Cookbook Review: Vegan Planet

With hundreds of recipes, a host of health and nutritional information, cooking tips, and thorough introductions to uncommon ingredients, this cookbook is a great choice if you’re looking to buy just one book or are new to meat-free cooking.

You'll find a recipe for just about everything in Vegan Planet. Author Robin Robertson includes chapters on sauces, breakfast, breads, appetizers, sandwiches, stews, beans, pasta dishes, and, believe it or not, much, much more. The recipes are diverse, ethnic-inspired and innovative. Favorite dishes are reinvented and become new again. For example, rather than providing just a recipe for pizza, Robertson creates Thai pesto pizza and curried spinach pizza. In doing so, she not only teases our senses, but also challenges our ideas about traditional dishes.

But Vegan Planet is more than just a simple cookbook. Included is an informative and comprehensive chapter on vegan health, food preparation tips and sample menus. You'll also be inspired to try new ingredients as the author introduces new foods, such as whole grain teff, provides preparation tips, then shares a recipe or two.

Perhaps the only drawback is the lack of photographs. With 400 recipes, the cost of including photos for each would make the book expensive to produce, but even just a few photographs would be appreciated. While the recipes are mostly easy, they tend to be ingredient heavy, which may intimidate the novice chef.

Vegan Planet is one of the most comprehensive and helpful collections of recipes available. I highly recommend it for anyone new to veganism or looking to go beyond the basics in vegan cuisine.

See also: Top 6 vegetarian cookbooks