Food 52 VEGAN : 60 Vegetable-Driven Recipes for Any Kitchen / Gena Hamshaw, Photography by James Ransom. Ten Speed Press, 2015. 145 pages, includes color photography, index.
Gena Hamshaw’s Vegan is your companion meal planner for tastefully crafted and elegantly simple vegetable, fruit and grain-based dishes, snacks, salads, soups, breakfasts and desserts. The cookbook focuses on delicious and well-loved dishes that will help you gain confidence as a vegan cook. As the author avows, her recipes are made of whole foods featured without additives or substances that however falsely give the impression of a meat or animal favorite. Hamshaw’s column online at Food52.com has for the past two years informed cooks on this style of vegan cooking, which can be counted on for quality and specialty.
Sampling the recipes, I find that scrambled tofu with nutritional yeast, tahini, tamari, mustard, and turmeric, polenta with roasted tomatoes and greens, and tostadas with refried beans and cabbage slaw appeal as premier breakfast recipes–although to make them requires a little concentration, not necessarily available of a morning before food. Hamshaw gives you tips on what to prepare in advance, so making the dish as shown is a snap.
Every dish is displayed in gorgeous photography, which gives Vegan top marks in my assessment (see “The 10 Attributes of a Great Cookbook”, an earlier post on this blog.). In fact the temperature and tone of the photography have almost everything to say to the reader/potential cooker of the recipes because when the author’s instructions match the image, you have a true sense of how it will turn out if you follow the directions. In these recipes, you are treated to clear images, lit in a kind of chiaroscuro manner that makes the concept look classic. The settings for the photographs are nothing short of artistic, artisanal–very inspiring! Classic vegan food—what a great concept.
Spices to do magic, as you are aware. Hamshaw’s favorites include turmeric, tamari and smoked paprika, with the paprika subbing for smoke-flavor, in case you, too, like real taste without additives. For pantry staples, Hamshaw has recipes for egg replacer (a “lighter” way to bake), oat milk (a fast and easy alternative milk), and horchata, a well-known sweet drink made from soaked rice and cashews.
For desserts that really satisfy the yearning for creaminess, a bit of sweetness and a truly classic taste, Hamshaw offers chocolate brownies and chocolate cake with ganache, even pumpkin pie and biscotti for your coffee or tea. However her Raw Citrus Cheesecake caught my eye—cashews, coconut oil and orange juice, lemon juice and orange zest are combined and spread over a date-almond crust and serves 12!
Hamshaw’s Vegan encourages you to try cooking beans and legumes from scratch, produce a batch of snacks like granola bars, kale chips, flax crackers and hummus or harissa mayonnaise and other sauces. Inserts to the recipes that casually introduce technique. You can also create cashew cheese or creams and nut milks from Vegan’s Basics section.
This is a complete set of 60, not 100 or over 200 recipes that could be overwhelming. With Hamshaw’s Vegan, you can pick up a few techniques for turning out salads with greens and roasted vegetables, desserts with the ease of a classic baker, and breakfasts with mouth-watering flavor and texture, and more.
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