Recommend a few cookbooks--ethnic and vegetarian preferred.

Cafe Society
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I am a terrible cook. Actually, I am simply not a cook. When I do cook, assuming I’ve got a recipe to follow, it generally turns out more or less fine, though it may take me a terribly long time to get it done due to uncertainty and truly atrocious knife skills. (Curiously, I seem to be an acceptable baker, and I quite enjoy working with dough. Fewer ingredients to worry about and no knife required, other than to slash the loaves. I’m terrible at that too.)

I do love food, though, and while I’ve got a bit of time on my hands, I’ve decided to do some cooking to see if I can get a bit more comfortable with it. All I have for cookbooks is… well, Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian. I like it, I really do, but the organization makes it a bit tricky when I want to find a specific sort of dish, and she seems a bit shy of spice at times, no doubt erring on the side of caution for the American palate. So, I’m looking for a few recommendations.

I’m primarily interested in ethnic cuisines–the usual suspects like Indian, (somewhat Americanized) Chinese, Thai, Italian and so on–but more exotic things as well. I’ve eaten more basic American mid-western food than anyone should ever want to. Obviously, I want to keep things simple and fairly easy. Finally, while I’m not a vegetarian, I’m rather interested in vegetarian cooking. Meat intimidates me–I don’t particularly like to work with it both because of the texture of raw meat and the food safety concerns that it raises. Plus, eating more veg is always good, right? That said, I probably should get over this, so if you’ve got a really good, simple, tasty ethnic cookbook to recommend, and it just happens to be filled with carnivorous recipes, don’t be shy. Oh, and older stuff I might be able to find at the library for a test run is good too.

Thanks all!

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I started this thread last month on this Lao cookbook.

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Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi. Entirely vegetarian, and utterly delicious.

If you’re not sure about getting/ borrowing the book, you can find a lot of the recipes here.

Darra Goldstein’s The Georgian Feast contains lots of vegetarian recipes, and is slightly off the beaten track in terms of ethnic cuisine. If you’re into baking, you have to make khachapuri - I prefer the non-yeast version, but then, I suck at baking.

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It does not have an ethnic or vegetarian theme but it is an excellent book on cooking techniques, science of cooking, and recipes running the gamut of all types of dishes. The particulars:

Title: Cooking
Author: James Peterson
ISBN: 9781580087896
Copyright: 2007

You will be able to take what you learn from this book and apply to any future cooking!

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I just heard a story about the Food Matters Cookbook on NPR. The author was very intelligent, thoughtful, and well-spoken*.

It’s not exactly vegetarian, per se, but from what I understand, meat plays a very small role (the guy only eats meat with dinner, and only as a side/accent dish, and IIRC only a couple nights per week.)

*I hope he’s not black :o

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I really enjoy Our Food: The Kosher Kitchen Updated and Jewish Cooking in America. I’m not Jewish and don’t cook kosher, but there are many delicious things here. Also, Celebracion: Recipes And Traditions Celebrating Latino Family Life has recipes from 16 different cultures in the U.S., from Puerto Rican to Dominican to Cuban.

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That’s Mark Bittman, and that’s who I came in this thread to recommend.

He writes a regular column in the NYTimes - link to his overview page here - and he’s got several cookbooks out. One is How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

His recipes and cookbooks are well-written, easy to follow, and generally don’t include 25 different non-standard ingredients that you have to go to 17 different stores to find. Plus, he’s a hoot. Check out some of the videos he does for the NYTimes, they’re very funny, and show you how to make really easy, yummy food.

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The New Moosewood Cookbook, by Molly Katzen. A minor classic of the genre, features a wide variety of recipes in all categories from osups and sauces to salads, entrees, and desserts. Most of the recipes are relatively quick and easy, but not too much so. Perfect for someone like you.

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>I started this thread last month on this Lao cookbook.<

thank you Siam Sam.

re vegetarian vs Non veg:

The OP doesn’t seem to be a fundamentalist ‘vege’, but just tends this way. I think maybe for many people it is not so much a a ‘all or not’ issue, but a matter of scale.

When I visited the USA, i was flabbergasted at the size of some of the meals we got served, order a steak, and sometimes it looks like you got a pound of meat on your plate, overhanging both edges.

south east asian dishes, especially lao food (which by now I know best) deals with it in a different way. the Lao food I learned to enjoy seems to have two major staples, Rice (mainly Khao Niao (sticky rice), and vegetables, in various forms, steamed, fresh, stewed, fried etc.

And meat. But usually in very minor portions compared to the rice and veg portions. meat is a luxury, and for people living in the remote areas, it is often a matter of what you can find where you can find it .

So if in an average USA meal sometimes meat is 30-50% of the weight of the meal, an average Lao meal i guess it maybe 5-10% of the total mass, sometimes less. It is almost like an accent of taste, something like a spice, to make your digestive juices flow by the smell and flavour of it, instead of the staple of nutrition it seems to be in the USA.

For those who look at the potential health issues of eating meat, as well as those considering environmental issues such as use of resources to produce a certain quantity of nutrition for human diet, Lao food maybe a lot more attractive then some western diets.

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And that Lao cookbook tells what ingredients can be substituted for original ones that may be difficult to find in the West.

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I just received three Japanese cookbooks by Harumi Kurihara for my birthday and they’re great simple recipes. The 3 books are: Everyday Harumi, Harumi’s Japanese Cooking, and Harumi’s Japanese Home Cooking. Some recipes overlap, but each book has enough new recipes to be worth it on its own.

The books are nicely organized into separate categories (Rice&Noodles, Meat, Fish, Vegetables, etc) and she has ingredients notes on the side for ingredients that might not be obvious to a Western audience. The recipes are authentic, but she’s not a stickler for specific ingredients and makes suggestions for alternate ingredients if you can’t find certain items. The recipes are usually portioned for 4, so it’s easy to divide in half if you’re cooking for 2.

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Thanks for the suggestions, folks, and feel free to keep them coming. That Georgian cookbook is intriguing–I’m a bit of a Russophile, and Georgia’s spent plenty of time in that sphere of influence. The Lao cookbook tickles my interest as well, but I’m a bit daunted by it–the idea more than anything in the cookbook, since I’ve not actually seen anything in the cookbook. Perhaps it’s just a bit scary because I’ve never had any. Will have to do some further investigations. :slight_smile:

Regarding the veg thing–don’t get me wrong; I dig meat, and I figure it’ll always be in my diet to some extent. But there are lots of reasons, reasonable and unreasonable, personal and economic, that it seems like a good idea to eat less of it. So I’m doing what I can.

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It’s not a million miles removed from Thai food. In fact, some of the dishes considered Thai have their origins in Laos.

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I just wanted to say, if you think you have bad knife skills, sharpen your knives!!! I swear, it makes the BIGGEST difference in cooking. You can buy an electric knife sharpener for under $100, easy, and keep them super sharp all the time. Seriously, sharpen your knives. Everyone! Do it!! Sharpen them weekly, at least. It makes the biggest change in cooking and ease of prep. For years i thought I was awful with knives, etc. but then I sharpened them and WOW! Turns out I’m pretty good! Sharpen your knives and keep them sharp. My tip for the day :wink:

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EatingWell puts out a magazine and several cookbooks. I swear I rep it so much on this site, but it honest-to-god changed my life. I never cooked beyond Tuna Helper before picking up an EatingWell book. My mother felt cooking was beneath her and my caregiver cooked or housekeeper from 0-18. Healthy people make their own damn food. If you’re not eating it, you don’t have the same stake in it.

EatingWell’s tagline is “Where good taste meets good health”. It’s healthy for you food, without being steamed-everything. Their vegetarian stuff is the bomb - hearty food that’s decidedly un-vegetarian. Not a lot of meat replacements with seitan and boca burgers and “fake” meat stuff, but either using tofu, a shitload of beans/vegetables, or portobellos. If you wanna keep costs down, the website has a thing where you can search like “meals under $2” and so forth.

I suggest checking your library system online for the books; the best are EatingWell Serves 2 and EatingWell healthy in a hurry. I haven’t tried EatingWell on a Budget yet, but that should be good as well.

If your knife is shitty and you want quality for cheap, get an Oxo Professional Mini Santoku. Best goddamn knife ever. Good for everything.

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I appreciate the advice–my knife is good, I really just can’t cut worth a damn. No consistency or speed. What I need are some good youtube instructional videos and a lot of practice, I think.