Book review - The Vegan Planet

This cookbook was one of the first I purchased when switching to a Vegan diet. It was simultaneously recommended by a friend, and selected from many choices at the bookstore by my wife. It was a happy coincidence to see it recommended after we had purchased it - and I have to second the recommendation given to me, that this is a cookbook for anyone, not just vegans.

For the first few months of cooking as a vegan, this cookbook provided almost every recipe that I made. While I had a few failures along the way, they were few and far between, and by and large, those that failed are something that I will try again (except for one recipe for sauerkraut and tempeh that was just not for me).

If you want to try an interesting variety of food, from many different cultural influences, then I would recommend trying this book. The recipes are easy to follow, have accompanying commentary, and often have a sidebar that goes into more detail about some of the more esoteric ingredients. For example, there is a seitan roast that requires wrapping in yuba. I wasn't familiar with yuba, and there was an explanation that it is the skin that forms on top of cooked soybeans, and is available in a variety of forms in most asian supermarkets (I wasn't familiar with seitan either, and there is a good recipe for that provided as well).

It's hard to go wrong with this one.