Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Check in for the research, checked out for some of the recipes

Plant-Powered Protein by Nava Atlas

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I’m getting a little tired of the plant based meat substitute trends in cookbooks, which seems to still be going strong. Still, I picked up Plant-Powered Protein out of curiosity, and it’s actually got some interesting things in it. Two of the best parts is the review in an appendix of the nutritional properties of many plant-based meats that are becoming increasingly commercially common. It’s not a full nutrition label for everything, but it is a list of the major brands ,what they tend to […]

When is 8 not really 8?

The Vegan 8 by Brandi Doming

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The Vegan 8 claims that it contains “100 simple, delicious recipes made with 8 ingredients or less.” This is not entirely true. The introduction says there are 3 free ingredients: salt, pepper, and water. This is fair, but then if you look at the recipes, there are many which actually either cheat by separating into multiple recipes that combine or try to suggest that things like black pepper corns and ground pepper are the same thing. It may be in the letter or the rule, […]

Make your own meat and cheese without involving animals

Fake Meat Real Food for Vegan Appetites by Isa Chandra Moskowitz

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It looks like the theme for vegan cooking for early 2023 is make your own meat substitutes. The newest entry to this group is Fake Meat by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. The author is basically the OG of modern approachable vegan cooking. She’s also my only cookbook automatic pre-order any and all new titles. Most previous Isa books are “vegan for beginners” in nature, in that they feature more readily available ingredients and normal cooking standard processes. This time, things gets a little more advanced. There’s […]

Fake Meat without the Butcher Shop

The Herbivorous Butcher by Aubry Walch, Kale Walch

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I’m really glad I didn’t fly home this year based on the travel chaos caused by the weather; I drove. What I did get stuck with though was indoors for a few days during blizzard conditions and dangerous windchills; that meant that even though I was pretty close geographically to the Herbivorous Butcher, I didn’t get to go. At least I got to stop at one of my favorite independent bookshops on the way (Boswell Books in Milwaukee WI) and got the cookbook. The Herbivorous […]

100 Recipes and Almost as Many Nopes

Vegan 100 by Gaz Oakley

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Vegan 100 is going to be a cookbook I don’t cook much out of; it turns out to be more pretentious than I tend to like, making it interesting to read but not practical to actually cook much from. It calls for sea-beans in a couple of recipes and I have never seen those in any local market within 75 miles of me. It also thinks I’m going to scratch make everything; I’m all for scratch cooking, the challenge can be fun, but not all […]

Not as much bang for the bosh

Bosh! On a Budget by Henry Firth, Ian Theasby

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Several years ago (pre-pandemic) I’d been to the UK for business, and gotten hooked on the Tesco (major grocery chain over there) lunch combo (sandwich, chips, and drink) with a specific sandwich: the Ploughman’s lunch. Basically, that’s a cheese sandwich with tomato, lettuce, and a very specific pickle-type spread. That spread is commonly available in the UK but not so much in the US, and a few weeks after getting home, I had a major craving for that sandwich. I found a recipe that’s quite […]



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