Whether you eat meat or not, a good vegetarian cookbook will help you enrich your cooking and of course help you cook without meat in a way that’s tasty and healthy. Since eating meat daily is associated with all kinds of disease, most prominently heart problems, eating vegetarian at least a few times a week is a health choice.
I’ve found you the most popular vegetarian cookbooks out today. I have selected them in part based on how much attention they pay to healthy cooking that tastes good as well.
Of course these books go by the normal Western definition of vegetarian: no meat or fish included, but most do include milk products and egg as ingredients occasionally.
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison
This is a cookbook that will help you become a better cook. As such it also serves as an introduction to cooking such as old-fashioned classic cookbooks used to do: learn about the right way to prepare your ingredients. For less than $20 you get over 800 recipes as well.
Because this cookbook uses such a variety of ingredients, without going all gourmet on you, it will help you keep your food out of the fridge and on your plate. One reviewer says it’s the most used cookbook in her kitchen, and she’s not a vegetarian at all!
This is a best seller!
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food by Chef Mark Bittman.
If you thought 800 recipes was a lot, this cookbook will blow you away: it has 2000 vegetarian recipes! Unbelievable. Mark Bittman is professional chef who is NOT a vegetarian. He’s simply a chef who has decreased the amount of meat he eats over the past three years.
He shares the recipes he developed to do that in this cookbook.
Like my earlier recommendation, this book too includes a lot of help in how to select and prepare your vegetables.
The recipes in this top cookbook start simple but are still surprising and tasty.
Student’s Vegetarian Cookbook, Revised: Quick, Easy, Cheap, and Tasty Vegetarian Recipes by Carole Raymond
142 quick and easy recipes for students who want to eat vegetarian at least some of the time, as well as for adults who just want a quick introduction to cooking without meat.
Quick-Fix Vegetarian: Healthy Home-Cooked Meals in 30 Minutes or Less by Robin Robertson
150 easy recipes that will help you get you started on vegetarian cooking. Described as a ‘perfect cookbook for new vegetarians and vegans’ by veganbreak.com. For one thing, the recipes in this book aren’t just vegetarian, they’re actually all VEGAN. That is: they don’t contain meat, fish, milk products, cheese or even egg.
Because these are quick recipes, chances are, you’ll actually try them for every day cooking.
Oh, and this cookbook is sturdy: it will surely survive your cooking from it and may well pass on to your children: hard cover, great paper, color photographs.
Vegetarian 5-Ingredient Gourmet by Nava Atlas.
There is a reason this cookbook is available starting at $2.37 (as I write this, it may change) this is a paperback vegetarian cookbook. The pictures are all black and white.
That’s just about the only negative though: it has 250 quick and easy recipes, which help you create a tasty vegetarian meal using only a few ingredients.
Best Vegetarian BBQ and Grilling Cookbook for Summer
Grilling Vegan Style: 125 Fired-Up Recipes to Turn Every Bite into a Backyard BBQ
BBQ and grilling cookbooks for vegetarians are a simple gift that every vegetarian can use especially when it’s time for that summer BBQ. In summer especially it can be tough to come up with vegetarian recipes for the barbecue. Whether you’re a vegetarian a vegan or merely someone who wants to serve all – BBQ or not – this selection of cookbooks will help you serve vegetarian food on the grill.
When having guests over it’s customary to serve some sort of vegetarian recipe with your main course so that you have food for everyone’s interests. This is especially hard when it comes to serving a barbecue: such a meat-centered tradition. All the more reason to get a cookbook about vegetarian grilling to be able to serve everyone.
What’s a Vegetarian again?
There are different types of vegetarians. Most people who call themselves vegetarian don’t eat meat or fish at all. This obviously makes a BBQ the last type of food fest they’d be likely to throw. However, as these books show, a vegetarian (or even vegan) grill cook-out is definitely doable, fun and tasty.
Some vegetarians also avoid eggs – Indian vegetarians and some Buddhist vegetarians do. Though many Buddhists are actually not vegetarian at all.
People who avoid all types of dairy as well as eggs, meat and fish are called vegans.