Cookbook - "The Conscious Cook"

This past week I took on another two recipes from one of my veggie cookbooks. I received Tal Ronnen's The Conscious Cook as a gift (thanks, Grandma!) and for a long time I avoided it because I found many of its recipes to be too advanced (for my level of cooking), and its ingredients too hard to find (for my local grocery sources). Well, after making the Mediterranean Chickpea Wrap and the Tempeh Creole Over Brown Rice, I found that the end results were well worth the recipes' complexity. Both were extremely flavorful, rich, and hearty - which I think speaks to the author's goal for all of his recipes: to make vegan meals that don't make the eater miss meat or dairy.

In fact, Ronnen's introduction to his cookbook is addressed to "meat-eaters," inviting them to "experience (and love) food in a whole new way" and to "get away from the microwave and spend some time enjoying the creativity of putting together beautiful, flavorful, unexpected dishes." I can relate both to this approach to cooking and to his approach to vegetarianism: he doesn't like sprouts, and when he became a vegetarian he "didn't abandon his taste buds. [He] took them with [him]." That is clear from the two dishes I made. We'll see if I can tackle some of the others from this book.