Jump to content

  • Welcome to the eG Forums, a service of the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters. The Society is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of the culinary arts. These advertising-free forums are provided free of charge through donations from Society members. Anyone may read the forums, but to post you must create a free account.

Looking for New Books to Buy - Simple Cooking

DanM

By DanM
in Cookbooks & References

 Share

Recommended Posts

DanM

DanM

Posted
Posted

I am in need of inspiration for a new cookbook or two. Specifically, I am looking for veg centric, easy/simple recipes. Lately I have been cooking heavily from River Cottage Everyday series and Ottolenghi's simple. I'm a father of three, so my time to cook while making sure they are doing their homework and not killing each other is rather limited. Any suggestions will be appreciated. 

 

Thank you in advance! 

"Salt is born of the purest of parents: the sun and the sea." --Pythagoras.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
heidih

heidih

Posted
Posted

Ha - first mistake is keeping them from "killing each other" - toss them out the back door and they will eventually pound on it - tired, hungry, thirsty and ready to get back to study ;)  

 

I like Melissa Clark in general and her "In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite" specifically. She aims for flavor done without pretense. From 2010. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
blue_dolphin

blue_dolphin

Posted
Posted (edited)

My first recommendation for veg-centric cookbooks is always Josh McFadden's Six Seasons (eG-friendly Amazon.com link).  Some recipes use make-ahead items from the section of "Go-To" pantry recipes in the front of the book so some planning is helpful but the recipes themselves aren't difficult.  There's a thread here on cooking from the book so you can take a look and see what you think. 

 

Four books that are not specifically veg-centric but which contain an ample number of veg recipes and were all very popular with the folks in my cookbook group who need to get family dinners on the table quickly are:

Melissa Clark's Dinner: Changing the Game This one is quite a good bang for the cookbook buck as it really has a ton of recipes. 

Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen Everyday

Julia Turshen's Small Victories:Recipes, Advice + Hundreds of Ideas for Home Cooking Triumphs and her second book may be even better for you, Now & Again: Go-To Recipes, Inspired Menus + Endless Ideas for Reinventing Leftovers

Diana Henry's Simple

Edited to add that while I'm not cooking for a pile-o-kids, I've cooked a lot from those books and really like them, too. 

 

Back on the veg-centric track and an old favorite of mine, Mollie Katzen's Still Life with Menu. In this book, she promotes the idea of doing some small prep tasks ahead so dinners are easy to put together at the end of the day.  There are 50 menus and each one has a list of prep work that can be done ahead.  There are also quick pasta and stir fry meals, breakfasts and menus for vegetarian Thanksgiving,  a vegetarian barbecue and a Seder.  There are some weekly menu plans at the end with advance tasks to do each day.

 

Two books that I haven't seen yet but sound right up your alley are Nigel Slater's Greenfeast: Spring, Summer and Greenfeast: Autumn, Winter, both feature seasonal, quick, easy, vegetarian suppers.  The first one hasn't been released yet in the US, the second came out here in September but both were published in the UK last year and have a lot of good reviews. 

Edited by blue_dolphin
clarification (log)
  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Alex

Alex

Posted
Posted

Any of Deborah Madison's books would be good, but especially:

In My Kitchen

The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

or even the 2002 Local Flavors

  • Like 1

"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Act 1

 

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."  -Max Tegmark, physicist

 

Gene Weingarten, writing in the Washington Post about online news stories and the accompanying readers' comments: "I basically like 'comments,' though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots."

 

"...in the mid-’90s when the internet was coming...there was a tendency to assume that when all the world’s knowledge comes online, everyone will flock to it. It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok."  -Neil Stephenson, author, in The Atlantic

 

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer

Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 4 weeks later...
AAQuesada

AAQuesada

Posted
Posted

Donna Hay isn't new or trendy any more but i've always found her recipes easy and really tasty even her meat dishes tend to be lighter with plenty of veg centric recipes. You can find a lot of her books used so you don't have to spend a lot

Link to comment
Share on other sites
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...