Vegan 101

The goal of this new cookbook ($19.95; available on Amazon) is to make it easy to create a tasty meal without meat. Whether you're 100% vegan or embracing Meat Free Mondays, this book serves up 101 easy-to-use recipes with a side-order of photos.

Vegan 101 is clear and concise. It opens with a chapter on kitchen basics, including a list of equipment "must haves," a section most useful for beginner home cooks. All recipes include metric conversions.

Recipes are drawn from a wide variety of cuisines and organized into seven chapters:
Appetizers, Snacks & Beverages
Sandwiches, Burgers & Pizza
Pasta
Soups & Stews
Salads
Side Dishes
Desserts

Among the recipes that caught my eye:
Hot ginger lemonade
Falafel burgers with tahini dressing
French-style onion pizza
Stir-fried rice noodles with vegetables
Orange cilantro rice
Mango and black bean salad
Pumpkin cookies

As regular readers of this blog know, last February Dean and I conducted The Plant Perfect Experiment. While Plant Perfect dishes are always vegan, not all vegan recipes are plant perfect. If your goal is to eat Plant Perfect (which differs from vegan in that all foods must be whole grains, fruits or vegetables without using any oils, sugars or processed foods), is this cookbook helpful? Yes. Vegan 101 offers more than two dozen recipes that qualify as Plant Perfect and several others that could be easily adapted.

Bottom Line: A helpful start to healthful cooking.