Five Seasons in the Kitchen by Avital Sebbag

Rating: 3 out of 10

I love cookbooks. I have shelves and shelves of them -- in fact, I have an entire bookcase that I use just for cookbooks. It used to be in my kitchen, but now it is in our guest room, because our kitchen is too small to put an entire bookcase in there. I have a computer program to track recipes. Nearly all of my cookbooks are vegan, and they are all vegetarian. None of this is even counting ebooks, because why would I? They take up no space. (Or maybe they take up imaginary space?) I love to get new ecookbooks, because I don't have to worry about where to keep them!

I am just trying to impress upon you how much I love vegan cookbooks, and how often I read them. Because neither of those things are the issue with this book.

There are several problems with this book. The first is that it uses ingredients that I have never heard of, and have no idea where to find! When I read a cookbook, the first thing I look for is a simple recipe that I can make to get an idea of the author's taste. That was very difficult to find in this book. I don't have any idea what "hijiki" is or where to find it. In fact, the "simple" recipe I ended up making took 2 days to make! I had to sprout the lentils in advance. It was a very good recipe, though. It was delicious but plain, and tasted much better left over, which is good because it took 2 hours to cook, so it was ready well after dinner time (and in fact closer to bed time!).

And that leads me to another problem. Reading through this book could make you think that vegan recipes require lots of advance preparation, exotic ingredients that are difficult to find, and lots of cooking time. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Measurements were only in grams, which is a problem because I have no way of measuring that. I don't have a kitchen scale handy because I use volume measurements and not by weight. I have seen quite a few cookbooks where the author used grams, but put in volume equivalents, such as cups. It is also a problem with tofu. The amounts they called for seem to be about a third of a package here. I don't think we have that size and I have no idea how to get the equivalent amount of tofu, so I just skipped the tofu recipes. (I was able to just google "how many lentils in 500 grams" and then measure it in cups.)

In an ebook, you want to link to other recipes that you call for. For example, in the Three Way Toastini recipe, it calls for 3 separate spreads found elsewhere in the book, but there is no link to them. How am I supposed to find the recipe "on page 98?" I'm not sure if this is a problem from taking this cookbook from print to ebook, but it is a significant problem for me.

I will probably explore this cookbook further, especially if I find some hijiki, but it is just unlikely to become one of my favorites. I have a distinct preference for simple recipes with easy preparation, and this book is much too complicated for me. I received this book for free in exchange for my honest and unbiased review.