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Vegetarain Cookbooks

The Moosewood cookbooks were the most used, stained, splattered & generally chewed up looking of all the cookbooks--vegetarian or general--on the "Dorje Ling" bookshelf. These recipes were especially recommended: Wynell's Tofu Pot Pie; Five Ethnic Egg Salads & Mushroom Pecan Burgers.

The New Moosewood Cookbook
by Mollie Katzen (Paperback - January 2000)

Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant : Ethnic and Regional Recipes from the Cooks at the Legendary Restaurant
by Moosewood Collective (Author) (Paperback )

Moosewood Cookbook Classics
by Mollie Katzen (Hardcover - September 1996)

Other cookbooks recommened by the Dorje Ling staff include:

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
by Deborah Madison (Greens Restaurant)
The following notes were on the inside cover: "Blackened Tofu: good/messy" and "Baked Tempe with mustard/honey." followed by several check marks.

Healing With Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition
by Paul Pitchford (Paperback - December 2002) was also especially recommended.
For twelve years the chef at "Dorje Ling" has been cooking & pureeing up fresh, healthful ingredients for a paraplegic who uses her food rather than the formula usually used when someone has to be fed directly into his stomach. The doctors, at first skeptical, put her food through many hospital tests but it kept passing them with high marks for purity and wholesomeness, and now twelve years later, the patient is still thriving under her care.

Another book that she (and I) recommend highly is:

Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master's Lessons in Living a Life that Matters by Bernard Glasman and Rick Fields. Bell Tower, NY 1996.

From Publisher's Weekly review: Based on a 13th-century Japanese manual of the same title, this guide to modern-day Zen practice also details the history of Glassman's work in the world. An abbot of Zen communities in New York City and Los Angeles, Glassman is also the founder of the Greyston Mandala, a network that includes a commercial bakery, apartments for the homeless and other not-for-profit community development projects in Yonkers, a suburb of New York City. In Zen Buddhist tradition, the preparation of a meal is used as a metaphor for leading a meaningful life. Glassman and Fields (coauthor of Chop Wood, Carry Water) detail the five main "courses" of life: spirituality, study, livelihood, social action, and relationship and community Most widely recognized of the Greyston ventures is the successful bakery.

Some might have seen the special that 60 Minutes did on Greyston. One especially interesting detail is that the bakery's first attempts to make brownies for Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream resulted in big, 50 pound blocks of brownies that couldn't be pulled apart for the ice cream sandwich covers that Ben & Jerry's had ordered. So what happened? They started chopping up the brownie blocks into bits and putting them in various ice-cream flavors, inventing Chocolate Fudge Brownie Ice Cream. Would that all cooking "failures" could find such successful resolutions.

In addition to the above books found on the shelves at "Dorje Ling," the world is full of good vegetarian cookbooks with more recipes online. Look on Amazon or at your local bookstore for books & on Google.com for recipes. I've found that when cooking vegetarian, it is a good idea to go with various ethnic cuisines, especially Indian, for truly outstanding meatless dishes.