I’ve said it before, but I tend to eat a lot of Asian food. It is my favorite kind of cuisine and it’s typically gluten friendly – Or easy to make gluten-free. I honestly cannot wait to start making some of my favorite Asian dishes plant-based.
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The Asian Green: Everyday Plant-Based Recipes Inspired by the East cookbook is a treasure. If you’re like me and want to learn how to eat healthier this is the cookbook for you. It’s fun, vibrant, and leaves you wanting more!
The story behind the making of Asian Green: Everyday plant based recipes inspired by the East is encouraging! The author, Ching-He Huang, wanted to help her husband who has suffered chronic illnesses since birth – this includes asthma and eczema. After 3 months of eating plant-based he is seemingly cured.
Huang really embraces the ideology that food is medicine. This doesn’t mean that we have to lose flavor while we are cooking healthy foods to cure our ailments. Asian Green: Everyday Plant-Based Recipes Inspired by the East cookbook is filled with all kinds of tasty meals. You won’t even realize you’re missing meat.
We jump right into recipes, which is a bit different for a health-heavy cookbook. The chapters are divided into breakfast, soup, salads, “fast and furious”, warm and comforting plates, sharing meals, and desserts. If you’re looking for pantry necessities, some basic techniques and ingredients, cook’s notes, etc., those are all located near the back of the book. I can’t comment how this would read, because I am pretty bad at reading everything chronologically.
I enjoy how the cookbook author quickly explains what a plant-based diet is and what you can do to be more plant-based. Huang even explains why plant-based is beneficial for more than dietary purposes, and also for the Earth as a whole. She doesn’t go into unnecessary detail and simplifies her eating ideology!
So, I’ve noticed that Asian recipes tend to have a lot of ingredients. Asian Green: Everyday Plant-Based Recipes Inspired by the East cookbook continues this trend where there are a lot of parts to each dish. Some recipes have an obscene amount of ingredients, like over 15 different elements – some as high as 25. Considering this, there is a lot of prep time for the majority of these recipes. But, the ingredients are all wholesome fruits and vegetables – lots of clean eating.
Once everything is prepped, cooking each dish is fairly easy to toss together.
A lot of these dishes are unique – they will definitely become household favorites, such as miso corn and sweet potato pancakes – it looks so delicious! Don’t worry, there are still our Asian favorites like mushroom and tofu hot and sour soup.
I do enjoy the photography throughout this cookbook. It’s a little cutesy and really showcases each dish. There is so much color and that definitely puts a smile on my face!
The message behind this cookbook is one I think we could all be reminded of – eat well and stay balanced. It is okay to waver, but we should always strive to do a little better every day.
~Kaiti
