Herbivores' Heaven

As I mentioned last month, I’ve really enjoyed cooking my way through Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Appetite for Reduction. It’s pitched as a healthy eating book, but is also fine if, like me, you’re not dieting. I did kind of stumble into an accidentally healthier month than expected, thanks to a step-counting fitness challenge at work. That combined with these vegetable-based dishes made me feel very smug indeed!

Let’s start with salad, then! I found the quinoa salad with black beans and toasted cumin seeds a little dull, actually – the only real seasoning was the cumin seeds, and it needed a bit more for me. I think we ended up throwing in some smoked tofu, which helped liven things up. Generally, I enjoyed the salads in the book, but this one fell flat.

I had really high hopes for the cauliflower pesto soup, but it turned out tasting quite bitter – I think this is down to the cauliflower, as there’s no reason anything else should have had that effect. It’s a great idea for a recipe, but just didn’t quite work.

I was very excited to try the Manhattan glam chowder, as the glam chowder from Isa Does It is one of my all-time favourite recipes. Apparently the New England version from that recipe is cream-based, and this Manhattan one is tomato-based. I’m afraid New England comfortably wins this battle. The flavours here were nice, but it was kind of annoying knowing how much better it would be with some cashew cream thrown in too. Still, I’m glad to know the difference.

I can’t believe I forgot to take a picture of the ceci-roasted red pepper soup. It was possibly the best recipe this month! Roasting a pepper always elevates a dish, and that was certainly the case here. The soup is only partially-blitzed, meaning that it’s quite thick and chunky- the perfect texture, to accompany the perfect taste.

If you feel like getting a stew on, this eggplant provencal is a fine place to start. Classic flavours, lots of veg, hearty red lentils, a splash of red wine…simple and very effective.

The Moroccan chickpeas and zucchini was such a simple recipe, really easy to throw together and nicely seasoned. It’s not life-changing (and not as good as Simon Rimmer’s Moroccan spaghetti), but it was very pleasant.

I have a go-to chilli recipe, but still almost always try one from whichever cookbook I’m using. Here I gave the classic black bean and veggie chilli a go, using kidney beans instead of black beans because that’s just how life is in Prague. Truthfully, I don’t like a chilli to be too vegetabley, so this will not topple my favourite recipe, but it was still a hearty, well-seasoned chilli.

The 2nd avenue vegetable korma turned out a bit drier than I’d expect a proper creamy korma to be, and I’d probably increase the spices next time too. But it was a nice mild sauce, with a good array of vegetables, and it was another one of those one-pot dishes that was easy to throw together.

One of the great things about this book is that it’s quite light on the more difficult to track down items that can deter people from trying vegan recipes. There’s lots of veg, beans, and grains, and they’re easy to pick up for many people. So as well as being a good book for vegans, I think non-vegans looking to get more veg in their diet would also enjoy it and find it accessible.

The lack of pictures (besides a few pages in the middle) is always disappointing, but should not deter you from the exciting range of recipes. Even after two months, I’ve barely made a dent in the book – there’s plenty of choice.

As with all of Isa’s books, there’s certainly no harm in adding this to your collection!

Appetite for Reduction was one of the first vegan cookbooks I bought, so why on earth has it taken me this long to review?! I used it quite a lot when I first went vegan, and decided to revisit it in May and see what I could get out of it.

It’s essentially a healthy eating book, ideal for anyone trying to lose a bit of weight. It’s Isa though, so she’s not making any sacrifices on the flavour front. Every recipe gives you a full break down of calories, proteins, fat, sugar, etc, so if you’re tracking any of those things it will definitely make life easier for you.

It wouldn’t be a healthy eating book without a salad section, would it? I started with the first recipe in the book: the everyday chickpea-quinoa salad, which also contains the balsamic vinaigrette and basic baked tofu. As you may have spotted, I used red quinoa, as we had a bit left in the cupboard, and it never hurts to prevent a dish from being totally beige! It wasn’t the most exciting of salads- the vinaigrette wasn’t that exciting, and we were really relying on the tofu to bring some fun and flavour to it.

The trattoria pasta salad with white beans was very much my kind of salad. The sun-dried tomato walnut dressing was just spectacular – so flavoursome. We used spinach instead of rocket, because rocket is the leaf of the devil.

And the goddess nicoise was even better. It was my first ever nicoise salad, so I’m not entirely sure what I was aiming for. Despite the instructions to keep all the components separate and the green goddess garlic dressing on the side, I just mixed everything up – it was in our lunch boxes, so it was getting mixed up either way. It was so delicious, though the dressing was very potent and may not have made me too popular in the office. The chickpea/tuna concoction was especially flavoursome.

I swear by Isa’s mac and cheese sauce from Superfun Times, so I had high hopes for her mac & trees recipe, which uses the easy breezy cheezy sauce. It was the most yellow cheese sauce I have ever seen, but it wasn’t quite as flavoursome as I’d hoped. It was nice, but it won’t challenge my existing favourite mac and cheese recipe (from Superfun Times, also by Isa).

On a fancier pasta note,I tried the lasagna with roasted cauliflower ricotta and spinach…only without the spinach, as our supermarket was out of all green leaves. Instead, I added mushrooms and smoked tempeh to beef it up a bit. The roasted cauliflower ricotta was nice and easy to make – I blitzed all the ingredients together (Isa recommends mashing the cauliflower into the tofu ricotta with a potato masher, but I thought a nice smooth mixture would be preferable). The sauce isn’t pre-cooked, so there’s not too much more prep to do – though I fried the mushrooms, of course. And it makes an extremely delicious lasagna. This is perhaps my favourite lasagna recipe – it was that good.

I’ve made the Arabian lentil and rice soup before, and it was just as good as I remembered! It’s very easy to make, and the rice makes it quite a filling lunch. I liked the simple seasoning, but Dr HH found it a bit boring. He’s wrong, obviously, but I’ve included his foolish feedback here anyway.

I’m a big fan of a good broccoli soup, but I’d never order one when eating out, so the name of this bistro broccoli chowder was a bit baffling to me. The parsnip is a fun addition, and this was a really thick soup – perfect for a hearty lunch!

I don’t usually make too many curries, due to Dr HH’s incredibly high standards. But I couldn’t resist the eggplant-chickpea curry, even though aubergine curry is his speciality. The recipe cooks the aubergine to perfection, that sweet spot where it’s just melting away in your mouth. And the addition of chickpeas elevates everything, so this one is definitely a winner.

He got into the kitchen himself to make this lentil and eggplant chilli mole, which I found very well seasoned, but he found a little mild. He was a bit sceptical about essentially boiling the aubergine rather than frying it first, but was won over by the texture in the end.

Regular readers may have picked up on the fact that I’m crazy about tempeh. Most Czech supermarkets sell smoked tempeh, so I chucked some of that in this smoky tempeh and greens stew. It’s a classic stew – hearty, flavoursome, perfect for tucking into on an autumnal evening, but still good during summer in Prague.

This book is absolutely jam-packed with recipes, and, though it wasn’t my original intention, I’ve decided to continue using it for another month. There are a lot of one-pot recipes, which is very much my kind of cooking. And even though most of my recipe tweaks make the final dish somewhat less healthy than the original recipe, I still like to think it’s been a month of healthy eating, and more to come!