Evolving Vegan: Deliciously Diverse Recipes from North America's Best Plant-Based Eateries―for Anyone Who Loves Food

There are plenty of interesting ideas in this book, but there are so many steps to most of them. There are also many expensive, hard-to-find ingredients (that would probably be used once then go to waste). I have many vegan cookbooks and cook daily, but these seem largely unapproachable. They’d be fun to order at a restaurant, but I have no interest in dirtying every dish in the kitchen and spending all day cooking to accomplish one recipe.

This book is amazing! Creative and easy-to-follow recipes. I've recently started the journey to *return* to vegetarianism and was excited to stumble across this book for plant based cooking. For those who don't eat 100% plant based--or even just the meat eaters--I still recommend this book!! Not only because I think we can all do with at least a few plant based meals a day, but mainly for the oh-so-tasty dishes!!! I often find myself scrolling through cooking blogs and getting really excited as I think--"Oh my, their great grandmother from her small village in Italy gave theme this recipe on her deathbed and now their 9 year olds love it too!"--only to find out there are 320943 different kinds of spices required to make gma's sauce. No, I do not have white peppercorns in my spice cabinet, I'm sorry but I can't disappoint your grandma. Honestly, I end up just winging it, and seeing if the spaghetti I throw sticks to the wall and blaming it on ADHD if the dish does not turn out well. However, not with this book!!! This book took all the things mentioned above and does the opposite. I love it. It's practical and the food combinations are so creative. The recipes are laid out clearly, and the instructions are ADHD friendly. While I may have had to make one substitute, most of the items I had laying around my kitchen. Mena Massoud put a bit of his heart into this as he writes memories and experiences that the dish brings up (though it's easy to skip to the recipe directions if you have an ice cold heart or just want to make sure you have all the ingredients before you're too emotionally invested in the dish). Coming across this book has been the inspiration/confirmation/Kick-in-the butt that I needed that my decision to return to plant based was not just the right decision for me, but also not as daunting. woohoo!

Vegan and carnivore alike should own this book. The recipes are delicious and easy to follow with great illustrations. You don’t have to be a veggie lover to enjoy the delights in this book

I’m really excited about this phenomenal cookbook. The collection of recipes is amazing. Wide variety of eclectic vegan recipes. The recipe for the “Magical Mango Curry Wrap” from Peace Pies is worth the price of the book alone. Must try!! However, there are a plethora of incredible options available in this magnificent cookbook. The lone reason it’s a four star is due to the layout. It’s a very colorful cookbook and some pages are pink/ orange and the typeface is either blue or yellow. Pictures are beautiful but it’s not easy to read the entire script at times. Still, highly recommend!!

Purchased for my cousins birthday! She’s a 6 year vegan and in love with Mena Massud! She’s going to love this! Wish it had more pictures of him though lol

This book made me discover more about vegan food. I don’t have to be a vegan to eat plant-based food. It also shows incredible stories from recipes and places.

I enjoy the full color pictures, the notes by the author.

Love this cookbook! Every recipe we have tried has been delicious.

font color was hard to read should use black font black power

Seems ok. Nothing simple. You'll just need to make sure you have plenty of time to prepare any of these dishes

There are plenty of interesting ideas in this book, but there are so many steps to most of them. There are also many expensive, hard-to-find ingredients (that would probably be used once then go to waste). I have many vegan cookbooks and cook daily, but these seem largely unapproachable. They’d be fun to order at a restaurant, but I have no interest in dirtying every dish in the kitchen and spending all day cooking to accomplish one recipe.

This book is amazing! Creative and easy-to-follow recipes. I've recently started the journey to *return* to vegetarianism and was excited to stumble across this book for plant based cooking. For those who don't eat 100% plant based--or even just the meat eaters--I still recommend this book!! Not only because I think we can all do with at least a few plant based meals a day, but mainly for the oh-so-tasty dishes!!! I often find myself scrolling through cooking blogs and getting really excited as I think--"Oh my, their great grandmother from her small village in Italy gave theme this recipe on her deathbed and now their 9 year olds love it too!"--only to find out there are 320943 different kinds of spices required to make gma's sauce. No, I do not have white peppercorns in my spice cabinet, I'm sorry but I can't disappoint your grandma. Honestly, I end up just winging it, and seeing if the spaghetti I throw sticks to the wall and blaming it on ADHD if the dish does not turn out well. However, not with this book!!! This book took all the things mentioned above and does the opposite. I love it. It's practical and the food combinations are so creative. The recipes are laid out clearly, and the instructions are ADHD friendly. While I may have had to make one substitute, most of the items I had laying around my kitchen. Mena Massoud put a bit of his heart into this as he writes memories and experiences that the dish brings up (though it's easy to skip to the recipe directions if you have an ice cold heart or just want to make sure you have all the ingredients before you're too emotionally invested in the dish). Coming across this book has been the inspiration/confirmation/Kick-in-the butt that I needed that my decision to return to plant based was not just the right decision for me, but also not as daunting. woohoo!

Vegan and carnivore alike should own this book. The recipes are delicious and easy to follow with great illustrations. You don’t have to be a veggie lover to enjoy the delights in this book

I’m really excited about this phenomenal cookbook. The collection of recipes is amazing. Wide variety of eclectic vegan recipes. The recipe for the “Magical Mango Curry Wrap” from Peace Pies is worth the price of the book alone. Must try!! However, there are a plethora of incredible options available in this magnificent cookbook. The lone reason it’s a four star is due to the layout. It’s a very colorful cookbook and some pages are pink/ orange and the typeface is either blue or yellow. Pictures are beautiful but it’s not easy to read the entire script at times. Still, highly recommend!!

Purchased for my cousins birthday! She’s a 6 year vegan and in love with Mena Massud! She’s going to love this! Wish it had more pictures of him though lol

This book made me discover more about vegan food. I don’t have to be a vegan to eat plant-based food. It also shows incredible stories from recipes and places.

I enjoy the full color pictures, the notes by the author.

Love this cookbook! Every recipe we have tried has been delicious.

font color was hard to read should use black font black power

Seems ok. Nothing simple. You'll just need to make sure you have plenty of time to prepare any of these dishes

Evolving Vegan from Mena Massoud is like a combination travelogue and recipe book. Perhaps the best thing about the book, to me, is that he makes a concerted effort to be inclusive and reach all eaters (yeah, that means all of us). If you're not a vegan and also not a vegetarian but want to work toward a more plant-based diet, I think you'll appreciate both the recipes and Massoud's discussion of how we eat. If you have been turned off because you feel some books are preachy (in my opinion, for a good cause) give this one a try. Part of eating well is being happy about what you eat. Because Massoud does not judge so much as suggest you can simply enjoy the information he offers (whether it makes any change in your diet is on you, as he readily acknowledges) and then enjoy the recipes he has collected. I tried just two of the recipes so far and I liked them both. I also contacted some of my family and friends who live near the restaurants mentioned to get their opinions of the places. In my case, those places included Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and DC. Several of my friends not only knew of the places but love them and eat there regularly. That gives me confidence, coupled with the two dishes I tried, to give even more of them a try. These recipes are not simply taking standard dishes in American cuisine and substituting non-meat for meat. There are a few such examples (though they are not quite so basic as substituting a generic non-meat burger for a beef one) but the bulk are dishes that will move beyond the usual American flavors. In particular I am looking forward to trying the Ethiopian Dinner which is from Bunna Cafe in Brooklyn, which a friend of mine highly recommends. I especially want to make the ginger-garlic paste they have and try it with some other dishes I regularly cook. No matter where you are on the eating scale you will find recipes here that will appeal to you. I recommend this as a cookbook first and specifically as a vegan cookbook second. Good food is good food, if I can also help the planet, all the better. And for the record, I am not a vegan, I have come close but still have a couple of things I haven't been able to let go yet. Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

Evolvling Vegan is a fantastic compilation of vegan recipes from top restaurants around North America. The photos in the book make everything look instagram worthy and the recipes are clearly written. Recipes that caught my eye are "Hashtastic" Potato Hash with Cashew Cheese, Jackfruit Flautas with Cashew Crema, Only Plants Allowed Burger, and a No-Bake Maple Pecan Pie. There are also interesting City Spotlights to bring attention to the plant based food scene in cities worth visiting. This book is a great one to add to your healthy kitchen library! I am rating this 4 stars because many of the recipes use tree nuts and soy, which limits many who have dietary restrictions or allergies.

Evolving Vegan by Mena Massoud provides recipes for learning to live a plant based lifestyle, many of them from restaurants all the over the country. The Kindle version I was given to review was very hard to read, as the recipes were interspersed with the text, so it was hard to see how much of each ingredient to use. Many of the pictures were also missing. I'm giving this book four stars because the material I could read was very good. However, there are problems with the Kindle version. I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley. My review is voluntary.

I have had an interest in vegan food for two decades, though I consider myself to be more vegetarian than vegan. But I'm always happy to find new vegan cookbooks and recipes to enjoy. I found this book a lot of fun. The author has gathered recipes from restaurants around the US., written some inspired by restaurants, and also has included her own and her mother's vegan recipes. If you ever thought vegan food was boring, just flip through these recipes. You'll see an incredible variety of colors, textures, and ingredient combinations that will make your mouth water! Some ingredients are certainly unusual, especially if you're accustomed to the traditional omnivore diet. Depending on where you live, you might have a hard time sourcing some ingredients, or at least I know I will in my rural southern Oregon town. Some recipes are more complex than you typically see in cookbooks these days. This is because so many of them are actual restaurant recipes or inspired by them. Real chefs tend to make fussier dishes than us home cooks. But I certainly found this collection of recipes inspiring, and there are more than a few that I want to try. Not every recipe has a photo, but many of them do. Many photos are taken from directly above, which I don't think is the best for most food dishes as it flattens the three-dimensional nature of food, not giving a true sense of what a dish looks like. I also had a problem with some of the graphic design of the book. Some recipes are given on a colored background that makes them at times hard to read. The light blue font on the medium pink background and green on yellow/orange were headache-inducing. All in all, though, I did find this cookbook immensely enjoyable. I received a free copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.

Evolving Vegan Right away this cookbook felt different. I love the author's story of how he grew up and the things he ate. I like how it points out how we all eat, cook, and really that should be accessible for everyone. This book is now a bunch of photos from a blog. It's recipes collected from the author's kitchen as well as his family and restaurants. It includes city spotlights that discuss the vegan community around the country. There's also hero spotlights that lift up people working hard for the vegan movement. The pictures are absolutely gorgeous. I always want more pictures, but these feel evenly spread out in the book and I didn't feel like I was missing a ton. The fonts and way the recipes are written I really visually enjoy too. I will say I wasn't a big fan of the cover. There's so many amazing pictures inside that I loved so much more then the cover photo. Something else I love are all the recipes have a short description/story with them. I enjoy the ideas of how to personalize a dish, what to serve it with, or a memory to read of where the recipe came from. There's a nice variety of cuisines and recipes. Definitely something for everyone here. The ingredients aren't too hard to come by. It includes a bit of vegan processed foods like vegan sausages, cheese options, soy curls or vegan chicken, but I think most people can find those options now (I live in a small town in the middle of hunting and carnivore central, so I hope most people can find it). Overall a fun, slightly different feeling, vegan collection of recipes. Thank you NetGalley for the arc. All thoughts regarding the book are my own.

Mena Massoud's Evolving Vegan is offers something different. There is a brief discussion on how a plant based diet helps our planet, but Massoud also appeals to the reader's tastebuds as well. He shares recipes of dishes from internationally recognized Vegetarian restaurants - the recipes are straightforward (not fussy) and replicable in a home kitchen. The dishes are well worth the effort and healthy. Mena suggests ways to tweak the recipes, to make them your own. I acquired a few vegetarian recipe books since our family began our plant based diet 2 years ago. This Evolving Vegan holds recipes that we enjoy eating and are not overwhelming in types of ingredients or steps. This supplements the basic vegan cookbooks very well.