Moosewood Restaurant?

Does anyone own a book from their series, and how do you like it?

I have loved every Moosewood book I ever bought. The recipes are unfailingly delich however also somewhat complex and time consuming to make. I, unfortunatley, am of the fast food generation. Not that I eat at fast food restaurants but that I like walking into my kitchen and walking out with a good meal in a manner of minutes, not hours.

So I don't use them as often as I once did but I will keep them forever and love them as old friends.

The Moosewood Cookbook was inducted into The James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame last year, joining The Joy of Cooking (1978), The Fannie Farmer Cookbook (1979), The Betty Crocker Cookbook (1982), Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1986), and so on. The 2006 inductee was An Invitation to Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey, who presented (YouTube) the award to Mollie Katzen.

I believe it is the best-selling vegetarian cookbook of all time, with The Vegetarian Epicure a distant second. (Though I admit the notes I have may be woefully out of date.)

>3 MMcM:, thanks for the info -- I didn't know that TMC was in the hall of fame! But the Moosewood Restaurant series is unrelated to the Moosewood Cookbook; I've found them to be pretty uneven. I like Sundays at Moosewood and Moosewood Restaurant New Classics quite a lot, and use them regularly, but a number of others I've looked at (or even bought) seem like just the same old dull stuff after a while.

If you're looking for a good vegetarian book with a balance of interesting but not insanely complicated reipes, you might also want to check out How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman, which is wonderful in spite of it's broken touchstone.

I have Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special which I like, use quite often (although probably for the same few recipes) - it's mainly for soup.

I also have been using the Moosewood Restaurant New Classics for ages and enjoyed a lot of great meals. (Not all, however; vegan lasagna is not for me.)

I love the Moosewood Daily Special book, too. I also have Sundays at Moosewood (which I haven't really used), the Mollie Katzen Moosewood Cookbook (which is great for easy recipes), and the Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts. The dessert book is the one that I really don't like much - other baking/dessert books are better.

My favorite vegetarian cookbook is Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison.

I have a funny story about this one. I have the Moosewood Restaurant Low-fat Favorites cookbook. It was the first vegetarian cookbook I owned. When my now-husband and I were dating, I made the "Meatless" shepherd's pie recipe. It took hours and was inedible. That recipe has become the hallmark of failed culinary experience, and we still joke about it. That's when we decided that vegetarian meals would only work for us if they were truly meant to be made vegetarian, as opposed to trying to take something that normally has meat in it and make it "meatless."

Needless to say, it is not my favorite cookbook, although we've had a few good recipes from it. On the other hand, I love Mollie Katzen's children's cookbook Pretend soup. I got it for my daughter last year, and not only does she love cooking from it, she loves to just read through it and name all the steps involved in each recipe.

I've got Moosewood Cooks at Home, all of whose recipes (purportedly) take less than 40 minutes start to finish. It's got a lot of good recipes, including some favorites. I also just bought Moosewood Simple Suppers and Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites, although I haven't had the opportunity to cook anything from either of them.

I actually have a favor to ask... when I was at the restaurant, I was hoping to buy more of their salad dressing, but it seemed as though they had stopped selling the bottles. My mother had the brilliant idea of checking the cookbooks for the recipes... I'm particularly after the Creamy Spinach-Basil dressing and the Feta Garlic dressing. They're not in any of the books I have, but if they were in one of the other cookbooks, I'd happily buy it. Can owners of the other books check their indexes and let me know if I'm ever going to be able to make these for myself, or if I'm going to have to start plotting a return to Ithaca?

I had a look for you and Feta-Garlic dressing is in Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant and Moosewood Restaurant Cooks for a Crowd. I had less luck with Creamy Spinach-Basil dressing - or maybe not. I found LD's Creamy Green dressing which contains spinach and basil - it sounds like the same one. It's in New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant. For your reference, the other M/W books I looked in and drew a blank for Creamy Spinach-Basil dressing, in case LD's isn't the right one, were The Moosewood Cookbook, The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, and Moosewood Restaurant New Classics and you've checked the three you have. Of course there are lots of other M/W cookbooks that other LTers may be able to check.

Awesome, thank you so much! The Creamy Green probably isn't exactly the same, since the Spinach-Basil is their "house" dressing, they might not want to give away all their secrets, but it's worth a try anyways. :)

I have a few of their books - I have cooked from them in the past, but mostly it does come down to a time issue. (And, full disclosure, if I'm pouring a ton of time into a dish, it will usually involve meat.)

I will say that (I believe) the Sunday's at Moosewood is the one I'm designing an herb garden after for next year. We had a fairly decent garden this year and I'd like to expand to fresh herbs and they had a good design. I may be thinking of a different one (the white one, frilly-ish green border on the front?), but it did have a really nice herb guide in it.

ACK! - Moosewood Restaurant Kitchen Garden is the one I mean! Sorry about that!