Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I first encountered Laurel, Carol et al. in 1985, after reading and being impressed by Diet For A Small Planet but feeling constrained by the narrowness of protein complementarity as it was then understood. I had been told by my doctor to lose the fifty pounds I had gained with my first pregnancy or she wouldn't be around to help me with a second one. A vegetarian friend suggested I try changing the way our family ate. Since I did then and still do love to cook, I was ready and willing to make whatever changes might be necessary. Laurel's Kitchen was a light in the darkness for me. The recipes were fun to make and best of all, they tasted great. My formerly meat and potatoes or nothing Irishman husband took to our new way of eating with real enjoyment. I took great heart from the philosophical musings that began the book and were interspersed with the recipes. When the second edition came out, in 1986, I was fifty pounds lighter and beginning a pregnancy as a well-nourished lacto-ovo vegetarian. My 11 pound son's birth left me two pounds lighter than I had been at his conception. I have gone through 3 copies of the 1986 edition, and have memorized (with our own personal modifications) all our favorite recipes, which have become family classics. I have never regained the weight I lost fourteen years ago and am in my twenty-fifth year of teaching high school history. My husband and our two teen-agers are healthy, slim and energetic. My daughter, at 16, takes a lot of static from well-meaning "friends" about her vegetarian diet, but she remains committed but never censorious of others' eating habits. We are happy with our choice and eternally grateful for the wit, wisdom and just plain good eating to be found in Laurel's Kitchen. As Carol states,"Laurel didn't believe just in cooking vegetarian...it had to taste good."
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The New Laurel's KitchenThe New Laurel's Kitchen includes plenty of simple, beat-the-clock recipes - who doesn't need them? But it refuses to blur the distinction between natural foods and fast foods. If you need forty-five minutes to bake a potato or cook brown rice, fine. That's good, solid wind-down time, precious in today's hurried world: time to cut up green beans, or prepare a cauliflower curry; time for the children to dry the lettuce and help make an Appley Bread Pudding. Laurel's kitchen has its own pace - a human pace, that lets other things happen besides just dinner.Good health is the first concern here, and foods that support it are rendered irresistible: dishes like Mushrooms Petaluma, Poppyseed Noodles, Lazy Pirogi, and Sebastapol Pizza. These are well-tested and innately manageable recipes, homespun, but with a generous splash of the sophistication that has swept the food world in recent years.
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