Product Description

Mollie Katzen has been credited with moving vegetarian cooking from the fringes of American society onto mainstream dinner tables, and her celebrated soups have been mainstays for vegetarian and nonvegetarian home cooks alike for decades. Marking the 30th anniversary of her enormously popular MOOSEWOOD COOKBOOK, this charming easel-backed cookbook brings together her classic hot and chilled soups, along with some new and tasty recipes, for the first time. Each recipe is lovingly hand-lettered and illustrated with Mollie's distinctive pen-and-ink drawings, making this timeless soup collection the perfect kitchen countertop companion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #81574 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• 119 pages

From the Publisher
* A delectable collection of 50 soup recipes from the best- selling author of THE MOOSEWOOD COOKBOOK, in a sturdy, compact easel format for easy reference while cooking. * Includes perennial favorites from THE MOOSEWOOD COOKBOOK and THE ENCHANTED BROCCOLI FOREST, plus five new sophisticated, easy-to-prepare soups from Mollie's current repertoire. * First in the MOLLIE KATZEN'S RECIPES easel book series, with salads and desserts to follow. * THE MOOSEWOOD COOKBOOK is one of the top 10 best-selling cookbooks of all time, according to the New York Times.

About the Author
MOLLIE KATZEN is a cookbook author and artist who has profoundly shaped the way America eats. One of Health magazine's five "Women Who Changed the Way We Eat," Mollie is a charter member of the Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Roundtable and is both a consultant and co-creator of Harvard's groundbreaking Food Literacy Project. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Customer Reviews

Solidly good vegetarian soups
Mollie Katzen's Recipes: Soups is produced in an interesting format. It's a small ring-bound book tucked into a board sleeve so it'll sit well on a shelf. Once you take the book out, you move a couple of things around, tuck one thing into another, and you end up with an easel. The idea is that you set it up so it only takes up a few inches of counter-space and your recipe ends up standing up in front of you, making it easy to read while you cook.

In this it works fairly well. The angle is fairly steep, so you'll need to set it down on a perfectly level surface or risk pages falling closed on you. I also felt that this worked better for cooking than for looking through the cookbook to find recipes, which was a bit more awkward. And once you've set it up as an easel, it'll never quite collapse back all the way again; while you can slip it into its sleeve to fit on a shelf, at least, it's still a bit awkward to work with in other ways. Other folks might find this format perfect; it just didn't quite work for me.

The handwriting font is attractive, but when it comes to cookbooks my personal preference is for something plain and clear. There are no photos, but I tend to think photos are pretty unnecessary with soups. The directions are clear and simple; these are not overly complex recipes.

The table of contents and index are quite handy; the ToC lists recipes in order, while the index lets you look for things by ingredient, both of which are useful.

It seemed to me that the flavors in these soups weren't balanced entirely well. Some seemed under-seasoned while others seemed over-seasoned. The spices in the curried squash soup smelled to-die-for while cooking, but the soup was flavored strongly enough that I found it a bit unpleasant, and that's unusual for me (I'm a flavor junkie!). I also found some of the soups didn't reheat very well (without mentioning this in the directions), which is a tad unusual for soups.

The soups aren't vegan, as a number of them use dairy, but it would be simple enough to substitute soy products and the like.


If you're die-hard looking for a source of healthy, vegetarian soups, this is certainly a good option. As a cookbook in general, however, I'd say it's good but not great. On the other hand, many of the things I wasn't so fond of will be taste-dependent.