Viva Vegan!: 200 Authentic and Fabulous Recipes for Latin Food Lovers

mandy — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:08:39 +0000

Let’s just get this out of the way—Terry Hope Romero is the best gift a vegan chef could ever hope for. While I am just a vegetarian, I often find myself flirting with the idea of going vegan. Thanks to Viva Vegan!, though, I can now successfully have a vegan Mexican dinner night.

Now, if you are a vegetarian, chances are you’re familiar with things like seitan and tempeh. If you’re not, no need to worry. Romero begins the book with an extremely helpful section called “The Vegan Latin Pantry,” which itemizes traditional foods necessary for the Latin kitchen and lists vital foods for vegans. The book is helpfully formatted with short paragraphs and text boxes to make the pages more visually interesting—let’s just say that the “These Are a Few of My Favorite Beans” text box has staved off any boredom I was experiencing from my standby black beans and rice lunch.

The 200 recipes in this book are sorted into an impressive fourteen categories, ranging from salsas to tamales. One benefit of having such a range of recipes is that there truly is something for every skill level and every kitchen. Personally, I don’t have a steamer basket or a large lasagna dish, so the tamales weren’t up my alley, but I found plenty of soups, stews, and condiments to try. There aren’t just guacamole and salsa recipes here—Cashew Crema and Chocolate-Chile Mole Sauce make for a delicious condiment section.

In addition to her creativity with condiments, I’ve got to give it to Romero on her commitment to home cooking. An alarming amount of cookbooks seem comfortable recommending that their readers use tons of ingredients that are bought from grocery store shelves, like bread, cakes, and other items that can be made from scratch. While Romero has a few recipes like that, she doesn’t say to head to a specialty store to pick up seitan; she explains how to make your own for chorizo seitan sausages. As someone who’s spent way too much money on seitan in the past, I’m grateful to have an easy recipe to follow that’ll save me money and produce a great dish.

Some of the recipes can be intimidating (I still haven’t tried to conquer making empanada dough), but all of them are well-explained without a hint of condescension. If you’re starving, don’t make the mistake I did by looking at the sixteen pages of full-color pictures. I understand the magic of Photoshop, but digitally-altered or not, that is some fine-looking cuisine. Ultimately, Viva Vegan! is a fun cookbook to read through and experiment with. Romero does a fantastic job of proving that while vegans may have dietary restrictions, there are still plenty of delicious, creative foods to be made and devoured.

Written by: Alyssa Vincent, September 4th 2010

You'd Be So Pretty If...: Teaching Our Daughters to Love Their Bodies—Even When We Don't Love Our Own

admin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:04:00 +0000

By Dara Chadwick

Lifelong Books

In presenting the best ways to work with our daughters regarding self-image, author Dara Chadwick offers relatively comprehensive ideas pertaining to the aspects of maturing for girls into women. By surmising her year writing the "2007 Weight-Loss Diary" column for Shape, Chadwick builds her column into a no-nonsense-this-is-how-it-is book for mothers, daughters, and all of us who interact with young women from early ages.

Looking at her own relationship with her body, the author realizes potential effects on her own daughter who may find her somewhat overly concerned with her body; this could translate into her daughter grappling with similar issues. Basically, Chadwick restates the importance of loving who you are as being the most important trait of being a good person.

While writing her column and undergoing her own transformation, her awareness of her daughter comes through. Realizing the importance of her daughter's keen image of her mother, she looks at her life and interviews others who deal with their own weight issues. The underlying premise remains her own relationship with her daughter, now in the teen years. At the end of each pertinent chapter, the author reiterates some talking points regarding the topic, pulling out the right words fitting the sentiment and deeming them necessary for mothers to talk, a completely understandable point, to their daughters.

Written after her column was completed, You'd Be So Pretty If... gives parents a chance to check in with themselves and arms them with tools to encourage healthy growing up. Not getting messy or too extreme in her interviews, Chadwick's book feels like a good exploration for women to talk to their kids. Covering many topics, she does not go too far into each one, and this leaves us to develop our own research about mothers, media, and school bullying. A compendium spoken from the heart, You'd Be So Pretty If... gives a lighthearted reflective look, but serious read to all of us.

Written by: Carolyn Espe, August 25th 2009