mandelicious' Reviews
26 recipes reviewed. Showing 1 to 26Sort by: Book Title 
| Date | Rating | Recipe Title
The Best Vegetarian Recipes: From Greens to Grains, from Soups to Salads: 200 Bold Flavored Recipes
By Martha R. Shulman
William Morrow Cookbooks - 2001
I really like that this recipe has you make your own mushroom broth instead of using store-bought broth or requiring you to have homemade vegetable broth on hand. I used all dried mushrooms instead of both dried and fresh because I already had a giant bag of dried mushrooms in the pantry.
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The Bold Vegetarian Chef: Adventures in Flavor with Soy, Beans, Vegetables, and Grains
By Ken Charney
Wiley - 2003
I have made this peanut sauce at least a dozen times, and it is so good as a dip or dressing for other recipes that I have never gotten around to making the tofu part of this recipe. The peanut sauce is excellent tossed with soba noodles, or used for dipping fresh summer rolls and vegetables.
As written, the recipe requires 1 1/2 cups of vegetable stock or water for thinning the sauce. From my experience, this is way too much liquid, even if you intend to use is as a marinade. To make a dipping sauce, I usually use a tablespoon or two of water to get the right consistency.
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These are very flavorful vegan tacos. The combination of black beans, tofu, roasted tomatoes and avocado makes for a great mix of textures and tastes.
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This is a complete meal in one dish -- potatoes for starch, chickpeas for protein and spinach for greens. It is also great as leftovers. I like it best served with plain yogurt.
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This stew was very bland, which was surprising given how well-spiced most of the other recipes in this book are.
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Easy Vegetarian: Simple Recipes for Brunch, Lunch, and Dinner
By Ryland Peters & Small
Ryland Peters & Small - 2007
Wow, this is delicious! It's not surprising, given the amount of cheese and butter involved. I would recommend either saving some of the mozzarella butter for another use (like making garlic bread, as recommended) or doing your best to banish the quantities of butter and cheese used from your memory while consuming this dish.
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A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table
By Molly Wizenberg
Simon & Schuster - 2010
This is a fantastic cake, especially given how easy it is to make. You should hope for leftovers to eat for breakfast.
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I can eat an entire cauliflower in one sitting when it is prepared like this.
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Very good. Incredibly dense.
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The fish, gruyere and tomato paste combine to make this taste far more elegant than I would have guessed for a recipe that centers on canned tuna fish. It's incredibly fast to prepare, and great with a green salad. The recipe says it makes enough for four light eaters, but I think two or three servings might be a more reasonable estimate. I had to stop myself from eating half the batch in one sitting.
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How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food
By Mark Bittman, Alan Witschonke
Wiley - 2007
Not too sweet, not excessively oily, and with suggestions for a number of variations, this is a great basic muffin recipe. I made these with frozen cranberries and cornmeal substituted for some of the flour.
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This recipe produced one of the most visually unappealing dishes I have ever created: tan-brown chunks of eggplant dolloped with tan-yellow saffron mayonnaise.
The salad tasted okay -- as do most things involving garlic and mayonnaise, in my opinion. If I were to make it again, I'd probably grill slices of eggplant and keep the skin on rather than, as Bittman suggests, splitting the eggplant lengthwise, cooking them and then peeling and chopping them.
Given that there are so many other tasty way to cook eggplant, though, I don't think I'll bother with this recipe again.
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The Minimalist Cooks Dinner
By Mark Bittman
Broadway - 2001
Good, though a bit on the bland side, maybe because I used ground turkey rather than pork or chicken. Adding lime juice at the end improved the dish. I would have preferred a higher vegetable to meat and starch ratio.
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I really enjoyed the combination of ingredients in this salad.
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Easy and delicious. Great for sack lunches.
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Website: Orangette
This salad is substantial enough to serve as the centerpiece of a meal. It's great as leftovers, too, but hold some of the tahini sauce aside to add right before eating. I found that I needed to add a couple extra tablespoons of water to the sauce to get to a pour-able consistency, but this probably depends on the thickness of your tahini and the amount of olive oil you use. I'm looking forward to eating it for lunch again tomorrow!
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Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day
By Peter Reinhart
Ten Speed Press - 2009
The hardest part about making these bagels was waiting for the, to cool for 30 minutes before eating them (that and waking up early to boil and bake them the morning of). The bagels were crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside and had a great flavor. I will definitely be making these again, especially now that I have a large jar of malt syrup to use up.
I made one batch of these using the recommended barley malt syrup. I had no trouble kneading a single batch of dough by hand, but could see how it might be challenging to double the recipe without a mixer. Reinhart describes two methods for forming bagels from the dough. I followed the supposedly preferred method of rolling out a rope of dough and connecting the ends to form a loop. My first bagel had a visible seam, but I got the hang of it by the second of third one. The bagels passed the 'float test' immediately the next morning.
If you have easy access to a great bagel shop, it might not be worth the effort to make your own. But if your options for good bagels are limited, these are far superior to anything that comes out of a plastic bag or grocery store bulk bin. (And doesn't it sound impressive to say you baked your own bagels?)
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Website: Serious Eats
This definitely qualifies as 'healthy & delicious.' It makes a great vegetarian weeknight meal -- fast to put together and substantial enough to make a complete meal. I added avocado, since I had one that needed to be used.
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Website: Smitten Kitchen
I made these when I wanted to bake brownies, but didn't want to leave the house to get ingredients. The ingredients are all things I'm almost guaranteed to have in the pantry and fridge -- cocoa powder, flour, sugar, salt, vanilla, butter and eggs. I also used walnuts and added 2 tbsp of dark coffee. I melted the butter, sugar and cocoa mixture in the microwave. microwaving the bowl on high for 30 second increments until it reached the right consistency. Like Deb's, my brownies required 35 minutes of baking, maybe because I used a glass pan.
These were very good brownies, and required only minimally more effort than making brownies from a mix. Mine turned out slightly more densely cakey than fudgy. Unlike other reviewers, I didn't find these brownies overly sweet, possibly because of the nuts and coffee. If you are looking for a quick homemade brownie fix, these really hit the spot.
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Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook
By Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Terry Hope Romero
Da Capo Press - 2007
One of the best quinoa salads I've made. If you don't have access to good fresh mango, just leave it out -- the salad is still good. It goes really well with avocado as well.
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The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved Restaurant
By Judy Rodgers, Gerald Asher
W.W. Norton & Co. - 2002
This is the only whole roast chicken I've ever made, so I can't compare it with other recipes. Given how well this turned out, I don't think I'll feel the need to add others to my repertoire (unless salting the chicken the day before is ever a problem). I didn't bother with the official bread salad, but did serve it with a green salad. It was fantastic.
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These homemade pickles are squite impressive, especially given how easy they are to put together. Rodgers says she serves them with her hamburgers at Zuni Cafe but I am enjoying these with crackers and cheese.
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Who knew that a pot of lentils could make your kitchen smell like a pot roast? The bay leaf, vegetables and wine combined to create the a fantastic aroma -- I would make this again just to recreate those smells, nevermind the delicious, nutty lentils that come along with it. I followed the instructions as printed, except to cut way back on the olive oil. Easy as this dish was, it did not taste simple. And seeing as I served it with a fried egg, bacon and boiled kale (pg 162), it was in no way an austere meal, even with the reduced olive oil.
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In need of a recipe for the excess of kale coming from my garden, I turned here. I fried the eggs separately first and then used them to top the kale. "Boiled kale" may sound like something to be eaten solely for the benefit of your health, but this is truly comfort food.
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The combination of arugula, corn and tomatoes tossed with a vinaigrette is hardly a revolutionary concept. This simple salad hangs on quality of its ingredients. If you can use fresh and in-season produce, including corn young and fresh enough to be enjoyed raw, then the simplicity of this recipe is its strength. But out of season, it's not worth it.
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I agree that the recommended temperature of 275 seems too low for roasting much of anything. I presumed it was a typo and went for a temperature of 375 right off the bat. I poured my polenta (prepared according to the back of the bag rather than the Zuni recipe) into a pyrex baking dish and it crisped up nicely in the recommended amount of time.
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