A good friend of mine is going vegan for the New Year. What’s your favorite recipe book (bonus if the recipes are fairly easy!)
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
How To Cook Everything Vegetarian
IANA Vegan or Vegetarian, but I like those
Vegan Planet: 400 Irresistible Recipes with Fantastic Flavors from Home and Around the World by Robin Robertson
The Joy of Vegan Baking: The Compassionate Cooks’ Traditional Treats and Sinful Sweets by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
Veganomicon is a great book. Highly recommended. Moskowitz also has a vegan cookbook devoted tocupcakes. Those are my recommendations.
Thanks, all! I’m heading out to Barnes & Noble tomorrow and some of your suggestions were referenced on their website. You’ve helped me narrow down my choices. Any more suggestions will be welcomed!
I love this one - I’m not vegan or even vegetarian, but this became my favorite cookbook that I bought in 2008. I use it all the time.
I’m an ovo-lacto vegetarian but third the Veganomicon recommendation, and have heard great things about the latter, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. (The first book does have a few cupcake and other dessert recipes in it if you want to give the idea a try first.) Plus I just love saying “I have to consult… the Veganomicon.” For the Evil Dead fans out there, the authors do make a throwaway reference to it in their introduction.
There is a chain of vegan restaurants here called Fresh. Awesome food! (Even their “eggs” and “cheese” are actually vegan substitutes). The regular items on their menu are available in their cookbook: Fresh at Home. There are no animal products in their recipes. The product description on Amazon is supremely dorky, but the restaurant has saved our hungry asses on many an occasion. Their smoothies are to die for! Most of the recipes combine food well, too. With most Fresh meals we get enough protein and carbs for our very active lifestyles. Best of all, the food is very, VERY tasty and filling. I very highly recommend this book.
Note: for vegetarian who still eat dairy or eggs, you can modify the recipes using milk etc., but the recipes themselves are vegan.
ETA: We have this book at home.
It’s not explicitly vegan, but it has lots of good vegan recipes: Dakshin. You could also consider A Vegan Taste of India, though I haven’t tried it. There are tons of great South and North Indian recipes (though there tend to be more South Indian than North recipes that are vegan), both in that book and others. Chana masala, aloo masala, all kinds of rasams and sambhars come to mind. Chapatis (flat breads to eat them with) are also vegan - just mix flour and water into a dough, roll into a tortilla-like thickness and slap it in a pan to cook.
As a bonus, many of the lentil dishes (especially the chickpeas) can be cooked in a slow cooker, so you can just toss them and forget them for four hours, then come back and spice them.
So far, I’m leaning towards the Veganomicon. My stepdaughter also recommended it.
Another vote for Veganomicon. Get it—you won’t regret it. Just take a look at the thread on veggieboards—it’s received almost 40,000 views and over 1000 replies.
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
I know I’m late to the party, but I wanted to also post a vote for Veganomicon. I have been vegetarian forever and wasn’t even really interested in becoming vegan, but I bought this book because I had a Barnes and Noble gift certificate, and it made veganism so easy and delicious! It will be perfect for your friend.
Yep, even the binding is well done. There’s no slipcover; the graphics are printed directly on the hardcover panels, like a college textbook There’s gotta be a name for that type of bookbinding, but I don’t know what it is. But it’s cool. Her other books are great too; don’t overlook the classic Vegan with a Vengeance.
Slight hijack: I just became vegan a few months ago and while I don’t have much in the way of cookbooks, could I recommend two other vegan books I really liked?
I don’t know your friend’s situation, but it is a rather big lifestyle change and unless she has support from vegan friends already, it can be really hard at first and possibly even unhealthy. A good book or two could certainly help with those more generalized issues while the cookbooks keep her fed.
Please do! Recommend away!
I hope I’m not too late but if youre going to get another one besides the
Veginomicon, check out the Moosewood Restaurant cookbooks, they have a lot of ethnic cooking and it’s all vegetarian.
Excellent suggestion. I do have a couple of them, but didn’t know that they had a vegan one.
Arg. Too late. I was going to suggest Moosewood.
Alright 
Vegan Freak: Began vegan in a non-vegan world is a light-hearted examination of the lifestyle and associated difficulties. It made everything a lot more approachable for me in that it made me realize “Yeah, there are going to be some hard things, but if you can find a way to laugh about it, it becomes that much easier.” It was the difference between me being a “GOD DAMN IT WHY DID I SIGN UP FOR THIS?!” vegan and a “Hmm. This isn’t so bad. It’s actually kinda neat!” one.
Once that attitude was in place, Becoming Vegan taught me how to be vegan AND healthy – note that the two, counter to popular conception, do not necessarily go hand-in-hand unless you do it right. A haphazard vegan diet can lied to nutritional deficiencies, hunger, etc. This book is jammed full of useful scientific advice on what to eat and otherwise be healthy. It can be a tough, long-winded read at times, but you can just skip around and take what you need from it. The info in there is really good.