I’m back with another cookbook from the Abrams Dinner Party!  I am a meat eater but do have a sister that is a vegetarian and my MIL used to be vegan.  So anytime I was hosting a dinner, I needed to make sure that something on the menu would be suitable for them to eat.  It really isn’t too hard to adapt recipes to make them vegetarian-friendly and of course, it depends on what level the person is a vegetarian or vegan.  My sister will eat some dairy and eggs so that made it a little easier with some dishes.  It is also easy to swap out vegetable stock for chicken stock in dishes.

Let me tell you about this cookbook.  If you are a beginning cook or learning your way around what is vegan, this is a great place to start.  The intro is in a nice huge font which makes it very easy to read.  You have no idea how much I appreciated the larger font.  The author then provides some cooking tips and then shares common vegan ingredients, how they are used and what to look for in that particular item.  Then the book is divided into chapters based on category and each category has its own color.  This is nice because if you know you want to look at pasta and noodle dishes then you look at the yellow section.  My only complaint when it comes to the categories is that the ingredient list is in the color of the section.  So the pasta and noodles section has the ingredient list in yellow.  It makes it a little harder to read if the color is a bit lighter.

I have made a few dishes from this cookbook and have marked a few others I want to try soon.  My husband is not a vegetarian by any stretch so I knew some of the main dishes wouldn’t be for him.  But there are a couple of super easy side dishes in the back that rounded out a meal quite nicely.  I made the Turmeric Garlic Rice and the Ginger Sweet Potato Mash.  I’ve made a sweet potato mash in the past but never thought about putting ginger in the dish and that spice added just the right little something to round it out.

For a dinner party tonight I decided to try the two cupcake recipes – Strawberry Lemonade and Chocolate with Peanut Butter Frosting.  Because it is November, I didn’t have any good strawberries on hand but did have some raspberries.  This is a delicious replacement for the strawberries.  The recipes are not hard to make and everyone at the party loved both flavors. In fact, several of us took half of each flavor to try.  I actually cut the recipes in half so that I only made 6 of each flavor instead of 12.  I really didn’t need that many extra hanging around!  Both icing recipes made more than enough for 6 cupcakes even with the recipe cut in half.  The icing is very sweet, but when combined with the cupcake (which was not sweet) it made for the perfect bite.  The dinner guests were surprised when I announced that dessert was vegan.  I decided after I took the photo to put a few peanuts on the chocolate cupcakes.  Because the color was close to the frosting color I don’t think it mattered much, but perhaps chopping them up and sprinkling on top would have added a crunch to the dessert.

This is a very versatile cookbook and I highly recommend it to anyone learning to cook or interested in some vegan dishes.

We give it 5 paws up.

About the Book

Isa Chandra Moskowitz is the undisputed queen of vegan home cooking. Her readers turn to her for recipes that work, whether they’re looking for cupcakes that adhere to their diet or comforting Thanksgiving dinners that taste as satisfying as their childhood memories. With I Can Cook Vegan, Isa offers doable recipes designed to help inspire people to kick their meat habits, improve digestion, and become all-around better citizens of the world. The book includes shopping lists, achievable goals, cheerleading, and an extensive FAQ, all written in Isa’s inimitable voice and style. But the book isn’t only for meat eaters looking for a better way to live: Isa wants to get vegans to start cooking more so that they can worry less about what they can and cannot eat. The perfect book for Isa’s legions of fans and anyone interested in learning vegan basics.