A Beautiful Bowl of Soup: The Best Vegetarian Recipes

by Paulette Mitchell

Book Overview

No, there is no chicken stock in this soup. What you'll find here is page after glorious page of the loveliest, most delicious soups and stews - each and every one entirely vegetarian. Brimming with international flavors, Paulette Mitchell's easy-to-follow recipes are paired with unique accompaniments, garnishes, and toppings that add tremendous visual appeal. Witness hearty Pumpkin Stew baked and served in a pumpkin shell; classic onion soup updated...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811835286
• ISBN13: 9780811835282
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.8" x 8.0"
• Age Range: 13 to 22 years
• Grade Range: Grade 8 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

A Truly Lovely Addition to your Cookbook Collection with a minor exception.

I love this book. Not just for the recipes but for the clean design and beautiful photographs. Everything about this book makes you want to use it over and over. I do have one word of caution. Her miso soup recipe calls for you to boil the miso. She makes an effort to explain how beneficial miso is for your health but unfortunately, boiling miso destroys all of the good enzymes. Add it at the end by turning off the heat, mix in your miso, and wait a few minutes before serving. Heat activates the enzymes but, again, boiling will destroy them. Aside from this small detail, it is one of my favorites amoung my vast collection of cookbooks.

Inventive, Original and Delicious

I have read dozens of soup cookbooks and while they all had their virtues, this soup cookbook is the most original and creative I have encountered. For example, Paula Mitchell's Avocado Soup recipe is truly divine. It can be served as written or with the addition of shrimp or crab meat. I strayed from the vegetarian theme and added a timbale of King Crab Meat to the center of the soup bowl. My guests were surprised and delighted. The flavor of the soup was ethereal. It is a wonderful first course with a delicate flavor that neither I nor my guests had encountered before. This little book is worth its weight in gold. Serving soup as a first course is a refreshing change from the current practice of offering typically greasy individual appetizers before a meal. In addition to their value to a hostess, these soups deliver great nutritional value and many can be prepared ahead and frozen. What more could you ask? If I could have only two soup cookbooks, this would be one of them ( I would still like to serve soups with meat) If I could have only one soup cookbook I would be very tempted to choose this one. Happily, given the reasonable price of this book, cooks don't have to choose.

A Beautiful and Creative Cookbook

I purchased this as a present for a friend who was graduating from college. He's not the most cooking-saavy individual, but the colorful pictures and clear instructions in this book made him want to begin making beautiful bowls of soup right away. Although the selection of recipes is not as wide as one might hope (more space than I would like is taken up by "dessert soups"), everything in the book is delicious and presented in creative, eye-appealing ways.

Creative and Unique

What I love about this cookbook is that not only are the recipes are delicious, but they are unique, and the ideas for presentation are great too. We especially love the recipe for Moroccan Stew. It is very flavorful, filling, and healthy, like all the recipes I have tried from this book.

A Delightful Book of Soup. Highly Recommended

It is much easier to identify very good and very bad cookbooks than it is to identify the merely good or average cookbooks. I saw the beauty of this book with the first recipe I prepared from it. I have read two other books on soup by very famous cookbook authors Barbara Kafka and James Peterson and I would recommend this little book over both of their works. Both of these other works are good, worthy of five stars, but this volume by Paulette Mitchell is better for the price.The fact that it is limited to only vegetarian and vegan recipes detracts not one wit from its value to the general cook. If this means anything at all, it means that the recipes will be less expensive and faster to prepare than recipes including meat. It especially means that you can make an appropriate homemade vegetable stock for these recipes very cheaply and easily, with no chicken sanitary problems to deal with.The main body of the book with the chapters of soup recipes covers:Creamy Soups featuring curried carrot, potatoes, squash, chestnuts, bell peppers, fresh peas, and peanutsChunky Soups featuring black beans, red lentils, chickpeas, asparagus, miso, minestrones and ribollita.Chilled Soups featuring Vichyssoise, borscht, lettuce soup, avocado soup, and gazpachoDessert Soups featuring berry-wine, strawberry-rhubarb, gingered pear, and brandied pumpkin.The chapter on chunky soups comprises about half the recipes. It should be clear from this list that most of the major soupy players are present. The only major type of soup one may miss is seafood chowders. For that, you can go to Jasper White's excellent book, '50 Chowders'.Many recipes are vegetarian in that they include some dairy product; however, the author gives many tips on making the daried soups suitable to a vegan sensibility. The primary technique is to substitute soymilk for cow's milk and toasted breadcrumbs for grated cheese.Before the main chapters of recipes, there is a short chapter on preparing vegetable stock. The book ends with an excellent chapter of recipes for `garnishes and accompaniments' which gives recipes for pestos, croutons, and various toasted nibbles. Many recipes also include a garnish which may easily be treated as a recipe in itself and a garnish from one soup can be grafted onto the serving of some other soup.Aside from the excellent selection of recipes for soups and supporting cast, the recipes are written in a very appealing format. Rather than undistinguished text or simple numbered steps, the steps are broken down into major activities, with numerous checkpoints to indicate where in the preparation it would be best to freeze or how to do parts of the preparation in advance. Soup and garnish steps and ingredient lists are always separate to easily mix and match soup with garnish.The book is loaded with tips relevant to the particular recipe, but which are also relevant to general cooking techniques. To this end, the author has provided a separate list of alphabetized names of t