thoughts on 500 Vegan Recipes

This isn't a book review, this is just, like the title says, my thoughts on this recipe book. First thought: YAY! This book is everything I hoped it would be. (More info on it here.) For one thing, it contains 500 recipes that are vegan. And loving have cake, will travel is a good indicator toward loving this book. It's fun to read. It's fun to make the food in it. It's fun to eat the food in it!

There was this moment where I was first paging through the recipes, and accidentally skipped the first breakfast section, so I was only in the muffin section, and, okay, I don't like muffins. (Many people have tried to convince me that I like muffins. I also don't like cake or cupcakes or brownies or other cake-like foods. It seems a lot like bread that has something wrong with it. The fact that I like banana bread is what makes some people think I am simply biased against muffins and would really like them if I bothered to try. I keep trying; muffins are not for me.) So I was dismayed. I was like, why is this breakfast section all muffins?! 

Then I found the actual breakfast section (or the rest of it -- for now I'm just going to keep pretending there are no muffins). Smoothies with oats in them? Banana fritters? Pumpkin tofu scramble? Zucchini fritters? Maple hickory tofu strips? I am so there. I've been making banana fritters and zucchini fritters for breakfast all week. I also made the lentil tart and it was amazing, and I'm pretty sure my time making the tahini crust for it is the only time I have ever, ever, followed a pie crust recipe as written and it made the amount of pie crust it suggested it would. 

This is what really sold me on the book though: deviled "egg" salad. I'm pretty sure deviled eggs are the only non-vegan food I miss. I see them at dinner parties (for some reason, they always appear at dinner parties!) and it's difficult. Also it's actually been so long since I've eaten eggs that the actual smell of actual eggs is gross, and kind of rotten-seeming, so when I actually get near enough to real deviled eggs to contemplate them, I get queasy. (This does have the advantage of making it easier to avoid ingesting eggs.) Okay, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Basically, deviled eggs are great, and the ones made out of tofu in this recipe are even greater, because they're delicious and animal-free. Hooray! 

Other recipes I can't wait to try: spinach quiche; basically all of the seitan sausages; mushroom lasagna; white pizza; open sesame cookies; peppermint bark; and baked chocolate almond pudding.