Reviews and Comments

I think on some spiritual level, even though this wasn't published until I was an adult, I feel like I read and loved this as a young teen. Reading it now felt like wrapping myself in the coziest blanket of imaginary nostaliga. I stayed up late reading this and read it instead of doing other things I needed to do. It's been a very long time since I have felt this immersed in a world.

It reminded me a little of The Goblin Emperor in its depth of humanity, and its portrayal of cruelty that doesn't make light of it, and, weirdly, I feel like there's some backstory parallels with Gideon the Ninth, although it couldn't be more differently tonally.

There were times were I did find it a little moralizing, and when the writing rang a bit off, but I loved it very much and if you don't like it I don't want to hear about it because it's been retrconned into my cherished childhood lore.

This whole cookbook reminds me of a recipe note in Veganomicon, which advises the reader not to bother serving it to omnivores, and "save this for appreciative vegetarians and vegans." If you're not already pumped about fake meat, skip this.

Most of the book is recipes for meals which include fake meat. The ones I made were pretty good! I generally find that I add more seasoning and fat than she suggests, and of the recipes I've added to my rotation, I don't make any of them exactly as written.

I've been living off the batches of the chili for weeks, with some added veggies and almost twice as much chili powder.

Usually I get recipes intended to have meat in them and do substitutions, which works fine for me, but it was fun to cook from recipes that are on the same page as me from the outset.

The later part of the book has recipes for DIY'ing the meat itself, which is extremely my jam -- I almost always make my own. It's almost all seitan, which is fine by me, and her recipes are great. I love the ground beef, which goes through a stage in preparation which she describes as resembling a "strawberry milkshake" but comes out an appetizing brown.

My only complaint is that I wish she'd given more technical info and instructions for the meat recipes. Seitan has a bit of a learning curve, and, like bread, it makes a big difference if you know what textures feel right. I always have to use quite a bit more gluten than recipes call for because whatever brand I get isn't as glutinous; that's not on her and I know the territory, but I'd be cautious sharing the recipes with people who've never done it before.

As a seitan nerd, I wish she'd explained why she was adding, for example, oat flour or pea protein (which I still haven't found in stores). And I was disappointed that she doesn't use cooked chickpeas in any, which produces my favorite seitan texture.

Overall, I've really enjoyed it and I'll make my version of a handful of the recipes on the regular, which is the ideal outcome for a cookbook.