Joanne Lee Molinaro

This book is stunning. It’s gorgeous and incredibly satisfying to read.

Not only are there scrumptious photos of the food including the completed recipes but there are many photos of the author and her family. This is as much an autobiography & family biography as it is a cookbook. There are photos for all of the recipes (except for maybe the very last recipe?) and even though I’ve read a bunch of cookbooks with beautiful food photos these might be the best of all the cookbooks that I’ve read. The author is personable and a good storyteller. She got a tad maudlin and overly poetic at a couple of passages at the end but the content made that 100% understandable.

I love most international cuisines (my favorites might be Mexican, Italian, and Indian, but ask me at any given meal and I might give a different answer, Thai or California cuisine, for instance.) There are relatively few national/regional cuisines that I don’t tend to like. Korean has been one of them and even though I found appealing recipes in this book it’s not just that it’s typically meat/fish centric. I do not like kimchi, pickled things, fermented things, vinegar, mirin, wasabi, or any sea vegetables, nor does my GERD appreciate most of these.

That said did find some recipes I think I’d enjoy, even without tweaking, and then even more recipes I think I’d like with just a bit of tweaking, though the author makes clear that some substitutions will not at all work for certain of the dishes.

I like that for each recipe the author marks how easy or difficult it is to make (easy, medium, practice makes perfect) and lists any common allergens in the ingredients.

I’m lucky to live in a city with a lot of diversity so this might not be true for every reader, but the ingredients called for in the recipes look as though they’d be readily available in many food markets. If you have a Korean food market or a Korean section in a food market, that would help for making the dishes in this book. It also would help to have a couple of the cooking tools mentioned.

Contents:

Introduction
The Korean Vegan
The Korean Vegan Pantry
1. The Basics
2. Breads
3. Side Dishes
4. Kimchi and Salads
5. Soups and Stews
6. Noodles and Pastas
7. Bar and Street Foods
8. Main Dishes
9. Sweets
The Lees in Korea
Acknowledgements
Index

This is a 5 star book all the way and I recommend it as an owned book to everyone who enjoys Korean food. Because I’m not a huge fan of the cuisine, I mostly enjoyed the stories and the images, and I do not want to own the book, but I hope that it will always be available for borrowing because I would like to try some of the recipes. I wanted to read it to see if I’d like vegan Korean more than traditional animal heavy Korean and I did but there are still a lot of basic ingredients-dishes that do not appeal to me. But yum: Korean Glass Noodles, and (I don’t usually even like most fried foods but) Fried Stuffed Pancakes (both the savory and the sweet recipes) and a couple of the desserts also: Chocolate Sweet Potato Cake and Chocolate Persimmon Cupcakes.

Highly recommended for: all people who enjoy Korean food, most vegans, cookbook collectors… (mais)