Moosewood Restaurant Favorites

June 3, 2013
The iconic Moosewood restaurant in Ithaca, N.Y., is known for its vegetarian cuisine and has been serving food for 40 years. Moosewood is owned by a collective of 19 passionate (mostly self-taught) cooks who run the restaurant and write cookbooks. The latest installment—their 13th collection (five have been nominated for James Beard awards, and two have won)—is a delightful “best of” collection of the restaurant’s most popular dishes, as well as some recipes that haven’t previously been published. The book is straightforward, with small international twists. Hearty, flavorful soups include classics like Moosewood’s famous cream of spinach and French onion, as well as the more exotic West African Peanut Soup and Chilled Cantaloupe-Amaretto Soup. There are fun spins on the traditional burger: Curried Red Lentil Burgers, and Mushroom-Tofu-Pecan Burgers, along with seasonal salad plates. Other chapters include “Beans,” “Frittatas and Pies,” “Casseroles,” “Stuffed Vegetables,” “Tofu,” “Pasta,” and “Fish.” There’s something for everyone in this comprehensive and extremely useful cookbook, which stresses community living and eating meals with style.

October 1, 2013
For more than 40 years, Ithaca, New York's Moosewood Restaurant has enjoyed a reputation as the nation's premier vegetarian restaurant. The collective of dedicated cooks that runs the restaurant may have changed across the decades, but its dedication has expanded beyond simple vegetarianism to organic and locally sourced ingredients as well. This collection of some of Moosewood's cooks' and customers' most admired recipes has something for just about everyone. There are stuffed vegetables and casseroles to star as centerpieces of company-coming dinners. Bean dishes derive from Mexican, Greek, Basque, and Caribbean sources. Burritos and strudels offer hand-held food for on-the-go eating. An entire garden of vibrantly colored fresh vegetables adorns pasta primavera. Moosewood gives in to nonvegetarian cooking with a goodly selection of fish recipes providing some alternatives to a rigorously nonanimal regimen. For the sweet tooth, Moosewood supplies cookies, brownies, cakes, pies, and even baklava.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)