Veggie Meals: Rachael Ray's 30-Minute Meals by Rachael Ray Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $3.00 You Save: $11.95 (80%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.15 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Veggie Meals: Rachael Ray's 30-Minute Meals
Book Review: Finally!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an amazinf book with amazing recipes. I bought it for my mother in law b/c she was recently diagnosed with Lupus and her Dr. has encouaged her not to eat anything with flour. Anyway, she is not exactly the best cook in the world but she has made some tasty veggie meals from this book. I was also happy to find a book that was about veggies and not about being a vegetarian or vegan.Book Review: good for non-vegetarians only
Summary: 2 Stars
I'd recommend this for people who don't know what to feed their vegetarian guests.
The book is unhelpful for most vegetarians. The book's not bad, but it's not very good either. Ms. Ray doesn't offer much in the way of ingredient substitution suggestions or interesting commentary, and the number of truly interesting recipes is very limited for the money, especially if one's been cooking vegetarian for a while. The recipes also tend to call for a lot of ingredients one doesn't have on hand. (The soups are quite good, and some of the supper snacks are interesting, but she leans too much on risottos and pasta for main dishes.)
Rose Elliot's "Vegetarian Fast Food" has only 4 main ingredients per recipe, keeps her recipes short, offers ingredient substitution suggestions, and offers interesting commentary on most of her recipes. Christine Ingram's "Vegetarian and Vegetable Cooking" has an amazing number of recipes, some very simple and tasty.
Book Review: Good soups, lacking in other areas
Summary: 3 Stars
I like Rachael Ray's show on the Food Network, so I was happy to see she had a vegetarian cookbook. Most of the book is mediocre, the pastas are pretty standard (the Northwoods Pasta is worth trying though, it's very original and quite good), the salads you don't really need recipes for, and the sandwiches are basically "everything you could think of to do with a portobello mushroom".
The shining stars of this book are the soup recipes. These are not the gourmet soups with complex flavors that you would get from simmering all day, but most of them are pretty darn tasty considering they take about 20 minutes to prepare. I usually turn to these soup recipes to serve with a veggie burger or a crusty roll and salad as a really quick meal.
If you like Rachael Ray, are not a vegetarian, and want to get some meatless ideas then check this book out. If you are a vegetarian and have some other cookbooks already, take a second to look at the soup section and decide if the purchase price is worth it to you. I would probably pass on buying the book now that I've had it for a while and tried it out. If you are vegetarian and want a fabulous cookbook check out "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" by Deborah Madison and if you are interested in a vegan cookbook check out "Vegan Planet" by Robin Robertson.
Book Review: Veggie Meals: Rachael Ray's 30-minute meals
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this a a surprise "just because" gift for a daughter in law. She is a vegeraterian and has stated she has run out of ideas for new recipes. She does cook with, and eat dairy, so since Rachael Ray is one of my favorite cooks and TV hosts, I thought this cook book would fill the bill. Well, in fact, she loves it and has tried several meals which were given great reviews by the family. Book Review: Great Rachael Ray Material. Not greatest veggie book!
Summary: 4 Stars
`Veggie Meals' is an early Rachael Ray book, reissued by her original publisher, Lake Isle Press, probably in light of her great recent success with her latest books and TV shows.
This is a hard book to recommend, in spite of the fact that I am a major fan of Ms. Ray's cooking show and the value I find in her '30 Minute Meal' books for people who would like to cook, but who have little time to search through the `Joy of Cooking' or similar encyclopedia for quick cooking meals, especially when they don't know the background behind fast versus slow cooking techniques.
One thing to consider is that while Ms. Ray does give menus of three dishes at the beginning of the book, it is not her classic `three dishes together' recipe presentation where all three recipes are done in the way she does it on her `Thirty Minute Meals' show.
The issue is probably a lot easier if you happen to already be a big Rachael Ray book fan and have many of her other, later books, and, you do not have a lot of cookbooks from other authors. This means that you can get these 95 vegetable recipes for a list price of $14.95 and have little fear of overlapping other books. This price of 15 cents per recipe is good, but not great as celebrity recipes go, but then, these are not really `celebrity' recipes in the same sense as those from Thomas Keller or Rick Tramonto or Eric Rippert. We are buying this book for versions of classic recipes that can be done quickly. And, I believe you should only get this book if:
1. You are primarily interested in fast recipes.
2. You really like Ms. Ray's twist on recipes and writing recipes.
3. You do not have other good books on vegetarian recipes.
This last condition is important because there are a whole lot of very good books of vegetarian and vegetable based recipes available from some pretty famous names in the culinary world. The three leading names are Deborah Madison, Jack Bishop, and Peter Berley. If you are really interested in vegetarian cooking and speed is not your major concern, and then you must get Madison's `Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone'. This big book is comparable in scope and quality to Julia Child's classic `Mastering the Art of French Cooking'. Another excellent Madison book is `Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison's Kitchen'. Equally authoritative is Jack Bishop's `A Year in the Vegetarian Kitchen' or his book on Italian vegetarian dishes. Berley has done two very good vegetarian books, the second being `Fresh Food Fast' which presents fast vegetarian cooking in far more depth than does Ms. Ray.
The moral of this paragraph is that Ms. Ray is treading in a field that already has its share of major league experts.
The recommendation on fast recipes is important because while there are a lot of `classic' recipes in this book, they may not yield `classic' results because of the shortcuts taken to speed up preparation time. The other side of the coin is that this book reassures us that, in a pinch, we can in fact make risotto, pasta Primavera, ratatouille, and eggplant Parmigiano in less than a full afternoon.
So, I suggest that you give just a little thought to parting with your 15 bucks for this book, but that you will probably not be disappointed if you are in Ms. Ray's favored audience.