Mark Reinfeld - The 30-Minute Vegan: Over 175 Quick, Delicious, and Healthy Recipes for Everyday Cooking

Table of Contents

Praise for The 30-Minute Vegan:

The 30-Minute Vegan is not only a culinary delight for vegetarians and vegans, it appeals to people who relish a meal that luxuriates the palate and satisfies the spirit.

Michael Bernard Beckwith, author of Spiritual Liberation: Fulfilling Your Souls Potential

Dont let a lack of time keep you from making a healthy choice! These quick, delicious recipes will see you through even the busiest mealtimes with good taste and style.

Jennifer McCann, author of Vegan Lunch Box and Vegan Lunch Box Around the World

Mark Reinfeld and Jennifer Murray have written a classic, practical guide to preparing exquisitely tasteful, healthy vegan food that is ideal for busy folks of today. Every home will be enriched by having this book in the kitchen. It is suitable for daily meals prepared for family members, as well as special holiday celebrations.

Arthur H. Brownstein, M.D., M.P.H., author of Healing Back Pain Naturally and Extraordinary Healing

The Complete Idiots Guide to Eating Raw (with Bo Rinaldi)

Vegan Fusion World Cuisine (with Bo Rinaldi)

By Deborah Madison

Imagine starting the day with a luscious galactic smoothie thats filled with dates and papayas, or a chai latte made not from a tea bag or a mix, but from black tea simmered with ginger and spices, the way its done traditionally. For something more substantial, you might add a southwest scrambleof not eggs, but tofu and herbs and spicesfilling, yes, but its also light. For lunch, you might dip into a warm bowl of soba noodles or make yourself a wrap (add a side of pickled beets here) and, come dinnertime, you may anticipate tucking into a red lentil-infused quinoa kitchari or a warm African sweet potato soup. Need a snack between meals? How about some toasted pepitas, crispy kale (now this is good!), or flavored popcorn? Do you have children? There are recipes just for them. Open The 30-Minute Vegan and you might well be surprisedand no doubt pleasedby whats inside. A host of appealing recipes can be found between the covers of this book, as well as a lot of good information about food and cooking in general, surprisingly realistic approaches to thirty-minute cooking with real food, and more, from glossaries to Web sites.

The authors, Mark Reinfeld and Jennifer Murray, know that Im not a vegan and probably you should know that, too. Although butter and cheese find their way into my vegetarian cookbooks and my kitchen, quite a few of my recipes are vegan, too, simply because many dishes I love happen to be so. Traditional, largely plant-based food cultures are full of dishes that today could be called vegan, and they are the dishes I turned to when I opened Greens restaurant in 1979. Like our vegetarian dishes, they were greeted with enthusiasm, not because they were lacking dairy, but because they tasted good and were familiar to our mostly nonvegetarian customers. (Who didnt know pesto?) Looking back to that time, it would have been difficult to imagine a vegan menu, or a book like The 30-Minute Vegan, which often overlooks traditional flavors in favor of a more carefree blend of elements and ingredients. But Im open to being open, and Im delighted to have Mark and Jennifers book in hand. Its introduced me to some new dishes and although I may never be a full-time veganI did grow up on a small dairy farm, after all, and cream is in my veinsI can certainly appreciate recipes that sidestep some ingredients we may well benefit from setting aside at least from time to time, while retaining flavor and appeal.

What I especially appreciate in The 30-Minute Vegan is the effort Mark and Jennifer make to woo, albeit gently, the reader away from highly processed convenience foods even if they are vegan, toward foods that are whole, fresh, and minimally processed, which means, one really does need to do some cooking. Although they live and cook in Hawaii, The 30-Minute Vegan is not too Hawaii based, which makes it ultimately practical for the home cook who happens to live on the mainland. Add to these virtues the knowledge that youre not going to be spending all day in the kitchen and you have a very useful book, indeed. Because Mark and Jennifer are so committed to helping you put real food on the table in a half hour or less, they provide various tips and tricks, including encouraging readers to hone their knife skills, which is good advice for anyone, but especially for people who havent spent much time in the kitchen. They also know that if you arent linear about how you think of cooking and organize yourself, you can accomplish a lot more quicklymore good advice and the kind thats often lacking in thirty-minute cookbooks.

This practical book is also a friendly one. Use what you have and what you love, the authors advise if you cant find a particular ingredienta relief for many, Im sure. And although vegan food may be different from mainstream food, who says that vegans dont want to have some egg(less) nog during the holidays, a chocolate-covered strawberry now and then, or lemon bars?... They do, and even if theyre not quite like what the rest of us are familiar with, the authors are generous in their offering of vegan approaches to familiar dishes such as corn on the cob, pizzas and pastas, BBQ sauce (for tempeh), polenta, as well as desserts.

For me as a cook, the goal of any cuisine, especially one that omits culturally mainstream ingredients, like animal products, is to come up with food that is delicious and a joy to eat. My favorite comment from customers at Greens was, Oh, I forgot that there wasnt any meat. You want your eater, even if its just you, to come away from a meal having forgotten all about those missing ingredients. Its not enough to exclude the shunned ingredientthats only going partway. The food has to sing, too.

So I especially appreciate that The 30-Minute Vegan emphasizes building blocks for flavor, such as herb-infused oils, and even the uses of herbs, so important and so often ignored. That theres an emphasis on food thats fresh, local, seasonal, and organic speaks, not only to our concerns about the environment, but again to the quality of the foods we cook. If you want to cook simply and well, youll be best off if you cook with the most flavorful ingredients, which, as it happens, tend to be fresh, seasonal, local, and organic. A useful glossary of foods and tools says that cooking know-how is taken seriously here, and it needs to be if you want to be self-reliant and free of processed foods. And I am forever happy that there are no breakdowns of recipes to keep readers obsessive about things one neednt (and no doubt shouldnt) be obsessing about.

Despite the challenges afoot with embracing a vegan lifestylenot only the decision to be vegan but to fully enjoy eating this wayMark and Jennifer offer a calm sense of purpose, unquestionable joy, and warm encouragement to those who want to cook and eat this wayespecially those who find time in short supply.