Basics: Vegetables: Techniques, Tips, and 70+ Recipes to Confidently Cook with Vegetables

Hardie Grant launches their user-friendly Basics series with this no-fuss vegetarian collection from Auge (Everyday Air Fryer). An opening section on “Essentials” lays out basic elements of a vegetarian diet, pantry, and protein alternatives through appealing step-by-step photographs. Images in the same style accompany every recipe, making this a useful book for beginners to prop on the counter while cooking. A falafel recipe shows a bowl of chickpeas soaking in water (step one); onion, garlic, and herbs pre- and post-chopping (step two); a food processor surrounded by the remaining ingredients (step three); and an image of formed falafel balls on a baking sheet (step four). This thorough documentation is especially useful with more complex dishes, demonstrating the proper way of folding phyllo dough for pea and potato samosas, for example. Fare ranges from “vegetarian classics” with clever twists (greek salad with watermelon, pasta salad with candied tomatoes) to “reinvented recipes,” which use vegetables as meat substitutes, as in the mushroom bourguignon and celery root Milanese. Recipes lack introductions, which might leave the uninitiated wishing they had more information before diving into making such dishes as green shakshuka or hasselback butternut squash. Still, novice home cooks looking for an easy-to-follow guide will find this does the trick. (Aug.)