A new cookbook!

I had been thinking about buying Vegan with a Vengeance for a while when I came across this post on Eat Air: A Vegan Food Log. The picture of Maple-Mustard Glazes Potatoes looked so good, it was the final impetus I needed to go order this cookbook. It wasn’t so much that I HAD to make that recipe, it was more that a critical mass of great recommendations had been reached that propelled me over the edge to make the purchase (not that it is that hard to convince me to buy a book!).

When the book arrived in the mail, it looked just as good as I thought it would. I love all the extra bits of information on how to host a public access tv show, or Food Not Bombs, or how to host a brunch café. I have actually found myself reading the book, rather than just paging through and glancing at recipe titles. Today, while riding the Metrolink home from work, I came across the Maple-Mustard Glazed Potatoes and String Beans recipe that had sent me to the online bookstore, and I realized that I had most of the ingredients for this recipe. Not only did I have fresh green beans and Yukon gold potatoes, I had beans and potatoes that needed to be used before they went bad! Talk about serendipity! I hate throwing fresh veggies away (although I am thinking this weekend we are definitely going to start our own fire escape composting bin; still, while composting food is better than throwing it in a landfill, eating it is better still). So, I was even more excited when I started actually assembling the recipe, and I realized that I didn’t have the yellow onions called for, but I did have a leek that would otherwise go to waste. Ah, it’s the little things in life that are exciting, isn’t it?

There are so many recipes in this book that I want to make. I just need to make a grocery list so that I can actually make the recipes, not necessarily food inspired by the recipes, like tonight’s creation (I didn’t have Dijon mustard, either, but stoneground seemed to work just fine). Not that there is anything wrong with changing a recipe—I firmly believe that recipes are guidelines, not laws—but it is nice to change things consciously, because I think I will like it better, rather than by necessity. On the other hand, there is nothing quite like the experience of realizing that you are out of a key ingredient midway through your meal preparation and still being able to produce a delicious dish.