Eat Your Veg–Book Review

 

Until last week I was thinking that I going to review a cook book for vegetarians, but on Saturday morning when I received the book by post, I realized I was wrong. Eat Your Veg published by Octopus publishing group is for everyone. Especially, if you have small kids at home, who are not so much into their veg then this book will be a good fit to your cookbook collection.

I usually go to the veg market and pick up things I find interesting. Some times I end up wondering what to do with some of them. I think now that this book is going to rescue me when I am stuck with a boring vegetable and would like to use it for making nice dish! Beetroot is one good example!  The book starts with beetroot recipes under root veg. The recipes are easy to follow and most ingredients are usually available in in your cupboards or fridge. Most of the recipes are accompanied with beautiful photos.

The author Arthur Potts Dawson has done a very claver job of presenting the regular vegetables in an attractive and inspiring manner. He categorised the vegetables among five main groups like root and tubers, bulbs and stems, leaves and flowers, fruits and fungi and finally beans and pods.

Each of these categories then has a list of vegetables followed by the recipes with these vegetables as the main ingredients. I love the part where the author writes about mash. There are several pictures of making the mash step by step and then taking mash is your base and flavouring it with lots of other veg like saffron and shallot mash or parsley and dill mash.

The book contains recipes that uses egg, fish and meat but as the name of the book suggests these are not the most prominent ingredient in the dish. Vegetables are still the star of the dish and the meats or fish are there to only to enhance the flavour. There are some not so common recipes as well, like roasted sweet potato with Marshmallow and maple syrup. but the book also contains some familiar recipes like butternut squash ravioli.

The best way to test this book is to go to the farmer's market and do a bucket load of veg shopping, then come home and find recipes from the book and try it out.

Initially I thought that the down side of this book is that it’s not easy to find a particular recipe in this book as the recipes are not listed with page numbers. The Quickest way to find a recipe will be looking through the index. But then, that itself is a good thing because that will make you glance through the other recipes and inspire you to experiment with different vegetables which until recently you didn't think were interesting enough!

This book will be available in the market in early May this year but you can pre order the book in amazone at a lesser price!