Book Review: 2024 Plant Based Diet Cookbook for Beginners

Title: 2024 Plant Based Diet Cookbook for Beginners

Author: Sarah Roslin

Date: 2024

Quote: "In your plant-based culinary journey, accuracy is essential."

And that's why this is not an ideal cookbook for beginners. It has pretty computer-generated pictures in the PDF version only, not in the printed version. Recipes are not well edited and in many cases will not yield results that resemble the computer-generated pictures. 

You don't want to do a "plant-based diet" unless you have access to 100% unsprayed plants...and that means free from drifting residues of poison sprays. That's why reading and reviewing this e-book has not been a high priority for me. I didn't want let the file sit until it was totally out of date (calling for products, like specific size packages of tofu, that may have gone off the market) but it's still not ready for the general public to use. 

Because you can't really go wrong with clean fruit and vegetables, as long as you have good-quality ingredients, what these recipes produce will be edible and may even taste good, but it may be very strange. Sometimes you can see how the computer-generated picture presupposes chunks of a vegetable where the recipe tells you to shred it. Sometimes you can't see how the picture shows a different size dish than the recipe will make. One recipe makes about a cup of a grain-legume mix, a good snack for the single cook, but the picture shows about a quart-sized pan full. 

Additionally, several recipes' lists of ingredients don't match the instructions given. Ingredients are not listed in the order they need to be used, so you'll be reading and rereading, going "Lime juice? It says nothing about lime juice...she must have meant the lemon juice in the ingredients list." 

Amounts of ingredients seem to have been copied verbatim from some other source. European cooks typically use postal-size scales and weigh out ingredients American cooks typically measure by volume. There are arguments in favor of either method. You get more precise equivalents of the original cook's recipe by weighing, but atmospheric conditions have a lot to do with the success of some recipes and you may have to spend less time tweaking proportions if you measure by volume. The only trouble is that beginner cooks in the US usually don't have scales. Knowing that a pound equals approximately 455 grams is only a little bit of help in measuring flour out of a 5-pound sack. 

For experienced cooks who have access to wide varieties of clean fruits and vegetables, however, here are some classic and some innovative combinations of produce from gardens around the world that are likely to delight the palate...because very few combinations of fruits and vegetables, in reasonable amounts, ever fail to taste good. 

"Plant-based" is explained at length in comparison with other trendy names for diet plans in the text. It means cooks use plant products when they can--in some recipes corn oil margarine or soybean sausages, assuming clean corn or soybeans, works just fine--but may use milk or egg products when they feel that they must. No recipe in this book calls for meat but some do call for butter, cheese, or honey. 

Most, not all, of these recipes are gluten-free. Most, not all, are sugar-free. All can be made completely nondairy, though some apparently disappointed the original cook when they were. The wide variety of plant products used means it's easy to avoid any specific allergy triggers you may still have even when plant products aren't poisoned with chemicals. (Most people, however, can tolerate clean fruits and vegetables. Most food allergies are sensitivities to chemicals rather than actual food.) 

Is it worth keeping a cookbook like this in the house? Meh. If you're going to find it terribly annoying or frustrating, don't buy a plant-based cookbook yet, but I personally like to keep them around as reminders of hope.