Quick-Fix Vegetarian: Healthy home-cooked meals in 30 minutes or less by Robin Robertson

Review by Alisa Fleming, author of Go Dairy Free ~ This isn’t a cookbook that I obsessively earmarked only to forget about it within weeks.  Rather, I scanned all of the recipes to get a gist for the ingredients used, and neatly placed into my “regular-use” stash of books.  No, I didn’t cook from it right away, but I knew I would return.  And return I did … within a week in fact.  It hit on a night (okay, these nights happen to me often) where we hardly had anything left in the fridge, I was void of ideas, and we had already eaten out far too much.  I grabbed this cookbook, flipped through, and within seconds I had selected that night’s dinner – Chipotle-Kissed Black Bean Soup. 

Though it merely used pantry items, this soup was a fulfilling hit!  It used those canned chipotle chiles in adobo sauce (I bought a small can almost a year ago without a clue as to what to use them in), which added an extra layer of flavor that we truly enjoyed. The recipe did call for carrots, which my husband is not a fan of, so I used some leftover roasted sweet potatoes for an even heartier, yet equally delicious meal.
 
A few days later, it hit again, but this time for a different reason.  I had some leftover coconut milk in the fridge and no cravings for a Thai curry.  But there it was … The Dark Chocolate Yum Sauce!  My freezer was actually overflowing with dairy-free “ice cream” from some recent taste-testing, and what “ice cream” isn’t improved even more by chocolate sauce?!  Let’s just say, the name of the recipe sums it up nicely … rich, dark, and yummy.

In terms of the facts, “quick-fix” means you will spend 30 minutes or less on prep time and cook time together.  There are some slow cooker recipes included, which do extend beyond the 30 minutes with the cook time, but the author felt that the incredible ease of throwing crock pot recipes together with no fuss warranted them some spots in this cookbook. A large percentage of the recipes are “from-scratch,” but she doesn’t hesitate to use shortcuts, including ingredients such as canned beans, jarred roasted red peppers, bottled barbecue sauce, and vegetarian sausage to keep all of the recipes as convenient as possible when “from-scratch” is just too time-consuming.

This cookbook hasn’t been in my rotation for long, yet I expect it will be “well-loved” (read: marked up, spilled on, and wrinkled pages from hurried used) in no time!

Quick-Fix Vegetarian is available on Amazon.

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