The Complete Vegetable Cookbook: A seasonal, zero-waste guide to cooking with vegetables

by James Strawbridge

A cook's e-guide to the wonderful world of vegetables, season by season.James Strawbridge opens your eyes to more than 40 vegetables, profiling them one by one and sharing innovative new recipes, old classics, and twists on tradition. An advocate of zero-waste cooking, James shows you all the edible parts of each vegetable and suggests ways you can use the different elements in your cooking. Then, learn about each plant and its varieties in more detail before being guided through the best ways to prepare, butcher, and preserve.There are over 120 delicious vegetarian recipes for you to main meals, light lunches, and sides. Rustle up one of James' family favorites, a warming fennel gratin for a cozy fall evening meal, beet dough balls, or carrot and cardamom ice cream--discover how simple ingredients can deliver utmost flavor. Sections on inventive ways to use leftovers, preserving, fermenting, and roasting ideas as well as James' top tips and "try this" suggestions will inspire you to think of new ways of cooking.A comprehensive vegetable reference and recipe collection that's a must-have in any cook's kitchen.

Genres: Cookbooks, Nonfiction

709 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 14, 2021

Reviews

[Hilary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite a big book, over 300 pages and there's lots to look at. This is an ideal book for someone who wants to start growing their own vegetables or someone who wants to eat more vegetables and needs to find new things to do with them. Having been an avid vegetable grower for many years this probably isn't one I'd buy new (my copy is from the library), as there was nothing that struck me as something completely new to me but if I came across this second hand I would probably get it to flick through for a reminder when faced with a glut of something. This book doesn't have growing times which I think would have been a nice addition but perhaps then it would have made it too specific to the UK. Some recipes used cheese or eggs but the main focus was the vegetable so there was plenty in here for any diet.

There's some nice photography of vegetables and plants, I can imagine reading this in the early months of the year would really get me excited about starting the new growing year!

[Ditte · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/3 stars
I like the idea of this book: seasonal cooking where you use all of the edible parts.
Most of the recipes I've seen before (I don't need another pumpkin soup).
Zero waste-cooking should also showcase the mentioned parts of the veggies/fruits in the recipes, ex: in the chapter about broad beans the author writes that you can eat the tops and flowers!
I love this and hoped that the following recipes would have these parts of the broad beans in them, but no. Only the beans.
Then why write this?

[Caroline McGrath · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is brilliant - I LOVED it! Both inspirational and accessible, I pretty much want to cook / bake / ferment / bbq everything in here. We already eat loads of vegetarian based food at home and this book will help us continue our journey to eat sustainably and ethically - while creating utterly delicious meals at the same time. Bravo!

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Complete" is a bold claim, and one that isn't backed up by the amount of content, either the number of different types of vegetable or the depth in which they're covered. The content is fine, but I didn't gain a lot from it.