The Vegan 8 cookbook- Brandi Doming
My rating: 3.5 stars
Before I start this review, I just need to make a disclaimer that I am not a vegan. I personally found myself getting increasingly interested in vegan food-culture and genuinely wanted to know how eating vegan would affect me and whether it was easier or harder to cook vegan.
The pictures in this cookbook are really well done and instantly caught my eyes and got me excited to try some of the recipes. I also really like how ALL recipes in this cookbook have a picture, which isn't the norm in cookbooks so I really appreciate it when it is done.
To start off with, I don't personally believe that these recipes can be considered "simple" in the purest form. True, the actual execution of cooking the individual recipes with 8 ingredients or less is simple and not that hard once you start making the actual dishes. However, the finding of the right ingredients in the grocery shops and making some of the ingredients needed for the recipes (e.g. cashew butter) I found to be very time consuming and not very cheap.
In total, I tried out 4 recipes from this cookbook - 5 if you include my beyond-painful experience of making homemade cashew butter. (Note to self: 1. Cashews are not cheap. 2. For the love of God, make sure to soak them next time!)
Overall, I did really enjoy the dishes I made and found them to be quite tasty. My particular favorite was the caramelized onions and spinach Buddha bowl which was super yummy, filled me up really quickly and didn't leave me feeling bloated or "full" in a bad way.
I also particularly enjoyed making the pumpkin crepes, which were delicious! The texture of them were just perfect & was surprisingly easy to cook through in the pan.
What I think I enjoyed most about this cookbook was how it taught me to be brave and try making my own homemade stuff (such as the nut butter and the homemade spice blends). It was also really great how the recipes used little to no fat or oil and still tasted amazing (who knew one could caramelize without sugar?! I do now!).
The only downsides this cookbook really has is first of all how pricey the ingredients are. Where I live, nuts aren't the cheapest things to buy and also finding some vegan alternatives (such as yoghurt or mayonnaise) was night impossible or quite expensive (compared to their non-vegan counterparts). And the second thing is that some steps in the recipes do take up a lot of time & energy. With some practice, I can imagine that I would become a pro in making cashew butter in no time. However, I think especially when someone is relatively new to making homemade ingredients (like I was) and is trying to find a bit of an "easier transition" into a vegan lifestyle, this cookbook might not be the one to reach for immediately.
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