Reviews Cooking, Food And Wine Book

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Amazon.com Review
If you don't get home until six or later and still need to get dinner on the table, this is the book for you. The Vegetarian 5-Ingredient Gourmet pares down ingredients to their simplest and most flavorful form. "Keeping things simple takes the frantic quality--and pressure--out of preparing a meal," says author Nava Atlas. "Simplifying helps you to slow down and enjoy the process of cooking."

Atlas devotes a whole chapter to tofu and soy products, including seitan and packaged products like soy "hot dogs" and "sausage." She also has a chapter on "Rudimentary Wraps," which includes recipes for Avocado and Ricotta Soft Tacos, Goat Cheese and Red Pepper Wraps, and the ever popular Black Bean Burrito (spice them with green chiles). Pasta is a quick and easy favorite. Keep jarred sauce on hand and you have the beginnings of Pasta with Triple Red Sauce or Pasta with Olive Sauce. Serve veggie burgers on whole-grain buns with a side of Creamy Coleslaw or Baked Barbecued Tofu and Potato Kebabs for an easy weeknight meal. Or try Asian Sesame-Soy Noodles paired with Broccoli and Tofu in Peanut Sauce.

Every recipe includes a nutritional breakdown including calories, fat, protein, carbohydrates, cholesterol, and sodium. Nearly every recipe has suggestions for what to pair the dish with and on what page to find it. This is an especially handy cookbook for time-crunched families. The food is easy, quick, healthy, and doesn't require great concentration to prepare. --Dana Van Nest

From Publishers Weekly
Vegetarian expert Atlas (Vegetariana and Vegetarian Express) offers a slew of simple, quick recipes, most of which make use of packaged and canned foods. A few unusual soups stand out, such as Rice, Lettuce, and Mushroom Broth, and Cold Curried Cucumber Soup made tangy with a dose of buttermilk. Salads include Chickpea Salad with Roasted Peppers, made with canned chickpeas and jarred red peppers, as well as a more upscale Warm Potato Salad with Goat Cheese. Some recipes, Pinto Beans and Corn, for instance, involve little more than warming up and stirring together the contents of various cans. Although this is not a vegan cookbook, many of its recipes do eschew butter; Ravioli or Tortellini with Sweet Potato Sauce calls for ricotta ravioli, but replaces butter or oil with nonhydrogenated margarine. Each recipe carries a suggested menu Atlas encourages readers to match Mixed Olives Pizza (made with a store-bought crust) with Corn Slaw and nutritional information. A chapter on wraps offers some nice alternatives to sandwiches, such as Eggplant Parmigiana Wraps. Desserts are fruit-based, such as Miniature Fresh Fruit Tarts made with packaged graham cracker pie shells, applesauce and yogurt. Many of Atlas's recipes are already familiar, but will be useful for beginning vegetarians, as well as for those who lead busy lives. 100 b&w illustrations. (June 19) Forecast: The Use-As-Few-Ingredients-as-Possible genre may be reaching saturation, so the title could backfire. On the other hand, Vegetariana sold more than 100,000 copies, and clearly huge numbers of health-conscious people are pressed for time, so this book stands a good chance of finding its niche.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Atlas writes for the cook in a time crunch, but this simplicity makes her book attractive and useful to novices as well. Illustrated with whimsical line drawings, the original and appealing recipes offer a variety of tastes-from potato salad and applesauce to more adventurous cold soups and frittatas. More sophisticated cooks will enjoy a variety of ideas derived from international cuisines, and YAs will be particularly interested in the recipes for popular foods such as pizzas, wraps, and smoothies. The five-ingredient constraint does result, at times, in unnecessary blandness; often, just another herb or two would make a big difference. But by paring recipes down to their most essential elements, Atlas creates an outstanding introduction to the basic principles of preparation and food combinations that underlie more complex cooking. As they stand, the recipes do work; they are easy to follow, and most call for readily available ingredients. Having mastered them, aspiring gourmets can become more creative, guided by sidebars that explain cooking arcana such as pasta shapes, mixed greens, or meat substitutes. Concise advice is offered concerning pantry stocking and menu planning, and the index is excellent. Many practical tips make this book a good resource for the growing number of people who, for environmental and nutritional reasons, are interested in using locally grown, seasonal produce as much as possible. You really don't have to be a strict vegetarian to love this book.

Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Simple and tasty recipes that made going vegetarian a little easier!
I bought this book shortly after my girlfriend decided to go vegetarian, and it's been a great source of recipes since! All the recipes have been approachable, and as amateur cooks, this is the book's strongest selling point.

We've also found a good deal of overlap in the ingredients, which means it hasn't generated many jars of such-and-such that end up sitting in the refrigerator unused for months on end - I'm looking at you, exorbitantly priced thing of demi-glace I bought for that french onion soup recipe.

Overall, a great cookbook that I'm happy to recommend to anyone!

Wonderful cook book!
Very easy to use, and recipes that anyone would like to try. No edible gold flakes or anything crazy like that. Quite impressed.

GREAT GREAT GREAT!
I read a review that someone wrote saying "I'm not the most gifted cook around, but this was a little too basic even for me." I have to disagree VEHEMENTLY with that comment. I, too, can cook. But coming up with easy vegetarian dishes with my ultra-busy schedule was so hard before I got this book. I carry this book around with me, and when I don't know what to make for dinner, I just pick a recipe, stop at the store for an ingredient or two that I might not have, and then go home and whip it up. My husband loves these dishes, and he's a carnivore!

Sure, there are quesadillas with refried beans that would seem like a no-brainer. But the author always puts an interesting twist on the dish that I wouldn't have thought of myself. And there are a lot of recipes that I would have NEVER thought of myself.

5 Ingredients is all I can really handle most week days, so this book is PERFECT for me. I have it with me today and I'm going to try the Green chilie and ricotta rice tonight with one of the quesadilla recipes. Yummy!