The Pretty Darn Quick Vegetarian Cookbook, Donna Klein (365 Books, Day 196)

[rushthatspeaks]

I am not the intended or correct audience for this cookbook, which is why weirdquark handed it to me. The selling points of this cookbook are: a) it is vegetarian with extensive vegan options and things clearly marked as ovo or lacto or whatnot (okay, actually this is a feature in a cookbook for me, I'd like all of mine to come with a lot of vegetarian and vegan recipes) and b) it does not require prep.

By prep Klein means, you know, slicing, whipping, peeling, chopping, etc. Klein's claim is that you can get by in this book without doing any of that.

Therefore I am the wrong audience for this, because when I do not have curry paste in the house and I want to make curry, I do not go to the store. I make curry paste. It is only logical. To me, at any rate. That is how I think about cooking.

But it was worth seeing whether anyone could get away with a cookbook of this nature and have it produce actual food.

Verdict: uh, kinda-sorta? There are a lot of recipes in here that are food, by anyone's definitions. Vinaigrettes, sauces, the reminder that it takes you only five minutes to toast some nuts and pour them on your ice cream, unusual combinations of raw ingredients-- that sort of thing works, and there's a fair bit of it, and it's fine. And there are a few things that mostly require canned and store-bought stuff that I don't consider cheating; I knew that you can make completely respectable fake fondue in ten minutes by melting Nutella with cream, and I did not know that you can use the good kind of store-bought pie crust to make empanadas, though it should have been obvious.

But the vast majority of this-- look, her vegetable potsticker recipe lists frozen vegetable potstickers as an ingredient, okay? You can't tell me that's morally justifiable. And there are a good many pre-made foods out there that simply do not do the same things that the fresh ones do. The kind of minced garlic one keeps in a jar in the fridge is not real garlic, and while there are applications for which I am totally willing to use it, and in fact we always have some around, you cannot have not-real garlic and a whole boatload of other things of the same not-quite nature and expect to produce food. You may produce a reasonable facsimile of food, but it isn't the same. And so I sat there through much of the book muttering 'you know, it would take you five damn minutes to chop some chives instead of using freeze-dried, and do you know how much better it would taste?'

This book was, in fact, a lesson to me as to where I draw my personal line about pre-packaged and pre-prepared foods. I will buy pie crust but not pizza dough, for instance, because the grocery store makes better pie crust than I do but fails pizza anything. I will buy jarred artichoke hearts, canned chickpeas, and frozen Brussels sprouts, but I stare incredulously at canned beets or canned cooked lentils. Freeze-dried shallots are not the same food as fresh; we use both. I chop my own garlic mostly whether I have time or not. I'll buy Miracle Whip but if I want mayonnaise, which is not remotely the same substance, I make it, every blue moon or so. You see. So about half of these recipes I was converting back into food in my head. Some require only minor conversion-- chopping your own garlic will add oh five minutes to most tomato sauces-- some are more major, and some aren't worth it.

If, however, you are the sort of person who really does not have time to/does not want to do the sort of prep the book is trying to avoid, well, it has a large range of both vegetarian and vegan options, and food from a large range of ethnicities, and you should be able to tell from the recipe how close to food it is (hint: the fewer jars you have to open, the better). So for the inexperienced or busy cook, why not. I can't go there with you, but I'm trying not to judge. Failing, but trying.

Comments

[vehemently]

Weird. Who is so violently opposed to peeling a couple of vegetables? I mean, lazy now and then, okay.

I have never seen canned lentils, and would laugh and laugh at them. I do come from canning people -- I remember my stepmother standing over the pressure-cooker in August, red-faced -- but she only ever canned pickled beets, not plain ones. (Plus green beans, wax beans, applesauce, and I don't remember what else. The beans were the biggie, and I still don't really believe beans are cooked until they're gray. It is a thing.)

[adrian_turtle]

It is important to me to cook food for myself and people I love, despite the fact that my ability to use my hands is limited by chronic pain. I am sometimes so "violently opposed to peeling a couple of vegetables" that it makes me want to throw up.

Last night, I was planning to have buckwheat porridge with chopped pear and dried cranberries. I picked up the knife to cut up the pear, and decided to substitute frozen blueberries. (There was no banana in the apartment. I could have cut banana.) I wanted breakfast for supper because I was dealing with post-travel and post-migraine queasiness yesterday. Most evenings, I am considering vegetables to cut up or take out of the freezer.

(Canned green beans and wax beans? Did the plants just take over your garden and your stepmother had to do something with the surplus? In my experience, frozen green beans are quite good [sometimes as good as fresh, depending on the storage conditions for "fresh"] if the packaging is good enough that I can't smell the beans through the plastic. Whenever I've had canned green beans, they've been dismal.)

[veejane]

Beans and apples grow well in that climate, and are basically free except for the labor involved. She came from modest origins, and canning surplus was very important to her. Waste not want not, etc.

I understand that not everybody can peel and chop every day; I'm just a little stumped that not using a cutting board is the "easy prep" the author advocates. Surely ease of gathering and storing ingredients counts as easy prep too? I live in a situation in which frozen food is difficult to transport, so I use fewer frozen options. And after all, what is "pretty darn quick" about waiting for frozen options to defrost, compared to how quickly one might (if one has the ability) prep something fresh?

If the author wanted to write the Less Hand Pain Cooking Handbook, that might be worthwhile, but from the review above, that didn't seem like what she was doing.

[green_knight]

I do use frozen vegetables because there's one of me, and shopping so I have fresh veggies every day is a logistic nightmare; so I have some fresh (things that keep) and some frozen (button sprouts, which are never bitter, spinach which wilts etc.).

The thing is that fresh veggies take longer to prepare (but not long if you're experienced) and frozen take much longer to cook. As someone who a) suffers from allergies and b) needs to eat a low carb diet, prepared foods are mostly a fail for me - beef curry with shellfish? _Everything_ with sulphites? Not great ideas at all.

This sounds like a book for people who don't cook, but who want to lessen their guilt over not-cooking, which I think is the wrong approach.

As for garlic, today I chopped half of mine and planted the rest...

[dorothean]

I don't think I would like this cookbook either, but as somebody who eats mostly sandwiches, frozen Amy's Kitchen dinners, and boiled vegetables with couscous from a box, not because I am inexperienced, busy, lazy, or unappreciative of carefully crafted food with high-quality ingredients, but (along with some of the folks at cookability) because when I need to eat I often have to make a choice between a low-effort meal that will leave me with the ability to get something else done that evening, or a complicated multiple-dirty-dish-producing meal which is my sole accomplishment of the night ... it feels kind of painful to see what I live on labeled Not Food.

I know you sort of acknowledged the judging at the end, but that didn't really help, since those sentences did not recognize that there are some things besides inexperience and being busy that legitimize a lack of dedication to carefully prepared food.

[rushthatspeaks]

Oh dear, I am so sorry. Several people have mentioned that this book might work well for people who have mobility/fatigue/pain other issues of that sort, and I wish both that I had thought of that while reading so that I could have tried to think about the book in that light and that the book had thought of that itself. Food is a direction in which I am privileged, because while my health issues also often mean a choice between cooking and doing anything else that evening, I have housemates who love cooking and are both willing and able to do it when I can't; I therefore have the luxury of not having to cook unless I have the spoons for it.

I will try to remember that that is a luxury, and do better about this in the future. Because you are totally right.

[dorothean]

Thank you. <3

[sovay]

And so I sat there through much of the book muttering 'you know, it would take you five damn minutes to chop some chives instead of using freeze-dried, and do you know how much better it would taste?'

. . . What is the point of freeze-dried chives?

(It doesn't even take five minutes to chop chives! They're the size of pipe cleaners! You can shred them with your fingernails if you have to!)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I thought that, too. And I am not even a very common user of chives, so it's not like I have infinite practice with them making me fast.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Kitchen shears are awesome at snipping chives, especially if you're prone to slicing your fingers, as I am at times.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I do not understand the point of freeze-dried chives at all. At the house I grew up in chives grew wild in the yard. The later apartment was an apartment, so I didn't really cook with chives for a while; now they grow all over the place again. As far as I can tell the freeze-dried ones taste of nothing.

[sovay]

At the house I grew up in chives grew wild in the yard.

Right! As far as I can tell, they're not a cultivated herb, they're a handily cookable weed. I can't even imagine buying them, unless I lived somewhere the climate was all wrong.

[q10.livejournal.com]

look, her vegetable potsticker recipe lists frozen vegetable potstickers as an ingredient, okay? You can't tell me that's morally justifiable.

that's unjustifiable for reasons which have nothing to do with the real food/not real food issue, and everything to do with the ‘at that point i can figure it out myself so why did i pay for a cookbook&?rsquo; issue

I will buy pie crust but not pizza dough

this is neatly the exact opposite of the tradeoff i make in this area.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

There are actually a couple of her recipes that tell you to make xyz food according to the directions on the box, and this makes me blink and go 'was that space so hard to fill?'.

I keep wanting to learn to make pie crust and it is one of the few cooking things I find genuinely intimidating, especially since the local grocery makes the best pie crust I have ever had, anywhere.

[q10.livejournal.com]

any DIY ethos or snobbishness aside, the pie crust thing is complicated for me by the fact that i'm a vegetarian (no lard) and i frequently cook for vegans (no butter). most prefab pie crusts i see contain some amount of either lard or butter. i suspect i'd like the lard ones, if i ate lard (although‘partially hydrogenated lard’ is one of the most terrifying phrases i have ever seen on an ingredient list, and i saw it on the list for a frozen pie crust). i don't really care for butter-intensive pie crusts, so the vegan thing really doesn't complicate it much. a butter can be nice, but texturally Crisco and palm oil both work better, in my experience.

[enleve.livejournal.com]

Pie crust isn't so hard once you know how to do it. My grandmother showed me. The main thing is mixing the butter with the flower at the beginning. The butter has to be solid to begin with, not melted. This is how I do it. I sort of cut the butter into small pieces with a spoon then crumble the butter into a bowl of flour with my fingers a few pieces at a time, working from the bottom of the bowl up. The flour and butter should be sticking to each other. It will be sort of like flour-coated pieces of butter, that may stick to each other a little bit but still are sort of separate from each other. I use a ratio of about 3 cups of flour to 2/3 of a cup of butter. That will make enough crust for 2 pies. After the flour and butter is crumbled together, then add 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp baking powder, 2 eggs, 1/4 cup oil (we usually used grape seed oil). Work all these new ingredients in with a spoon, then add ice cold water a little bit at a time until you reach a texture where you can scrunch it with your hands and it stays together. It is important not to use too much water.

After that, your pie dough is ready to roll.

I imagine using lard would be similar to butter. If you can't use lard or butter, and have to only use something liquid like oil, then I'm not sure what to do. Perhaps use something like olive oil that goes solid in the fridge? Although that might affect the taste. Coconut oil maybe.

[q10.livejournal.com]

re lard - crisco is softer than butter when chilled/solid, which means it's a little easier to work and makes for a somewhat flakier end result. Crisco (or generic equivalent) is basically a vegetarian/kosher lard substitute, so i imagine lard is similar for these purposes. liquid oil pie crusts have a fairly different texture from solid fat ones. besides the options already mentioned, palm oil is actually solid at room temperature and works pretty well (sometimes it's sold just labeled as expensive vegetable shortening for people who're afraid of hydrogenated stuff). cacao butter seems like it'd be too hard but i admit i never actually tried it.

i've always gone with a simple flour+fat+water+salt approach. now i want to try the thing with eggs and some liquid oil to see how it compares.

in any case, i emphatically second the thing about particles of fat coated with flour, and about doing that part dry before adding any liquids. that's prettymuch essential. investing in decent pastry blender can be helpful here, but isn't essential.

[sovay]

I keep wanting to learn to make pie crust and it is one of the few cooking things I find genuinely intimidating, especially since the local grocery makes the best pie crust I have ever had, anywhere.

I have not made pie crust so many times that I can reel you a recipe off the top of my head, but I have made pie crust more than once (and even the same kind of pie crust more than once, although I think the Zwiebelkuchen was the most fun) and each time, although I was kind of winging it, the results have been more than edible. Recommendation: we should try it sometime.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

It's not real garlic???

Do you mean that in the 1) it's not real garlic sense
or the
2) it loses potency because already minced and packaged sense so not with all the things that fresh minced (or pressed through the garlic press) garlic has sense?

[weirdquark]

Minced garlic doesn't taste like fresh garlic, though cooking it comes closer to the taste of cooked fresh minced garlic than if you were using it in something like salad dressing. Anything you do to garlic to make it last longer than fresh changes the taste. We also buy pre-peeled garlic cloves and freeze them, and that also changes the taste; it's closer to fresh than the pre-minced kind, but they're a little sweeter.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

When garlic gets processed with metal implements, the oil in the garlic reacts with the metal; the more thoroughly the interior cell walls of the garlic get mashed, the more reactive it is. The reaction produces a bitter/metallic aftertaste. In small doses, such as one gets with two or three cloves through a press at home, this is undetectable or tolerable, although really good garlic presses are plastic. But the pre-minced refrigerated stuff always has that aftertaste in spades, plus the natural changes that take place in the oil over time, which with garlic is not so much a loss of potency as a change into a more vicious sort.

If I'm cooking a dish long enough that ninety percent of the oil of the garlic is going to vanish, I will use refrigerated minced garlic. It does okay there. Otherwise, no. I don't know if other people can, but I can smell the difference as soon as I take the lid off the minced garlic, and it's not a good smell.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting. Thanks.

I am simply not that sensitive. Otoh, I cook when I have to, not for love. I like to read about people's love for cooking because it's like reading about a foreign country. I do love to bake, though.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Have you come across the ceramic garlic graters? Basically they're like a saucer with little ridges raised on the base; grate the garlic against those, and behold: utterly pasted garlic, no contact with any metal at all bar the knife you probably used to peel it with. Garlicky fingers, but hey...

[redbird]

I think I know at least one person in the proper audience for this cookbook, which includes anyone who has serious hand problems or is dealing with ongoing fatigue (either by itself or part of some other disability). I don't know if the author or publisher has pitched it that way, but this might be a very useful book for, say, someone with arthritis whose doctor has told them to eat less meat for health reasons. Or who is omnivorous but wants to feed a vegetarian grandchild.

Also, that minced garlic is not perfect, but it is much better than either no garlic at all, or only dried garlic, and sometimes getting real garlic is difficult to the point that we're simply not going to do it. This neighborhood isn't exactly a food desert, but I would have to make an extra out-of-the-way stop on my way home to get good garlic for large parts of the year.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Of course people would end up with different lines on what they will/won't use. One of mine is not actually mine but timprov's. I adore brussels sprouts, and he is apparently a commercial for douche about them: "Mom, do you ever feel...less than fresh?" He cannot abide the smell of brussels sprouts that are less than fresh. We can't even get the fresh ones that are not on the stalk in the grocery. We have to wait until some on-the-stalk fresh ones come in.

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

Speaking of "open cans, mix, eat" :

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

Uh. Okay, that fails to have embedded. Link time!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we2iWTJqo98

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

I also cannot fathom not using fresh garlic. that said, I have had success with making my own minced garlic paste in a grinder and then keeping it in the refrigerator in a jar with an oil layer air barrier. it's okay for a week.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

This post is chock full of why I enjoy you. (Why I enjoy reading you? Something.)

[gallian.livejournal.com]

That actually sounds like a remarkably useful cookbook for my cooking group at school... (none of my students can effectively wield a knife.)

[khava.livejournal.com]

A couple of years ago my mother found the following recipe in the newspaper.

APPLE COBBLER

Grease an 8" square baking dish. Take a frozen apple pie, turn it upside-down in the baking dish, and remove the pan it came in. With a knife, break up the bottom (now top) crust of the pie. Bake according to package directions.

My mother still has not stopped mocking this recipe. She will probably continue mocking it until she dies.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I am entirely of your mind, except about Miracle Whip. Miracle Whip and store-bought mayonnaise and fresh-made mayonnaise are three entirely different things, and two of them are very good, and one of them is an abomination sacred to Cthulhu.

By the way, I picked up The Flavor Thesaurus from the corpse of a Borders. It has already proven its worth by pointing out that one can make truffle paste presentable to company quickly by sticking it in a pastry crust. Well worth the eye-rolling at some of the prose.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

This book was, in fact, a lesson to me as to where I draw my personal line

Now I want there to be a meme, to establish where different people draw their lines. Mine is (of course?) slightly offset from yours: I won't buy pie crust but I will use a machine to make it (because my rubbing-in-the-fat technique sucks rocks); I will buy jarred artichoke hearts but not canned chickpeas; I'd never think about frozen Brussels, but I do sometimes buy a jar of store mayonnaise. Etc.

I'm trying not to judge. Failing, but trying.

Yes, that.