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(More customer reviews)I would love to give this book five stars. When I first bought it, I certainly would have. However, as I worked my way through the book and cooked with more of the recipes, I found myself with headaches as often as I had great food.
Here's why: This book is not edited well, and it is not written with a beginning or even an intermediate cook in mind. That combination spells disaster. In roughly a third of the recipes in the book, vital details are missing, details that might seem minor to a casual reader or obvious to advanced cooks but mean the difference between beautiful food and a disgusting, and in some cases expensive, catastrophe.
Here's a good example. Many of the book's recipes call for a meat substitute called seitan, a sort of gluten loaf cooked in broth. A recipe for seitan is provided in the early chapters of the book. Interested in making at home what can be a very expensive item in the store, I set out to make seitan one day according to the recipe provided in Petrovna's book.
So, I followed the directions to the letter, going through the entire process of making the dough and rinsing out the starch and kneading the resulting gluten ball, a process that takes place over the course of hours. Then, I prepared the broth that the gluten is cooked in - a very salty broth, I should add - and put the whole thing on the stove to cook, a process that also took hours. However, as I put the pot on the stove, I found myself rereading the directions over and over again, hoping that I'd find a clue as to whether or not to put the lid on the pot while the seitan cooked. There was none, except a picture of the seitan cooking, which featured a pot with no lid on it. So I decided to take a chance and leave the lid off.
What I got at the end was a very time-consuming, very messy ball of salt. This is no exaggeration. Eating the seitan was comperable to taking a shot of salt and washing it down with another shot of salt. The liquid had boiled down, depositing all of the salt in the gluten loaf. I had no way of knowing that this was probably not the intended effect until I tasted the seitan and found it completely unedible. Had I been instructed in the directions to simply put the pot lid on, I might have had something to show for my effort besides a huge loaf of gluten-flavored salt.
Unfortunately, there are a ridiculous number of this type of omission in "Native Foods." Slips as simple as forgetting to instruct readers to grease a pan, to drain canned vegetables before using them, or to add more water if a recipe gets dry can leave all but the most experienced cooks with a disaster instead of dinner. Most of the recipes in this book are fun and imaginative, and if the directions are clear they come out beautiful and delicious. Unfortunately, every time I use this book I feel like I'm playing Russian Roulette, so I've come to pass this book up for ideas unless I've got a lot of time and money to buy groceries.
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The Native Foods Restaurant CookbookWhen people ask Tanya Petrovna, "Are you a strict vegetarian?" she replies, "No, I'm a fun vegetarian!" As head chef of the popular Native Foods chain of restaurants in Southern California, Tanya treats her customers to a vegan cuisine that is so tasty, satisfying, and hearty that it draws praise from nonvegetarians and vegetarians alike. Tanya is known for creating delicious and satisfying meat substitutes from soy and wheat products such as tofu, tempeh, and seitan. And with signature dishes like her dairy-free cheesecake made from cashew nuts, she proves that healthy, animal-friendly eating can be indulgent and fun.Now, with this book, Tanya's best recipes can be made at home, including: "Fun Mung Curry," "Seitan Olé Mole," and "Rockin' Moroccan Skewers." Plus, there are plenty of outrageous desserts such as "Elephant Chocolate Cake with Cinnamon Peanut Butter Topping," "Sam's Vegan Cheesecake," and "Chocolate French Silk Lingerie Pie." The Native Foods Restaurant Cookbook also features instructions on basic cooking methods, helpful definitions, nutritional information, and a simple kitchen pantry setup.
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