How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food

I use this cookbook almost every single night as a starting point. Rather than recipes where I feel like I need to buy special ingredients or have great planning skills, this book is more of a muse than anything. It teaches you variations in a way that helps open up the kitchen. These days I pick up an ingredient first, and then find out what amazing dish Bittman has in store.

I borrowed this book from the library, and after paying my overdue fine, decided to purchase my own copy. Bittman's recipes are easy to follow and have inspired me to create my own. Our family is now eating a greater variety of vegetables and grains. The grain recipes are especially good.

We're not strictly vegetarian but this is my new "go to" book. The recipes are easy to follow and easy to adjust/improvise. Our new thing when discussing dinner is "Let's see what Mark has to say." I use it several times a week and, being a former restaurant owner, I have a lot of cookbooks.

This cookbook contains 0 photos of a completed dish, but it didn't really matter because it is so basic with such simplistic foods that most people wouldn't need to see what garlic bread looks like after it's cooked. I was hoping for more meal planning of healthier and alternative foods and not how to poach an egg or bake a potato. If you never cooked before and have little knowledge of most fruits and vegetables, I would recommend this book. However, if you're looking for a cookbook to help plan healthy meals using recipes more sophisticated than a lettuce, tomato and olive oil salad, I would suggest you keep your $24. I wish I had!

I bought How to Cook Everything Vegetarian earlier this summer after joinign a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share in a local farm and being inundated with vegetables, some of which I'd never eaten. I mean, fennel? What does one do with that? Well, Bittman to the rescue. Now I know what it is, how to prepare it for cooking and eating, and have recipes to use it in.