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The Adaptable Feast
By Ivy Manning

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The Adaptable Feast

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The Adaptable Feast
Satisfying Meals for the Vegetarians, Vegans, and Omnivores at Your Table
By Ivy Manning
Read How You Want, (2011)
EasyRead Large Print, in 16 Point Font
(Originally Published in Standard Print by Sasquatch Books)
ISBN: 9781458787354
Genre: Cookbooks, Cooking
Reviewed by Simone Bonim - October 21, 2011

In times past, when you went to someone's house to eat, you were expected to eat whatever was served, whether or not you liked the food served. To do otherwise was considered impolite unless you had a medical reason for abstaining. However, the tide has turned, and now the host is expected to serve dishes designed to please each guest. This can be easier said then done, especially when one or more guests follow a dietary regime that differs from the more common omnivore diet.

So what is a host to do? Cook a separate dish for each guest? Thankfully, the answer is no. Using Ivy Manning's cookbook, The Adaptable Feast, with your own cooking knowledge, you can easily adapt many recipes so that they can be used equally well for vegans, vegetarians, and omnivores. In this cookbook Manning shows you how you can take a single recipe and at various points throughout the cooking process, you simply remove one or more portions, before adding additional ingredients that would turn a vegan dish into a vegetarian dish, and then remove some more portions, before adding ingredients that would turn it into a dish for omnivores. Once you get the hang of how to do this, you can apply the same techniques to other recipes that you will come across in other cookbooks.

In The Adaptable Feast, Manning explains how these various eating styles differ, and what makes a dish vegan, or vegetarian, etc... She also explains how to stock your pantry for mixed diet cooking - especially if such cooking is a regular occurrence in your family because one or more members of you family follows a different dietary model. She also provides nutritional guidance to ensure that your meals are nutritionally balanced and that they provide each 'eater' with sufficient amounts of protein in their diet.

Overall, The Adaptable Feast follows the standard cookbook format with the recipes organized into sections including Appetizers and Salads, Soups and Stews, Quick Fixes, Classic Recipes, Food From a Far, and Special Occasions. There is also a section called Basics that includes recipes for vegetarian and vegan flavor anchors such as Asian-Style Vegetable Stock, Vegan Fish Sauce, Blender Pesto, and more. Throughout the cookbook, the recipes follow a standard format, with the recipe title followed by a notation stating how many vegetarian and omnivore serving the dish will make. In most cases, Manning has included a short expository section that talks about the history of a given dish along with tips on how to make the dish. This information is followed by a list of ingredients, which in turn are followed by step-by-step cooking instructions. When it is time to remove portions of the dish to make it vegetarian, instructions are provided. When a vegan variation of the dish is available, this information is provided at the end of the recipe.

I would have preferred that the vegan variation of each dish was given at the beginning of each recipe, rather than the end. Having the variations listed at the end requires that you look through the entire recipe to see if a vegan variation exists. This is not much of an inconvenience, as you really need to read through each recipe anyway, before beginning to prepare it, so that you'll have some pre-knowledge of the various extra-steps you will need to take to ensure that you do not contaminate the vegetarian or vegan versions with unwanted animal products.

After reading over, and trying some of the recipes in The Adaptable Feast, I found this to be a respectable cookbook. The recipes are, for the most part, easy to follow and construct, although there are a few complicated dishes thrown in that might be a challenge for novice cooks. As well, most of the ingredients can easily be found in a well-stocked grocery store or ordered via mail order - a list of mail-order sources is provided at the end of the book. For the most part, I also found that following Manning instructions that it was rather easy to turn an omnivore dish into a vegetarian or vegan one. However, if you are an experienced cook with practice in making vegetarian or vegan dishes, you may find this cookbook a bit on the common sense side as you will already be familiar with many of the 'special' ingredients used in such dishes. However, for someone unfamiliar with these cooking styles, this cookbook will prove invaluable as all the recipes have a vegetarian variation, and most have a vegan one as well.

Some of the many tasty recipes that you'll find in this cookbook include: The Adaptable Feast is available from Read How You Want, an on-demand publisher that makes books available in a variety of formats including Braille, DAISY, and five different large print formats. This range of formats makes this, and other books, available not only to visually impaired individuals, but also anyone with a reading or physical disability that makes reading standard print books difficult.

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