Cookbook 3 – For The Love Of Food: Vegetarian Recipes from the Heart, Denis Cotter.

My husband read in a review that this is one of the finest vegetarian cookbooks and so purchased a copy. At the time, my vegetarian niece and now husband were living in Cardiff and would come to our house for dinner. Having a good vegetarian cookbook was helpful. They have since left the UK but I took the cookbook out of the cupboard when I decided to cook a Meatless Monday supper.

The cookbook is divided into the following categories: Breakfast, Salad, Risotto, Soup, Mash, All Wrapped Up, Bowls, Oven, and Sweetness and is filled with recipes that are “simply nice things to eat” says the author. So there are no major themes, and on purpose, but I found one. Most of these recipes are for when you have time to cook and want to prepare a lovely meal for your friends and family. Generally speaking these are not quick meals.

The Breakfast category has lovely recipes such as vanilla & coconut risotto with spiced mango and pistachio and savoury dishes such as a vegetarian breakfast sausage with a spiced breakfast chutney. The Risotto chapter has an introduction about different techniques for cooking risotto and gives several vegetable combination recipes for a tasty dish, such as risotto of cavolo nero with saffron-chilli leeks and beetroot risotto with lemon-fennel oil, goats cheese and broad beans. The Soup section has a variety of substantial soups with interesting ingredient combinations, such as celeriac soup with walnut & green pepper salsa and goat’s cheese cream. The Mash chapter is in praise of the mashed potato and gives recipes and ideas to inspire meal time mash such as leek and wasbi mash with oyster mushrooms and choi in a coconut tamarind sauce. The chapter All Wrapped Up is a celebration of stuffed vegetables and terrines such as chard dolmades of quinoa, carrot & currants with saffron cashew butter sauce.

Couscous salad with fresh apricots, broccoli, feta and a minted tomato dressing.

My vegetarian cooking tends to lean towards, pasta dishes, soups, stuffed vegetables and hearty stews with pulses and vegetables so I turned to this cookbook for some different ideas . I decided to make 2 of the substantial salads. The first was a couscous salad with fresh apricots, broccoli, feta and a minted tomato dressing. I also made the salad of roasted courgette, green beans & puy lentils with coriander, mint & yoghurt dressing. I was drawn to recipes that called for mint as we have a lot of wild mint growing around our house and I am always looking for new ideas for using it.

Salad of roasted courgette, green beans and puy lentils with a coriander mint and yoghurt dressing.

Both salads were lovely substantial salads and simply required slow roasting of vegetables and mixing them with the cooked grains and making the dressing to go with.

If you are looking for a vegetarian cookbook with creative combinations of ingredients then give For the Love of Food a try. The recipes do not call for complex cooking techniques but as a general rule these are not 30 minute meals. You will want to have time to enjoy cooking these lovely recipes as simply beautiful things to eat.

You can find this book at good local book stores and on Amazon by clicking the image,