YumUniverse Pantry to Plate by Heather Crosby

YumUniverse Pantry to Plate by Heather Crosby ISBN-13: 9781615193400 Paperback: 320 pages Publisher: The Experiment Released: May 16, 2017

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from NetGalley:
Cooking at home is good for you, but sometimes it’s nice to eat without planning (and shopping) ahead of time! Enter YumUniverse Pantry to Plate: Improvise Meals You Love—from What You Have!—Plant-Packed, Gluten-Free, Your Way!

In this one-of-a-kind recipe playbook, healthy living enthusiast Heather Crosby shares ingenious master recipes that home cooks can customize endlessly. For example: Pick any grain, one or more veggies, and a complementary aromatic, sauté them together in your choice of sauces, and voilà! You’ve just improvised a hearty, nutritious “scramble.”

Are you a recipe renegade who likes to bend the “rules”? A new vegan or vegetarian seeking more kitchen confidence? Are you tired of going shopping for just one missing ingredient in a recipe? Infinite possibilities await you in your own YumUniverse!


My Review:
YumUniverse Pantry to Plate is a vegan (no meat, dairy, or eggs), gluten-free cookbook. The author provides 30 recipe templates that you can customize based on what you like (or have on hand). She also provided 100 recipes based off of those templates so you can see some of the possibilities. Most of the recipes take between 15-40 minutes to create.

These recipes look fairly simple in terms of cooking skill required. However, the author didn't spend much time explaining how to cook or what the different ingredients can bring to the overall taste, so it may be hit or miss in terms of the resulting taste of the dish. Also, many of the recipes had a lot of added sweetening and/or oil, though these were usually optional additions.

I've tried several of the recipes. They tasted good, and one was quite tasty. One turned out to be less work than the template format made it look like. Overall, I felt like these recipes were more for committed gluten-free vegans than for tempting people to eat more vegan meals.

The templates: For breakfast, a veggie and grain stir-fry, granola, pancakes and waffles, muffins, warm cereals, or breakfast cookies. In addition to some recipes for sauces and creams, she provided templates for compotes and fruit butters, coconut yogurt, and dairy-free milk. For lunch and snacks, it's gluten-free crackers, amazeballs, dairy-free fermented cream cheese, dips and spreads, crunchies, fermented veggies, bites and tots, veggie fries, and soups. For main meals, it's cheesy comfort food, epic salads, veggie sushi makis, tacos and wraps, 'banza bakes, veggie burgers, and hand pies. For sweets, it's cookies, crispy bars, brownies, coconut-based ice cream, and crisps and crumbles.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.


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