Jamie
Nov 6th, 2006, 04:15 PM
I bought this but am quite dissapointed with it - I haven't made ANYTHING out of it! In fact if anyone wants to buy it off me please PM me ;)
It's all very fancy stuff and there is hardly anything that you can make out of normal storecupboard ingredients, or even anything you can find in a local store! Except maybe those who live near fantastic gastronomic emporiums...! It all looks very complicated too.
Maybe it all tastes nice if you make it, I don't know, as I said I've not been able to make anything out of it. There's loads of ingedients which I don't know what they are: wax beans, veggie crumbles, 'stewed' tomatoes, hickory shagbark syrup, radicchio, bolillo, mirin, kielbasa, boiling onions... yes I could look them up online but that is a pain to do so often.
And almost every single recipe calls for a faux meat or cheese of ENDLESS variety... every variety of cheese in a vegan form (I can just about get cheddar or mozzarella and to be honest there's barely a difference between them, and parmesan, this wants provolone, swiss, caraway, feta...), and every sort of fake meat going, from vegan salmon (!!), to scallops (I thought that was deep fried potato slices?), to pork. I can't get any sort of fake meat normally besides chicken/ham/turkey/bacon rashers, sausage or burger, or homemade seitan. It also uses vegan sour cream in loads of recipes - I had to order the tofutti in specially to try it out and I didn't think much of it so would probably avoid a lot of the recipes wanting this.
Looking at this book again to add it to this list on here, has made me want to try my hardest to find something to make, even if I have to adjust it a bit... they do look like they'd be the sort of thing I'd never normally eat and quite nice some of them.
So I wouldn't reccomend it to most, but I would reccomend it to experienced vegan cooks who have access to a lot of the specialist ingredients and fancy a nice challenge. Or maybe those who cater/run restaurants etc might manage because they can order things in and use on a larger scale.
And it is a thick book for the money - 426 pages total, a little bigger than A6 size.
It's all very fancy stuff and there is hardly anything that you can make out of normal storecupboard ingredients, or even anything you can find in a local store! Except maybe those who live near fantastic gastronomic emporiums...! It all looks very complicated too.
Maybe it all tastes nice if you make it, I don't know, as I said I've not been able to make anything out of it. There's loads of ingedients which I don't know what they are: wax beans, veggie crumbles, 'stewed' tomatoes, hickory shagbark syrup, radicchio, bolillo, mirin, kielbasa, boiling onions... yes I could look them up online but that is a pain to do so often.
And almost every single recipe calls for a faux meat or cheese of ENDLESS variety... every variety of cheese in a vegan form (I can just about get cheddar or mozzarella and to be honest there's barely a difference between them, and parmesan, this wants provolone, swiss, caraway, feta...), and every sort of fake meat going, from vegan salmon (!!), to scallops (I thought that was deep fried potato slices?), to pork. I can't get any sort of fake meat normally besides chicken/ham/turkey/bacon rashers, sausage or burger, or homemade seitan. It also uses vegan sour cream in loads of recipes - I had to order the tofutti in specially to try it out and I didn't think much of it so would probably avoid a lot of the recipes wanting this.
Looking at this book again to add it to this list on here, has made me want to try my hardest to find something to make, even if I have to adjust it a bit... they do look like they'd be the sort of thing I'd never normally eat and quite nice some of them.
So I wouldn't reccomend it to most, but I would reccomend it to experienced vegan cooks who have access to a lot of the specialist ingredients and fancy a nice challenge. Or maybe those who cater/run restaurants etc might manage because they can order things in and use on a larger scale.
And it is a thick book for the money - 426 pages total, a little bigger than A6 size.