Recipes. Where do I get them? Most cookbooks have very few vegan recipes in them. It really is striking once you begin to look, how many recipes incorporate milk, eggs, or cheese - even if they are meatless. I have, through reading reviews and purchases found a few that I like.
One of my favorite cookbooks is not vegan at all but is a truly excellent cookbook that took my cooking to a whole new level. The book is "The Food Lab" by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. It was the winner of the James Beard Award for General Cooking and the IACP Cookbook of the Year Award when it came out. I had followed Kenji on the excellent website seriouseats.com for a few years and immediately bought his book when it came out. He is a graduate of MIT in architecture, but what he really enjoys is cooking - and he takes a very analytical approach. Of course, that approach appeals to me, but then it must appeal to a lot of other folks as well. It is also quite well-written, and a joy to read. Kenji does have a few vegan recipes - he used to try to go vegan one month out of the year and developed some quite nice recipes doing that. His chili, lasagne, queso, batatadillas, and falafel recipes are still my favorites. He now writes a cooking column for the New York Times.
Another key book on the basics of cooking is "How To Read A French Fry", which also goes into the science of cooking. Cooking is both science (chemistry and physics) and art, and I think that to do it well one must have some understanding of both sides. I find it very helpful when I understand the physics and chemistry that is going on - it especially helps when trying to follow a poorly written recipe, I can fill in the blanks with my own knowledge of what actually works. For example, there is a whole chapter in the french fry book on deep-fat frying which was revelatory for me. Why the oil should be heated to 350 degrees, why you should add at least a little old, used oil. Things most recipes don't explain.
There is a well-known cookbook - quite large - "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone". I bought it and was seriously disappointed. To a large degree, every recipe had either eggs or cheese in them, and the few that were actually vegan were pretty meh. They reminded me of the main complaint I have trying to eat vegan in a restaurant - it is often not very tasty. Boring vegetables. I can do better. I have a copy if you want it!
My best cookbook purchases have been specialized ones, with one exception.
"Vegan Tacos" by Jason Wyrick is quite good. I have cooked about a dozen of the recipes, several more than once, and have rarely been disappointed. He also gives some nice background on each taco - for example, where in Mexico it comes from. There is also an extensive section on key topics like chilis, making tortillas, and other things. He has another book, Vegan Mexico which is pretty good, but I haven't used it nearly as heavily. It has a good recipe for tamales, and a really good one for sopes with smashed charro beans.
To support my current goal of learning more about East Asian cooking (Mandarin Monday) I researched and then bought "The Chinese Vegan Kitchen" by Donna Klein. I've so far cooked about a half-dozen of the recipes, and two turned out to be really awesome, and so have been repeated.
One of my favorite books is "Cool Beans" by Joe Yonan, Food and Dining editor for The Washington Post. There are seven recipes in it that I have made multiple times - some of them I make at least once a month. They are awesome. He also has much great advice on buying and cooking beans, including how to cut down on the gassiness. And it works. I'll have a whole chapter later on about beans. They deserve a special place.
I recently bought a new cookbook I am still trying out. It looks pretty promising, and so far I'm pretty happy with it. "How To Cook Everything Vegetarian" by Mark Bittman, who also authored the VB6 diet many years ago. It is a bit like Joy of Cooking, in that it tries to be fairly comprehensive. It also tries to provide broad guidance in addition to specific recipes - for example noting a dozen different recipes one could use as a taco-filling say, although they were not originally intended that way. So far I've only made 2 recipes out of it, and they were good but not life-changing. But I have high hopes.
I get a lot of recipes off the internet. Usually, I am faced with "what do I do with these three ingredients that I need to use before they go bad"? So I do a google search. I don't usually care much for the larger sites that offer "50 ways to cook eggplant". I like the smaller, individually written sites. My favorite site is Serious Eats, their staff is very talented and the editing is excellent - recipes are explicit about every step, well-organized, and have clear descriptions. Other sites I like are minimalistbaker.com, loveandlemons.com, thespruceeats.com, and dorastable.com, but those are just the ones I have used several recipes from. There are many more that I have gotten a single recipe from.
I keep all my links on this spreadsheet.
Anyway, that covers most of where I get my ideas and recipes. The picture below is of the SpaceX landing barge for their boosters returning from space. I put the picture there so that this blog would get a nice illustration of "Just Read the Instructions".
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