A Modern Way to Eat – Cookbook Review

Hello, my name is Katie and I have a vegetable addiction.
Other than eggplant, whose squishy weirdness I just can’t get an affection for, there has not been a vegetable that I don’t fall in love with. Its not secret if you know that I adore my vegetable garden and a good portion of my meal almost often involves numerous vegetables.
I also love this book.
Anna Jones’ A Modern Way to Eat is a gorgeous and divergent set of recipes that are unlike anything I’ve seen before except maybe for Yotam Ottolenghi’s masterpieces Plenty and Plenty More. In A Modern Way to Eat, Jones pieces together vegetarian dishes that combine less than usual sets of ingredients to make some beautiful dishes.
Don’t let the cover of this book fool you. It is pretty uninspiring and pristine-looking with a kind of boring picture on the front but when you start to turn the pages of the book, the photos are gorgeous and full of life and color.
I am less than halfway through perusing through its pages and already have a rainbow set of tabs marked of recipes I can’t wait to try.
A sampling of the recipes I’m drawn to is the “A New Eggs Benedict”, a play on the traditional dish but using roasted sweet potato slices stacked up, and then topped with caramelized red onions and sautéed spinach topped with a poached egg and avocado cashew nut modern version of Hollandaise.
This is representative of Anna’s take on updating an old classic but making it more vegetable packed but keeping deliciousness as well.
Another thing I really love within the book are the mint green colored pages in each section that offer many varieties of making something. There is a base starting point and then each additional column offers additions to continue the recipe or to make it different with a list of ingredient suggestions. It opens your mind up to the many different creations of a salad, a soup, a pesto, etc. that you can invent by following her suggestions.
If you are a very traditional recipe person, this book might intimidate you with its flavors and spices from around the world, but to me it’s a challenge ….and a healthy one at that!
*In compliance with FTC guidelines, I am disclosing that I received this book through Blogging for Books for this review (but I would totally buy it had I not).