesn't mean it can't provide inspiration for one's own cooking none the less)