Product Description

Since its opening in 1973, Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York, has been synonymous with creative cuisine with a healthful, vegetarian emphasis.

Each Sunday at Moosewood Restaurant, diners experience a new ethnic or regional cuisine, sometimes exotic, sometimes familiar. From the highlands and grasslands of Africa to the lush forests of Eastern Europe, from the sun-drenched hills of Provence to the mountains of South America, the inventive cooks have drawn inspiration for these delicious adaptations of traditional recipes.

Including a section on cross-cultural menu planning as well as an extensive guide to ingredients, techniques, and equipment, Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant offers a taste for every palate.

Moosewood Restaurant is run by a group of 18 people who rotate through the jobs necessary to make a restaurant work. They plan menus, set long-term goals, and wash pots.

Moosewood Restaurant contributes 1 percent of its profits from the sale of this book to the Eritrean Relief Fund, which provides food and humanitarian assistance to the Eritrean people.

Moosewood Restaurant supports 1% For Peace, an organization working to persuade the government to redirect 1 percent of the Defense Department budget towards programs that create and maintain peace in positive ways.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14299 in Books
• Published on: 1990-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

Amazon.com Review
In Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant, 18 of the Moosewood Collective's chefs each contribute a chapter of vegetarian recipes from a different regional cuisine. Recipes are straightforward, and sources (and substitutes!) are given for hard-to-find ingredients. In addition to the Asian cuisine one might expect to find in an international vegetarian cookbook, there are some surprising and tasty options from Eastern Europe, Armenia, and the Middle East, as well as both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish recipes. The suggested menus encourage mixing; tomorrow's dinner could include Sopa de Ajo (garlic soup) from Chile, Spinach Nori Rolls from Japan, and Mango with Yogurt from India. The main dishes are so hearty that your guests may not notice they're meatless.

From Library Journal
The Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York has a national reputation, gained in large part from Mollie Katzen's collections of its recipes, The Moosewood Cookbook ( LJ 3/15/78) and The Enchanted Broc coli Forest ( LJ 10/15/82). This latest collection is a celebration of ethnic and regional fare, and here each of Moosewood's 18 cooks has contributed a chapter featuring a different cuisine. The resulting mix of mostly vegetarian dishes is an interesting one, from Croation Sour Soup to Rhode Island Cornmeal Bread. Destined to be widely popular, this is recommended for most collections.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Moosewood Restaurant is run by a group of 18 women and men who rotate through the jobs necessary to make a restaurant go. We plan menus, set long-term goals, and wash pots. Our ranks are bolstered by about half a dozen employees.

Major decisions are made collectively, and while democracy at work and at meetings has required effort and determination, the payoffs have been rich. Most of us have worked together for nearly ten years, and some of us since the restaurant's inception in 1973. Personally, we are an assortment of individuals who have become a family -- caring deeply for one another, striving for fairness and consensus, and putting-up-with and letting-go-of various human foibles. Professionally, our collective process has worked well for seventeen years. Come visit!

If you have enjoyed Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant, you will want to read The Moosewood Restaurant Kitchen Garden by David Hirsch.

Customer Reviews

I was skeptical, since I'm a meat & potatoes kind of guy...
so what the heck am I doing with a vegetarian cookbook?!?? Well, I was given the book and some suggestions -- Sopa de Lima (from the Mexico section) and Saffron Butterflies. But it's a veggie cookbook, so it just sat on my shelf -- until I had dinner with the person who gave it to me. It wasn't until AFTER dinner, she told me it was recipes from this book -- the meal was so good, I didn't even notice it was meatless.

So, I tried them, and now I'm HOOKED! Sopa de Lima is great food for during halftime of basketball and football games -- and I later found out I can make it fast and easy with some simple substitutions (hint: use a jar of salsa instead of a bunch of other ingredients). Saffron Butterflies is SMOOOOOOOTH and good -- with or without some meatballs thrown in. These two were so good I've had to try others and now "Rumpledethumps" (silly name, but GREAT DISH) is a personal favorite -- I just use it as a side dish along with a London Broil. Okay, so I'm a carnivore -- these recipes are great standing alone, and most of them work well with meat added or on the side.

More than just the great recipes, this book is great for the stories, too. I never would have thought cookbooks make good reading, even when I'm not cooking, but this one is.

Vegetarian (and fish) dishes from around the world
I've had this book for more than 10 years and still return to it periodically when looking for something unusual, yet easy to prepare.

The book is organized into 18 ethnic regions, less a comprehensive collection of world recipes, more like an eclectic, culinary passport to some areas perhaps less familiar to American cooks: Africa South of the Sahara, Caribbean, Finland, Armenia and Eastern Europe. Each chapter features an essay on the region by the contributing writer, followed by a sampling of the region's cuisine, from appetizers and salads to desserts and after-dinner drinks.

The recipes are as varied as the cuisines, though all are fairly straightforward, emphasizing fresh, easily accessible ingredients. Some recipes can be prepared in under 30 minutes, while others can be an hours-long labor of love (assuming one finds meal preparation theraputic, as I do.) I've found the chapter on North Africa to be a favorite; I can't count how many times I've prepared Fatima's Salad, an intoxicating blend of potatoes, carrots, beets, peppers, vinegar and olive oil, each time with raves from my guests. And Mahshi Filfil, a dish of rice-stuffed bell peppers with a creamy feta cheese sauce, has convinced my finicky Armenian family that there's more than one way to stuff a vegetable.

As to the recipes' authenticity, most are modified creations of ethnic dishes, in many cases substituting vegetables or soy products for meat or for hard-to-find ingredients. It is not a book for the cook interested in authentic ethnic cooking; a more accurate description is a collection of Americanized recipes that pay their respects to world cuisines.

An eclectic book, it has a little something for everyone; it specializes in nothing, celebrates everything and encourages the cook to gently step beyond the boundaries of one's own culinary traditions, into exotic cuisines from around the globe.

These recipes are almost as good as eating at the Moosewood
I own all of the Moosewood Cookbooks and this book is most likely my favorite. All of the cookbooks are wonderful and the recipes are always great. This book combines the simple goodness of the Moosewoods normal recipes (vegetarian, but not *weird* vegetarian) with a decided ethnic flare. I am not a vegetarian but with recipes like these you don't even notice that they are vegetarian recipes. This book is especially nice because of the many cultures that are highlighted as well as the in depth information that is given about each area or culture. Because each section is edited by different authors you get a real feel for each region as well as each author. It is truly a delightful book.