After not seeing much new on the vegan cookbook front since Vegan Brunch, I noticed a flurry of new cookbooks that have dropped recently. Last week I ate mostly out of Robin Robertson's Vegan on the Cheap, and it's a new favorite.There are a few ways to end up spending a ton of money going vegan. It's easy to fall into a trap of eating microwaved convenience foods all the time, and living off Amy's loaf and Celentano manicotti isn't pleasant or cheap. Or you can buy a bunch of ingredients to make daily recipes out of the Millennium Cookbook, and sometime after making three subrecipes for one entree, give up and head to a restaurant. And then there's loving to cook but realizing you just spent $25 on a tiny bottle of hazelnut oil; plenty of cookbooks are full of expensive gourmet ingredients, obscure produce, or call for fake cheese or meats more expensive than the ingredients they're replacing.
Robertson's cookbook, delightfully, addresses all of these vegans with recipes that are simple, easy, and require only cheap ingredients, with plenty of recipes that can be made solely from pantry ingredients instead of highly perishable produce, making them ideal for that day or two you're trying to stretch out not going to, say, the commissary on a saturday payday before a holiday weekend. If you want to save some money by making your own staples, there are recipes for that, although she doesn't go crazy assuming everyone wants to start canning their own beans. Plenty of recipes have different levels of commitment: if you've found an abundant, seasonal cheap source of tomatoes you can make that homemade sauce, but the amounts required are conveniently equivalent to a jar from the store. If more expensive ingredients aren't a problem she adds a few "splurging" tips for each recipe, usually in the form of more expensive veggies or fake cheese you can throw in.
What did I make? The Tortilla Strata (above), an old school casserole that combined beans, corn, salsa, and tortillas. Since I had some on hand, I used mozz-style Daiya instead of bothering with making the nooch-based cheese sauce; The recipe came together in 5 minutes, baked in 45, and was cheerfully received. Surprisingly, the recipe even made enough to provide leftovers for lunch the next day.
Next up was Baked Ziti. I edited this one a fair amount, to be honest; out of fresh blocks of tofu and not having time to soak soybeans for more, I narrowly avoided a grocery store trip by making my own from pantry ingredients: blend 1C salted cashews + 1 12oz block extra-firm Mori Nu tofu + juice of 1 lemon + 2 T olive oil + 1 clove garlic + 1/2 t salt + a couple teaspoons of Penzey's Tuscan Sunset, blended in a food processor. If I tallied the cost of the ingredients here they would probably not be particularly cheap, but it saved me a trip to the grocery store. I also used bottled marinara, and since I cooked up a whole pound of pasta I managed to get two casseroles out of it instead of one, making it a quick recipe that allowed me to grab an even quicker meal out of the freezer later that week. Another win for Robertson! This is the perfect World Cup half-time meal, baking in 45 minutes.
For our third evening on the cheap, I ventured out of the casserole chapter and brought out two recipes: Tempeh Lettuce Cups and Peanut Noodle Salad. These took a little more time than the previous recipes, but they were tasty, although the seasonings were a bit too similar to make them together again, and for a mostly cold meal the preparation did warm up my kitchen a bit much. There were plenty of leftovers for both of our lunches, though.
Finally the Samosa Pie drove my eye back to the casserole section. It was another simple and quick dish to put together, and while a neat idea I think I'd change the seasonings up a little next time. It tasted like food with Indian spices, not necessarily Indian food; I get this a lot when cooking with curry powder, and when I want authentic tastes I usually turn to Dakshin. I might make the pie again, but I would definitely change up the seasonings and probably temper them first before sauteeing the rest of the vegetables.
And so, after I've had one week with it, Vegan on the Cheap is definitely going on my pile of most-frequently-used cookbooks. It has a wide variety of recipes - I didn't even make any of the dishes in the pasta, skillet, or slow cooker sections; fans of Robertson's earlier Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker have certainly seen variations on most of this last section before, though her corned seitan and cabbage is definitely catching my eye. It has the typical consistency and good editing of all Robertson's cookbooks, and while some of her ideas seem like they're borrowed from other authors and improved upon somewhat, they've definitely been made quicker and easier. In a world where most vegan casserole recipes call for everything to be cooked at length ahead of time, having a few recipes in our arsenal that can be dumped together and baked into a good meal within minutes is alone worth the cost of the book.
