How To Cook Everything Vegetarian

After grappling with a leek on Saturday while preparing split pea soup, I found myself thinking that surely there must be some kind of 'user's manual' for vegetables...something that tells you, say, how to cook everything.

Later that day I was by Barnes & Noble, so I went to their cookbook section and found this:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Cook-Everything-Vegetarian-Meatless/dp/0764524836

Uh...HOLY CRAP. Like everyone else in the world, I'd always eyed Bittman's original classic, but there were just too many sections I didn't care about.

But this is awesome. It's a thousand pages long, and has in-depth instruction on how to select, prep, and prepare every vegetable, fruit, rice, grain, bean, herb, pasta, mushroom, and specialty vegetarian item in the entire world. Seriously.

Like the original How To Cook Everything, he gives you a bunch of recipes for each item. The recipes are (ahem) minimalist, of course, and unlike a lot of vegetarian cookbooks he doesn't include a lot of fake meat or dairy products. Most of them are just, you know, Broiled Leeks With Butter.

Be warned, though...he doesn't skimp on the butter or the cheese or the eggs. (One of the negative reviews on Amazon call the book How To Cook Vegetables With Cheese. Heh.) However, since the bulk of the book is about preparing produce, there ARE a bunch of vegan recipes, and in most non-vegan recipes he takes the time to explain in each instance what can be taken out to render it so.

Here are some sample recipes:

http://www.howtocookeverything.tv/htce/MoreRecipes/list.html

In the store it's $35, but Amazon has it for $24. I just bought it at the store cause I wanted that shit IMMEDIATELY. I'm not kidding or being sarcastic when I say that I probably would have paid $350 for it. It's that awesomely useful.