Cookbook

[Anonymous]

Trying to cook healthier, including more organic and vegetarian, meals. Any cookbook or website recommendations? We especially love ethnic foods but pretty much eat everything. Quick and uncomplicated is a plus since I have a 2yo and 5mo.

[Anonymous]

I like Mark Bittman's books, How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

American Wholefoods Cuisine is also good albeit somewhat dated.

[Anonymous]

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison.

[Anonymous]

Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen (they are the same people) have great cookbooks with family friendly recipes and a good selection of vegetarian ones. They are mostly concerned about taste and accessibility to encourage home cooking.

[Anonymous]

I love Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - but this does not satisfy the OPs request. There are few recipes in there that are quick OR uncomplicated.

For quick and uncomplicated - I would got with the six o'clock scramble cookbook. It has a lot of ethnic recipes - and a bunch have meals with lentils, beans or tofu as your protein.

Obviously any cookbook works for using organic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen (they are the same people) have great cookbooks with family friendly recipes and a good selection of vegetarian ones. They are mostly concerned about taste and accessibility to encourage home cooking.

Cooks Illustrated has a Cooking Light book of recipes that is pretty good. Cooks Illustrated experiments with variations of recipes until they find the absolute best way to make something that is both good for you, but tastes good as well. For example, they have a chocolate chip cookie recipe wherein rather than mixing in all the chocolate chips, you simply place a few chocolate chips on top of the cookie and get the same effect (chocolaty taste) without using as many chips in the batter. They've done this with all types of foods (meats, desserts, etc.) and it's all really good.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I love Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - but this does not satisfy the OPs request. There are few recipes in there that are quick OR uncomplicated.

For quick and uncomplicated - I would got with the six o'clock scramble cookbook. It has a lot of ethnic recipes - and a bunch have meals with lentils, beans or tofu as your protein.

Obviously any cookbook works for using organic.

Agree. I love Deborah Madison's books (including Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone), but I used them much more pre-kids. Now we're using Six O'Clock Scramble quite often.

[Anonymous]

I recommended Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. It looks like many of the recipes use things most folks have in their pantries ... I cooked from it when my child was a toddler and I am a single mom! OP might want to flip through it and judge for herself.

[Anonymous]

Vegan with a Vengeance is absolutely wonderful. She incorporates lots of ethnic foods like curries, Moroccan stew, etc. She just knows how to spice things so perfectly. However, I can't say most of the recipes (at least my faves) are quick. I love the ones that are heavy on veggies, which of course require lots of chopping. But it is great to use on the weekends when you can make a whole bunch of stuff and freeze. For example, a curry you could just heat up over fresh rice later.

[Anonymous]

The old Moosewood Cookbook is a good standby - I believe they re-released an updated version in 2000 or so.

Just remember, vegetarian(and certainly vegan!) =/= healthy.

[Anonymous]

I'm a huge fan of Deceptively Delicious. Every recipe I have tried has worked out well and they are all really healthy. Plus the meals are relatively inexpensive to make. I like Moosewood Farms Vegetarian cookbook, though my favorite recipes take forever to make and some recipes have not turned out well. Every recipe I have tried from Cooking Light magazine has been yummy and gourmet. When it was just my husband and I had a subscription and made their recipes often. Now we have a tighter budget and i find a lot of their recipes can be pricey (and time-consuming) to make so I stopped the subscription. Although I think weightwatchers is a wonderful weight-loss program, I don't recommend their cookbooks. I have several and it's rare for me to find a recipe we even like.

[Anonymous]

I religiously buy the annual Cooking Light cookbooks - they contain all of the recipes from the previous year. Always includes some vegetarian, but also lots of other great recipes, many of which are geared to weeknight dinners

[Anonymous]

Weight Watchers cookbooks are TERRIBLE. Thank goodness the program has that online recipe function, recipe maker or whatever it's called. You plug in a recipe and it give you the points per serving.

[Anonymous]

I love "How to Cook Anything"