This little gem of a vegan cookbook is written by a non-vegan professional pastry chef who loves many vegan dishes from around the world that taste good, have rich and robust flavors, and are nourishing and filling. Kinser begins with a helpful essay on the pros & cons of dry versus canned beans, and then fills the book with real peasant plant-based recipes that she has often tweaked to provide nutritional balance, especially complete protein and plenty of it. I have made only two of the dishes - African Peanut Soup and the Lentil Loaf, the first terrific and the second very tasty - but in reading so many others the relatively simple cooking and the end results can be imagined and tasted. Peasants throughout the world succeed in their diets by finding and blending sharp flavors from easy-to-find foods that work well with each other and are simple to combine and this book puts so many of them in one place. (Caveat: it helps to be near an ethnic Indian grocery.)
I like vegan food that looks and tastes like what it is - not tofu or seitan masquerading as the-chicken-or-steak-that-you-miss so much - and this book provides this (although both tofu and seitan are used in a few recipes). As my dinner guest remarked of the Lentil Loaf, served as suggested with mashed potatoes and collard greens, "This is real food!" as are the rest of the recipes.
The book is a low-budget production and disappointingly has no pictures but it is so much more rewarding that the tonier vegan cookbooks with contrived combinations that it still deserves five stars.
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