The Real Food Daily Cookbook: Really Fresh, Really Good, Really Vegetarian

I bought this book due to the great things I heard about salisbury seitan. I found many more great recipes that were a great surprise once done that they tasted so good. My kids ask for the raw cashew cheese. They love to dip crackers into it. I read all of the reviews and many said the ingredients were too hard to find. Well, you can get agave at walmart, and you dont have to live in NY to find the ingredients. I live in SC and this was my first vegetarian cookbook and I don't have a problem with this. When you get these few "weird" ingredients you will realize you use them for much more than these recipes. I am finding that I am learning new healthier ways to cook and the ingredients being staples in my pantry I am using daily. I just finished basic seitan, salisbury seitan, golden gravy, and garlic mashed potatoes. Prepped everything in an hr. and of course the seitan takes 2 hrs to cook, but it's several batches worth that you will freeze and have instant seitan ready for more dinners. If you figure that any fancy dinner that you are not used to making out of your head will take this long, it's no big deal. Eventually, you will be able to make these out of your head and it will take less time. Even if you buy this book expecting to make an occassional dinner when you feel like you have time or a day off, it is worth it. That is what I bought it expecting to do and have realized I use it more than I thought I would. It's great for making dinners for the family to try to convince them to go vegetarian because these are good. Many things vegetarian that you get recipes for are just not good, but because these are served in a restaraunt, you know they are already tested and they will be good. I made the garlic potatoes my new potatoe recipe. No one can believe that I stopped using butter and milk for my potatoes. $17 is nothing to pay for even a couple "keeper" recipes that are good. Especially since it is extremely hard to find good enough vegetarian recipes to make a family of 9 happy. Kids are picky especially if they are used to eating meat and cheese everyday and have to stop. It's great to find recipes that they won't complain about. Oh, your bread machine is your friend. Take it out of hiding and use it for mixing the dough for seitan and whatever else needs mixing. It is easy to clean and takes you no work. It's great for mixing granola also. Just put it on the dough or jam setting and turn it off after a few minutes of mixing. You can be prepping the rest of the dinner while your machine does all the mixing and saves the mess.

After eating at RFD in Santa Monica, I absolutely had to own this cookbook! I've made a number of recipes and they've all turned out great!This cookbook uses pure ingredients that are not only vegan, but infuse the recipes with loads of nutrients which is a dramatic step up from the standard kind of vegetarian or vegan cookbooks that just remove the meat and animal products. I know there are a number of reviews from people that can't find the ingredients or complain making food from scratch takes time, but I don't have a problem with any of this. My local Raley's in the po-dunk county town I live in carries the majority of the ingredients and the very few items that are not stocked I pick up from Whole Foods from time to time. I prefer to cook from scratch in order to eat pure and healthful foods and since this my health and body is a priority, I find the time for this.The recipes are divided into categories (i.e., starters, soups, sauces, breads, sandwiches, side dishes, desserts etc) and also lists entrees by season which is helpful. The book also contains Thanksgiving recipes and if you're veg like me I'm sure you'll breathe a sigh of relief to have this.

This cookbook has been a wonderful addition to my collection. The recipe for the Cashew Cheddar is unbelieveably good and may cause me to give up dairy cheese. The consistency is perfect! The Ceaser salad with blackened tempeh is one of the best dishes I have made at home. I am a vegetarian, moving towards veganism with a husband who eats meat. He has loved these recipes as well.This book definitely has multiple steps, and is more complicated that a basic book (you won't make these when you are in a hurry for dinner in 20 minutes) but the results are delicious and unique. Some of the ingredients are unusual, but I live in a larger city and have not had a problem finding them. I have enjoyed learning about these new ingredients. This book has definitely helped take my cooking up a notch. A worthy investment!Just to update - favorite recipes so far are: sweet and sour tempeh, thai rice croquettes, ying yang salad with soba noodles, mexicali chop, mac and cheese, and the blackened tempeh ceaser.

I really enjoyed this cookbook and the results were fantastic, but many of the recipes required very expensive and hard-to-find ingredients. The seaweed used in many of the recipes was $10, with the agar flakes also running me about $10. If one batch of vegan cheese costs over 10 dollars, I can do without it the next time. The recipes are not exactly low fat, and I really wouldn't recommend this cookbook to anyone looking to lose weight. Some of the recipes required as much as 1/4 c. of oil or more.Some of the ingredients were poorly-explained, which made it very difficult to buy them. A recipe in the book calls for "umeboshi vinegar," so I went to my local Asian food store and asked about "umeboshi vinegar," which led me to a tub of umeboshi plums (for somewhere in the range of $6). I didn't buy them, but after further research I discovered that umeboshi vinegar is the vinegar that surrounds the preserved plums. In order to make the recipe, I would have to buy a $6 tub of pickled plums, which I would have no use for, and use just the vinegar from them. Maybe the vinegar is sold separately elsewhere, but that's not a good investment for me.This is a great cookbook for "once in awhile," but eating this way every day wouldn't be practical or cost-effective.

Fantastic!

Love love love RFD can't believe it's took me so long to get the book! Now I can make my favourites at home!