Not only is it fun to read, but the recipes are really accessible. I mean, most of them use ingredients that I've never tried, but wasn't that part of the point of me becoming a vegan? To expand my horizons? I made my first dish from this book tonight - "Mushroom and Sun-Dried Tomato Risotto."
I knew I'd have to make a little jaunt across town to "Whole Foods" (natural grocery store with lots of specialty items) for this one, as it called for several things that the "Bi-Lo" just wouldn't have, i.e. cremini mushrooms, fresh herbs, arborio rice. In the past, although I love shopping at "Whole Foods," I've shied away from it just because it is more expensive on most things. However, I decided that if I was going to be serious about being a vegan and actually enjoy it, I'd have to suck it up and pay a little extra now and then for those special ingredients.It took me an hour to find everything I was looking for, mostly because I'm so used to seeing my food packaged in a certain way that I didn't recognize it even when it was right in front of me. For example, it took me 10 minutes to find and bag my mushrooms. I saw mushrooms right away, but they were loose in a box in front of a sort of fresh veggie deli counter. And they were $5 a pound. Well, surely these had to be the special mushrooms. Weren't there any more somewhere, perhaps in a shrink-wrapped styrofoam container? Nope. I reluctantly bagged up what I thought was 3 cups of cremini mushrooms, just knowing that that bag was probably worth more than my shoes. Surprisingly, that big bag didn't even come to a pound. In retrospect, of course it wasn't a pound! Mushrooms are primarily air. I just saw the sticker price and freaked out. If the sticker had said "35 mushrooms for $5," I'd have gone, "Oh, what a bargain!"
I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the fresh herbs were much less expensive at "Whole Foods" than I had seen them for at other stores. And I didn't need to use tons of any one of them, so they will last me for several recipes.
The hardest things for me to find were the arborio rice and nutritional yeast (yeast is for another recipe - stay tuned). I was looking all over the store for them in their pre-packaged bags, the way I'd normally find them. But here these items were kept in bins, much like candy in a candy store. As it turns out, "Whole Foods" buys the majority of the nuts and grains they sell in bulk so that they can a) keep prices down and b) reduce the amount of unnecessary packaging that goes on, thus saving even more money and creating less waste. Three cheers for them! Again, the prices on the bins made me a little nervous. But really, nutritional yeast weighs about as much as saw dust.
My point? I didn't go broke at the register today. Although I don't think that it would be financially prudent to do all of my grocery shopping at the health food store, I am no longer scared to walk out of there with a large paper bag full of food. Especially when the food is so obviously better (tasting and nutritionally) than what I could get at my regular market.
As for the risotto, this recipe was so wonderful that even my husband, a self-proclaimed mushroom hater, said he would eat it as a main dish if I was to make it again. It says that it serves 4, but I had quite a bit of it tonight and still ended up with 5 one-cup servings as leftovers. I'm not generally a cookbook girl. Like, I can usually take 'em or leave 'em and I don't use them but maybe on holidays. But do yourself a favor and BUY THIS BOOK and all of the savory pseudo-fancy ingredients that comprise the recipes in it.
That is all.
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