Forks Over Knives: Flavor! – by Darshana Thacker

It’s important to not have to choose too much between health and flavor, because the outcome will never be a good one, either for your health or your happiness. And what’s bad for your happiness will ultimately not work out and thus will be bad for your general health, so, the question becomes: how to get both?

This book handles that nicely, delivering plant-based dishes that are also incidentally oil-free, and also either gluten-free or else there’s an obvious easy substitution to make it such. The flavor here comes from the ingredients as a whole, including the main ingredients as well as seasonings.

On the downside, occasionally those ingredients may be a little obscure if you don’t live in, say, San Francisco, and the ingredients weren’t necessarily chosen for cooking on a budget, either.

However, in most cases for most people it will, at worse, inspire you to try using an ingredient you don’t usually use—so that’s a good result.

The recipes are very clear and easy to follow, although not all are illustrated, and the “ready in…” times are about as accurate as they are for any cookbook, that is to say, it’s the time in which it conceivably can be done if (like the author, a head chef) you have a team of sous-chefs who have done a bunch of prep for you (e.g. sweet potato does not normally come in ½” dice; it comes in sweet potatoes) and laid everything out in little bowls mise-en-place style, and also you know the procedure well enough to not have to stop, hesitate, check anything, wash anything, wait for water to boil or anything else to heat up, or so forth. In other words, if you’re on your own in your home kitchen with normal domestic appliances, it’s going to take a little longer than for a professional in a professional kitchen with professional help.

But don’t let that detract from the honestly very good recipes.

Bottom line: if you’d like to level-up your plant-based cooking, this will definitely make your dishes that bit better!

Click here to check out Forks Over Knives: Flavor!, and dig in!