Monkey Rose's Reviews
66 recipes reviewed. Showing 1 to 50Sort by: Book Title 
| Date | Rating | Recipe Title
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
By Deborah Madison
Broadway - 1997
Oh my gosh... this recipe!!! It's very easy - you just dump a bunch of things into a food processor and mix. What comes out is a wonderful dip that tastes a bit like Thai Peanut Sauce (and no wonder when you look at the ingredients...). It's a great dip for vegetables - a fantastic and easy appetizer. I make this often for parties, book group etc.
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Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
By Deborah Madison
Broadway - 2007
Oh my gosh... this recipe!!! It's very easy - you just dump a bunch of things into a food processor and mix. What comes out is a wonderful dip that tastes a bit like Thai Peanut Sauce (and no wonder when you look at the ingredients...). It's a great dip for vegetables - a fantastic and easy appetizer. I make this often for parties, book group etc.
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This is the first recipe I made from this book. It's really quite good and can be used in burritos in addition to being a dip.
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Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
By Deborah Madison
Broadway - 1997
A tasty way to eat beets.
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This is a wonderful picnic-safe potato salad recipe. It's really yummy! The only problem I had with it is that the next day a lot of liquid pooled at the bottom of the bowl. A LOT. I think it was mostly the olive oil and vinegar. So anyway, I guess my advice is to try to eat it all the first day.
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I made this for my in-laws the first time they came over for dinner. It's a lovely fall/winter salad. The persimmons steal the show and anytime you put persimmons in anything, they're sure to impress or at least be a conversation piece.
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This one is a BIG favorite of mine. I usually bring it to potlucks and picnics. I always get a lot of compliments with this one. Sometimes I make 1.5x the curry dressing because it IS really tasty and adds a lot to this dish.
I can't wait for mango season...
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This soup is sinfully easy to make. It's very tasty and hearty even though you don't even need stock. I think that's the real beauty of this soup! No stock! Ms. Madison often calls for you to make your own stock, but sorry sweetheart... I don't usually have the time or patience for that.
I sometimes add a little bit of cheese to the soup for some extra flavor - usually Gruyere.
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I love this soup! Usually, I make it just as instructed and it comes out really well. Oftentimes though, I'll fudge a bit and skip the "croutons" since it's an extra step and I can be a little lazy.
This is a great soup to have with some buttery biscuits.
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This is a delicious way to eat squash. The recipe turned out well, but cutting the squash in half and roasting it was a big pain. Actually, it was the cutting in half that was a pain. I had half a mind to take an axe to the dang things. But, if you can get past that, here's something to do with those squash that you used as center pieces at Thanksgiving.
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This is a lovely, hearty gratin. It's definitely "heavy" so I prefer to make it with a nice light vegetable side dish.
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I think that this one may become a family favorite at Thanksgiving. It's very very tasty. I usually skip the parsley (I'm not a fan of parsley) and the squash is a pain in the rear to peel and chop up (or else my knives suck). But overall, this dish is worth it for a few wintertime special occasions.
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This is a wonderful recipe. It is extremely tasty AND it's probably good for you too. We've made it many times - especially when we were growing chard in the garden and it was running wild (we used the variation with the chard and garlic croutons). The mustard is such a nice flavor to go with the lentils.
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This is one of our go-to recipes for weeknight cooking. It's easy to make and the ingredients are so simple that we almost always have everything on hand.
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This is a tasty dish and the "spicy" tomatoes aren't too spicy for most people. In fact, I'd almost say that they're barely spicy but maybe that's because I usually only go with 1 jalapeno instead of 2.
I keep all of my dried beans in mason jars in the kitchen. This is the only recipe that I know that uses mung beans - but I love having them on hand because they're so darn pretty!
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This is very, very simple. It hardly counts as a recipe at all. However, it's one of the reasons I love this book. There are great recipes like this in there - it's really just the simple addition of lemon juice, olive oil, and pepper that it makes it stand out and really pop when compared to the usual steamed broccoli with a pat of butter or a dash of salt that I think most people usually do.
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This is a very light dish that tastes nice and healthy. Since it's so light, I have paired it with a basic couscous to make it a little more filling.
I recommend reading her prelude on how to shop for and cook eggplants before starting this one (leaching out the bitterness etc.).
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This is a good one for Thanksgiving. This recipe introduced me to and began my love affair with parsnips. The garlic cloves are incredible. The beets add a nice pop of color to the dish. I often use yams in addition to the sweet potatoes and I quarter whole onions instead of using small ones or shallots.
I think of it as a main dish but my husband feels like it's more of a side. He's not a vegetarian, so what do you expect? But I do feel that it needs something to go along with it.
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Maybe I'm being a little unfair to this recipe. I made it only once. The problem I had was that the fritters didn't really stay together very well. I'm not sure if I didn't salt and drain them enough or what, but they were wet and fell apart pretty easily.
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This is a nice one with a lot of flavor. It's a good one to have if you're sick of tomato sauce with your pasta.
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This is a good recipe and it's nice to try something different with the pasta. I'm apparently not a big fan of capers which is why I'm only "meh" on this one.
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This is a nice, fresh tasting recipe. The lemon is a nice flavor, but I think it could probably use a little more than she calls for to give it a bit more kick.
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This is a nice dish and there's a pretty color picture of it in this book somewhere. However... there isn't anything all that special about it. I went out and bough saffron for this recipe too and now I'll probably be finding other recipes to use it in.
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These are DELICIOUS! This is my ultimate "I'm showing off" recipe for when I have guests or for special occasions. These things are also beautiful when they come out of the oven. They're a little bit labor intensive, but SO SO SO worth it. But make no mistake, this isn't a "healthy" vegetarian recipe. There's a ton of butter and cream and cheese in this one. This recipe will spike your cholesterol. There's a reason why it tastes so good.
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The pizza dough comes out pretty good - but pretty heavy and bread-y. It could also use a little salt.
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This pizza sauce is sublime. It's very simple and very basic, but sometimes the best recipes are.
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This dish has a very nice flavor to it. The only thing I don't like is that it calls for carrot juice which isn't exactly easy to find. I usually buy a little bottle of Odwalla Carrot Juice for this recipe, but it doesn't use all of the juice so I always have some carrot juice left over. I don't know about you, but I don't usually drink carrot juice, so it ends up going to waste.
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One of my very favorite dishes in this book! It's so beautiful and bright when it's done. I love the flavor of the beets especially when paired with the lemon. The lemon adds such a nice zing to this. YUM!
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This is a nice risotto to have in the spring (as she even suggests in the book). It has a nice fresh, light flavor to it.
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This is a very heavy cheesy dish, but it's very rich and flavorful. It's great for a cold day.
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This is a great way to make tofu. It might not be "authentic" but it reminds me of the tofu that you usually get in East Coast Chinese restaurants (and that's harder to find out here on the West Coast). I always make this when I'm making stir-fried vegetables. I often add minced garlic and grated ginger in for some extra flavor.
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These are a delicious toothsome treat. A nice change from your every-day pancakes.
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This is a great basic waffle recipe. Sometimes I add a little molasses, nutmeg, and ground cloves to give them more of a gingerbread flavor.
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The Ultimate Vegetarian Cookbook
By Roz Denny
Smithmark Publishers - 1996
These... just did not come out well. I could not get the crust to stick to the tomatoes for the life of me. To be fair, I may have done something wrong, but I thought I followed the directions to the letter, so I don't know what it could have been.
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This is a great desert that's not too sugary-sweet and probably not all that bad for you. It can end up a little bit juicy so I suggest going easy when you juice that orange. Although they suggest you serve it with cream or yogurt, I suggest that you serve it with vanilla ice cream. You can scratch what I said earlier about it not being all that bad for you if you add the ice cream :).
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This is pretty tasty, but I wouldn't say that it's any better than the tapanade you can buy in a jar at the store and save yourself a lot of time and probably some money too.
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Here's a different way to eat your potatoes. This is very easy to make. They're quite serious about not overcooking the potatoes though - you end up with basically mashed potatoes with beans in if you do.
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This is a delicious dish! It works well as a side too.
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The main reason that I'm reviewing this one is because the crust actually comes out quite well. It's a basic pizza recipe otherwise.
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This dish is notorious in my mind for being my worst cooking disaster ever. I spent a long time cooking it and I was VERY hungry by the time I was done. So, when I tell you that it was so bad that I dumped it in the trash without eating more than two or three bites, don't take that lightly. On the other hand, one of my housemates (oh so long ago...) also made this and it came out well, which was why I was trying it in the first place. I don't know where I went wrong, but something went terribly awry with this recipe when I made it.
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These are delicious and surprisingly easy.
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This is a nice dahl, but overall it's pretty average. I've had better. I've had worse. Nothing really noteworthy about this one.
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I believe that this was the first yeasted bread I ever made, so it's a credit to the recipe that it came out. I used to make this a lot in college, but I haven't made it in years and years now. I doubt that I used any saffron and I sincerely doubt that I ever let it rise for more than the bare minimum of 1 hour. Also, I learned the hard way not to add more honey than is called for. It usually came out well (and when it didn't, it was usually because I strayed from the recipe).
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Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie
By Ken Haedrich
Harvard Common Press - 2004
This is a fantastic crust recipe. It's my go-to recipe for most pies. It comes out wonderfully - flavorful and flaky. Basically, it's a half-and-half recipe - half of the fat is butter and half is shortening, thus bringing together the best of both worlds.
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Around here, we have a lot of Rainier Cherries in the summer. Usually, cherry pies are made with sour cherries, but this is a great recipe if all you have are sweets.
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I'm not a big fan of coconut, but the flavors go very nicely together. This is a great recipe if you have a lot of sweet cherries as we do around here where sour cherries are harder to find.
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I think if I'd made this with a regular pastry topping instead of the crumb topping, I'd have been able to give it a 5 instead of a 4. I'm not so hot on cornmeal. Also, I don't usually keep tapioca around, so any recipe with tapioca in it has a strike against it from me. But otherwise, a great recipe.
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This was a very good pie. I had to make it with regular blueberries instead of wild blueberries. It was a pretty basic blueberry pie - quite tasty though!
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I made this for a work picnic and won a prize for best desert. Even the people who "don't usually like pies" loved it.
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This was a nice tasty pie. The brown sugar brought a nice flavor to it. The only problem I had was that I put a top crust on it and the apples cooked down a good bit and left a dome of empty pastry on the top. Otherwise, the recipe worked very well.
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