The recipe was from the Conscious Cook, by Tal Ronnen. Although I eagerly requested it from the library, adding myself to the very long waiting list. So, I was pretty psyched when I got it. But then I skimmed the book, and found a few recipes that sounded pretty decent, but also found a lot of aspirational-seeming recipes for people who aspire to different things than I do.

Vegan Tomato Bisque (adapted from the Conscious Cook by Tal Ronnen)

Overall, this recipe was actually pretty decent, even if the cookbook brought on a rant. I’m not going to lie, one night I had it with a grilled ham and cheese sandwich.

• Olive oil
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 4 garlic cloves, smashed
• 2 tb all purpose flour
• 5 c vegetable stock
• 1 28-oz can fire roaster tomatoes
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 1/2 cups cashew cream (rinse cashews under cold water. Soak overnight. Drain and rinse. Add water to cover and blend – I used my immersion blender)

Put a 2-3 tb of olive oil in dutch oven. Add onions and add a pinch of salt. Saute onions until soft. Add carrots, celery, garlic and a pinch of salt. Cook about ten minutes, stirring regularly.

Add the flour to the vegetables and stir aggressively for another few minutes. Add the stock, tomatoes and herbs. Bring to a boil and simmer for about half an hour.

Add cashew cream and season with salt and pepper to taste. Simmer another few minutes.

Remove bay leaf. Puree soup until smooth. I used my beloved immersion blender.

My Rant

I actually should actually have been forewarned that this book would not be my speed. Vegan chefs who cater celebrity weddings. Danger! Oprah Winfrey’s 21-day Vegan cleanse. Danger! Look at all of my vegan chef friends! Hey, I’m besties with Yves Potvin, who created fake meat called Gardein. Hey, here are 20 recipes with Gardein! I think I should use my preferred brand of fake vegan butter, Earth Balance, in 50% of my recipes, and include identical steps to put salt and then the weird vegan butter in the pan to create a non-stick effect.

I am like, dude, you know what’s vegan? Olive oil. And several other kinds of VEGETABLE oils. Which don’t require some weird process to create a non-stick effect, and which Earth Balance is made of. You know what else is vegan? Beans. Which don’t require some weird process to become meat-like. Because foods that are NOT meat don’t need to be LIKE meat.

This book gave me insights into why people get all weird and aggressive about vegans. It made me want to taunt Chef Tal with bacon. And I’m cool with vegans. But I guess I am not cool with cookbooks where so many recipes call for specific, branded products so explicitly. I’m all for cookbook authors recommending particular products that they truly feel are the best, but it skeeves me out when such a high proportion of recipes include a specific product.

I am also cheap. I don’t like to spend money on things that I will not get a lot of use out of (I will drop lots of money on things like shoes, glasses, and le Creuset cookware that I will use a majillion times, but not on things like books, which I will read once). So, I have also been a library maniac for ever. That’s right. Libraries. They were green and frugal before people started getting all het up about that stuff.

I check a LOT of books out of the library. Some, I succeed in reading. Some, I start but do not succeed in finishing.

I failed to finish a Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters by Rebecca Solnit.

Overly Simplistic Pocket Reason I didn’t Finish this Book

This book sounded like it would allay my occasionally recurring fears of a terrible disaster striking and the whole world turning more or less into the Road (Cormac McCarthy. Dystopian, dark and horrifying, misery, yet with fatherly love). But I couldn’t get into it, because when I read the first chapter, focused on the 1906 San Francisco quake, what I read between the lines was basically, “people are usually kind of a-holes, but for the first few days after disasters, they find ways to cooperate and help each other (unless they were helping the Chinese, maybe) because they can focus on surviving instead of making money, until some military guys and industrialists, who are mostly a-holes in any circumstance, try to take over and start shooting people and lighting fires for no good reason.”

Yeah, I didn’t get into it. Maybe it gets better, but there’s a giant waiting list at the library, so I have to return it, and I don’t get a fourth try.