“Fresh At Home”, by Ruth Tal Brown

Tal, Ruth, and Jennifer Houston. Fresh at Home: Everyday Vegetarian Cooking. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2004. Print.

I got this from the library after eating at the restaurant “Fresh” on Bloor Street in Toronto.  I loved the bowl of veggies and noodles I got there, and wondered how easy it might be to re-create at home.

Well, the answer seems to be, fairly easy if you’re willing to go whole hog… or vegan hog substitute, anyway.  The ingredients all tend to be fairly consistent across recipes, but are things that my family don’t normally have in the house.

It’s hard to tell what ingredients could be substituted and what can’t.  All the rice bowls, for instance, specify brown basmati rice.  Bean sprouts are called for in a few recipes, but others call for sunflower sprouts or buckwheat sprouts.  Many recipes call for filtered water – honestly, does that really affect the flavour of the finished dish?

What frustrated me the most was that it seemed like every single bowl recipe called baby bok choy, which is in season for what, two weeks a year?  Tomatoes and avocados are frequently called for as well.  Perhaps in 2004 we weren’t thinking about seasonal and local ingredients yet, but it strikes a sour note against the super-healthy, vegan focus of the book, which nowadays seems to go hand-in-hand with the 50-mile diet and so on.  And speaking of dated, they feel they need to define the word “tsunami” (the Japanese word for tidal wave), which by the very end of 2004 no-one in North America could be unaware of, after the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami on December 26 that killed over 230,000 people.  (I notice it’s no longer on the menu now).

I might be tempted to gather the ingredients and try one of these recipes, but the chore of cooking has been officially taken over full-time by my husband this school year.  I hardly feel I can thrust this cookbook in his hands and say “here – try this!”.  There’s a glossary and short index, as well as recommended reading.