I went away this weekend with some girlfriends and one bought the book Skinny Bitch which is a very plain spoken book about the reasons why humans should be vegetarians and vegans. ( It doesn’t asphixiate, like other dietary books and overwhelm with scientific mumbo jumbo, but it does have a healthy and odd dose of swearing and insulting. Very strange, yet entertaining in some way until it becomes tiresome.)
I read the first 6 chapters aloud on the drive back home and it opened the door to some interesting discussions.
I cannot imagine my life going full vegan, but I can see myself tweaking the family diet for the better.
I’m not a vego, but Kurma dasa’s Great Vegetarian Dishes is a favorite cookbook. It looks like he has a TV show and web site too. The only drawback is the Hare Krishna attitude to onions and garlic - just substitute them back in for the asafetida powder most of the time, and you’re set.
We had a thread on vegan cookbooks within the last few weeks, so search for that, but I’ll repeat my nomination of Veganomicon as an excellent vegan cookbook with a little “lifestyle” info thrown in.
Vegetarian Times magazine is great - they also have cookbook collections, and the option to download an electronic version of the magazine in case you want to limit your paper usage.
I have one of Kurma Dasa’s cookbooks as well, and enjoyed it.
Moosewood Restaurant cookbooks are entirely or mostly vegetarian and are classics in the field; just get the updated versions when available as at least one of the early copies was admitted by the creator as throwing in lots of extra dairy products to quiet any qualms about the protein content.
I’d recommend any of the books by Mollie Katzen - she has wonderful vegetarian recipes, doesn’t get preachy about giving up meat and doesn’t go nuts with healthy substitutions, either. My particular favourites are *The Enchanted Broccoli Forest *and Vegetable Heaven (which has a pineapple rice pilaf recipe that is to die for). We use them regularly when our vegetarian friends come for dinner.
Also, Mark Bittman has published a vegetarian companion to *How To Cook Everything *(which is, not surprisingly, called How To Cook Everything Vegetarian). I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it’s gotten very good reviews and you can never go wrong with Bittman.
I can recommend Diet for a New America, by John Robbins, although it is more of a philosophical and science based rationale for vegenism, rather than a cookbook. I can truly say that this book changed my life and how I think about food, the environment and animals overall. It’s an older book, but it’s a great overview for anyone interested in learning more.
I also recommend *The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World *, by the same author.
Oh, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food is a good one - it’s not entirely vegetarian but very much leaning that way, and it provides a lot of good reasons why you should “Eat real food. Mostly plants.”
On reflection, I might be conflating Moosewood’s cookbooks with those of Mollie Katzen; she did the Moosewood Cookbook but I’m not sure that she stayed with their other books. They are a vegetarian restaurant, though.
THere’s lots of great Vegan and vegtarian cookbooks out there. There are also several decent reasons to switch. However SK is neither a good cookbook, nor are its reasons valid. They basicly lie their asses off about a lot of complete myths. Meat does* not* rot in your stomach for example. It’s not bad for you, per se. (Yes, too much can be bad- so can too many carrots or macadamia nuts)
If you read the reviews, even many outspoken vegans dislike that book.