Here are some customer reviews of
Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites: Flavorful Recipes for Healthful Meals
: To quote from the header for "Mushroom Sesame Tofu Stew": "Plain, simple, satisfying...a dish that somehow becomes greater than the sum of its parts..." This tells the story. The book is easy to follow, with generally common ingredients that blend together to make wonderful, tastes. As a not-so-serious cook, who is NOT vegetarian, but looking for healthy spa-type food, this book was a find that I will treasure. Recipe analysis and cross-referencing for ingredients round out an excellent diverse selection of recipes, 300 in all. Middle Eastern Tofu-stuffed peppers, Banana muffins made with rolled oats, New England Squash Soup... Can't wait to explore the rest...yum!
 Granted, when you're proud of your roots this isn't such a bad thing, but I sense a definite rut forming here. People's tastes in food are personal and widely varied--and the postings for Moosewood's books indicate a lot of folks like them just fine, but my experience has been much more mixed.
I have three Moosewood cookbooks (New Moosewood by Mollie Katzen/Moosewood Cooks at Home/Moosewood Low-fat). I have chosen to post my review with this title because, while my feelings here apply to all the books, this one in particular I found most lacking. The reason I have three Moosewoods is because two were given to me because the previous owners found they didn't earn their shelf space, the other--my first Moosewood--I bought years ago when collecting vegetarian cookbooks.
To my tastes, the recipes in these books never really paid off. The ones I tried weren't terrible (though a few from the low-fat book were close), but none were memorable and none even came close to making it into my permanent recipe collection. I was surprised at the lack of complex, sophisticated flavors considering the books world-culture approach.
I think Moosewood deserves a lot of credit for introducing new foods and flavors to the American dinner plate years before anyone else I know of was (at least in a mainstream sense), but where Moosewood seems to be very content reexamining the same territory, other cooks have moved the process forward to provide recipes that satisfy our increasingly grown-up tastes and streamlined preparation needs. I have to wonder if it isn't Moosewood's friendly, co-operative philosophy coupled with a general nostalgia that keeps their readers so faithful.
I will give this to everyone on my Christmas list this year! We eat out of this cookbook daily. The recipies are easy to make and so good. I took dishes out of this to both Thanksgiving dinners this year and received such rave reviews!
This is the best lowfat cookbook I have. And I have quite a few. To eat healthy quite often there's a lot of chopping and mincing involved so although the recipes are easy they're not really fast but its worth it because the meals TASTE GREAT! You don't feel like you're givng up anything. So often in lowfat cookbooks the food is bland and uninspired. The stews, especially, are so yummy my picky children clean their plates. Knowing the night before they had a stew with lots of vegetables and those protein filled beans makes it alot easier to say yes to the one night of MacDonald's when our day is a bit hectic. PS - to mitigate the time factor I make extra - the stews freeze and reheat great.
The best overall cookbook I own. Not just for vegetarians. Not just for people watching their diet. For everyone who enjoys easy to follow directions, easy to find ingredients, and recipes that turn out "good enough for company" on the first try. Also includes a helpful chapter on nutrition facts for those who are just starting a healthy eating plan.
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