The Vegetarian Kitchen is a recipe book with over 140 easy and simple vegetarian recipes. Mellisa Bushby is a home cook and she has written down some of her family’s favourite recipes. Mellisa describes it as getting back to basics with hearty and comforting foods. There are lots of bread recipes as well as many pastry based dishes, it even has a section with recipes for health care and beauty products. Although it is advertised as vegetarian and lactose free, there are no eggs or animal products used in any of the recipes so it would be great for vegans or people with dairy or egg allergies.
I’m liking
The recipes are really simple and most have ingredients the average non-vegetarian or vegan eater would have at home. The recipes are really non-threatening, they are mainly remakes of classics or dishes that even picky or unadventurous eaters would enjoy.
So many vegetarian recipes have cheese in them, but I can’t eat dairy and so it was great to have a book full of recipes I could use. There’s even a recipe for a “cheese” sauce, which, while it wouldn’t fool anyone who eats cheese regularly, was pretty good as a substitute.
Vegan cakes are hard to do well, and there are some great ones here. I particularly liked the ones which use applesauce to replace butter and so are very low fat.
Things that made me go hmmmm
Some of the specifically South African ingredients would be difficult to find in New Zealand – Fry’s vegetarian chunky strips for example. Others come under different names to those NZers would be familiar with.
There is a lot of pastry in this book – two separate recipes for onion tarts even! I think this detracts slightly from the healthy eating angle of her book.
The ingredient lists for some recipes are confusing. I was going to make a cake recipe, but couldn’t figure out when it listed soya butter, oil or applesauce, if that meant soya butter and oil or applesauce, or soya butter or oil or apple sauce.
The conclusion
I found the savoury recipes in this book a bit too unadventurous for my tastes, I like my food a bit peppier and spicier, so it would suit people who prefer simple comfort food. This would be a great recipe book for people who are venturing out into the world of vegetarian or vegan cooking, particularly those who maybe want to cook for a vegan friend or family member and don’t know where to start. It would also be great for vegans who are having meat eaters around for dinner and don’t want to scare them off with a fiery chickpea curry!
It would also be great for people wanting to get into egg and dairy free baking. The book would be worth it just for the baking recipes alone!
