Little Brown and Company (New York). 256 pp

I love a vegan celeb, and Pamela Anderson is one of the longest standing ones we have, so I was eager to see what her cookbook had in store. Although the title is a little much for me, the introductory text does convey that Pam is very cool and likeable and earthy. She loves the outdoors, growing her own food, and sharing the process and results of cooking with her loved ones. The recipes in this book are definitely plant forward – you won’t find any meat substitutes here – but there’s also a certain lofty, decorative quality to both the presentation and the content. That vibe made me nervous as first – I get concerned about material that makes being vegan seem unachievable or unrealistic, or, god forbid, “elite.” On the other hand, I do like the idea of conveying that vegan life can be luxe and isn’t limited to brown lentils and Birkenstocks. So I dove in.

The book is divided into the following (slighty-too-prescious-sounding-for-me) sections: Waking with the Sun, Picnic in the Garden, Afternoon Tea, Aperitif, Light Summer Suppers, Comfy Food for Cozy Days, Sweets, Bread Obsession, Don’t-Forget-Me Pet Treats, Natural Beauty, and Preserving the Season.

The Waking with the Sun (otherwise known as breakfast) section, features a lot of overnight oats and porridges, which as we know, are not my thing. So I made the California Acai Bowl.

It calls for frozen acai berries – which I didn’t know existed and I was unable to find. So I just made it with a bag of acai “chunks” and blueberries. This didn’t have enough liquid, and my Bullet blender struggled with it, but it was tasty and had a lot less added sugar than some acai bowls I’ve had.

From the Picnic in the Garden section, I made the Paradise Street Corn. And here we have already arrived at the highlight of this book. This recipe calls for corn on the cob to be slathered in vegan mayo, sprinkled with what Pamela calls “Crumbly Cheese,” then sprinkled with lime juice and cilantro. Divine. Will eat this many times over the summer and would gladly serve it to company.

But the real story here, my friends, is the Crumbly Cheese. This is more or less a parm substitute, but it is far and away the best one I’ve ever had. It’s a breeze to make with nooch and a few seasonings – and the genius addition of almond flour. I find with most cookbooks there is one “this made the purchase worth it” recipe – and this one is for sure it. This house will never be without a batch henceforth – in fact I just ordered a nice glass shaker jar to keep it in.

I opted to make a Glow Green Juice from the Afternoon Tea section. It tasted like the celery, kale, and green apple that went into it, and it sure was pretty. But I’m a little on the fence about juice. The amount of waste that is left behind and the tremendous amount of water it takes just to clean the ten parts of the juicer, make me wonder how sustainable it is.

This chapter also features some nice sounding tea cakes, but also a few eye-rollers like Flower Tea Blends that ask us to gather things like dried rose petals, dried elderflower, and dried red clover and steep them. I mean, sorry to be bah-humbug, but does anyone really do this?

“Marinated Plant Feta” was my first selection from the Aperitif section. I have made a lot of tofu feta in my time, and it never quite hits. I had high hopes for this texture-wise. It has a lot of coconut oil in it, which may be what made the difference, and it did come out crumbly at first. But then directs you to cover it with olive oil (I think I would have chosen brine), which for an entire container of tofu, would be a LOT of oil, so I didn’t bother.

It’s pretty good without it, still isn’t quite Follow Your Heart feta crumbles good. I added some to a white bean and dill salad, and it worked nicely there, but I still have a lot left over. (Side note this is one of three things I made from this book that required overnight time (or longer) in the fridge, which as I have griped about before, I believe should be bolded in recipes).

I also made the West Coast Avocado Tartine. This is essentially mashed avocado with a touch of lemon juice – and the surprise addition of nori. I really thought I would hate it – that seaweed flavor is pretty off-putting to me — but with the recommended walnuts and chia seeds sprinkled on top, it was really a winner! (Then I made it a second time, and thought I would gag, so figure that out.) Anyway, if a sushi-like avocado toast would be your jam, you would like this clever combo.

From Light Summer Suppers I made the Buddha Bowls with Crispy Sesame Tofu. This recipe made me cranky. It involved way too many pans for a rice bowl. The sauce was way too thick, more like a dipping sauce, than something you could easily toss with the otherwise plain rice and veg. I guess the sesame seeds made the tofu look pretty, but I’m not sure they added enough to make the fussing around worth it.

You’ve made this dish a thousand times before but without all these unnecessary complications. I’m not quite sure how lentil soup and Harissa Baked Whole Cauliflower mesh with “light” and “summer,” but those are some of the other entries you will find in this chapter.

Comfort Food for Cozy Days brought me Wild Mushroom Risotto, and a similar experience as the Buddha Bowl. It required a lot of pots and clean up for what was a pretty run-of-the-mill dish. It was kinda boring and had way too much oil in it. (It also had a rare typo for this book, calling for one small or two large shallots). BUT it had the Crumbly Cheese on top. So, yay for that.

I ended up making three things from the Sweets section. That’s unlike me – not sure why I did. Perhaps because it include some of the more approachable recipes. To that end, I started with Watermelon Granita. I have seen so many recipes for granita, but it aways seemed like more trouble than it was worth. It’s just frozen fruit and sugar – essentially shaved ice. But, hey, people like shaved ice! This was really tasty and refreshing, reasonably low-guilt for a sweet treat, and, of course, very simple, easy, and inexpensive to make.

I was skeptical about the flavor profile of the Grapefruit Thyme Popsicles. But dang – this is another one where this book really shines. These were tasty, refreshing, surprising, fairly easy to make, and the perfect end to an al fresco meal on a summer evening.

I was going to make the Superfood Warrior Chocolate Chip Cookies to use in the Cashew-Coconut Ice Cream Sandwiches, but I didn’t want to spend the money on maca powder, and then I forgot the applesauce, so I gave up. But I did make the Coconut-Cashew Ice Cream. The texture of this is really nice, but I found it kind of sweet. I think with some chocolate applied to add some bitterness and dimension, it would be a keeper.

From the Bread Obsession section, I made the Finnish Sunflower Seed Bread. In addition to sunflower seeds, this features walnuts and flax seeds and chia seeds and hemp seeds. Again, it requires hours of chilling time, an hour of baking, and then hours of cooling time, which is irritating, but ultimately it is dense and nutty and packed with protein and other good things. Its a good base for avocado or faux feta or anything else smooth and fatty you might want to put on it. (Again, I didn’t want to spend the money on the psyllium husks called for, so I just substituted extra flax and chia. The bread came out a little crumbly, but that could be because I made a substitution, so cannot fault the recipe for that.)

This section also includes a recipe for Herbes de Provence. This is the kind of “recipe” that drives me a little nuts. The text says, “I enjoy making my own spice mixes from my garden. I plan accordingly while planting. The lavender adds a unique flavor, like laying (sic) in fields of flowers – dancing in wild pink grasses… My imagination runs wild…” Then the recipe calls for, among other things, dried savory, dried marjoram, dried food-grade lavender, and eight other dried herbs and seeds. I mean, do you really grow all these things in your garden and then dry them and the mix them, as opposed to just buying a jar of Herbes de Provence? I am, um, not going to do that.

I didn’t make the pet treats (sorry Ethel, but you know you have a sensitive tummy). Nor did I make the Natural Beauty products, mostly because I didn’t feel like searching out the ingredients. Finally, I know, I know about fermented food, it’s all the rage. But things that have to be kept in a cool, dark place for a month before I eat them freak me out. But if you want to try this – there are a bunch of pickles and preserves in the Preserving the Seasons section to try. I made the Plant Butter (not sure what it has to do with preserving the seasons), which, like the crumbly cheese has the addition of almond flour, but in this case, it didn’t really work. I’m sticking with homemade Miyokos (the unfermented kind).

This book was such a mixed bag for me. It runs the gamut from incredibly simple (Watermelon Granita) to extremely complicated (My Wedding Cake). Some of the techniques are a little out there (there is a recipe for cosmetic rose hip oil which requires warming it in the oven for EIGHT HOURS. What?) And it includes a lot of expensive and difficult-to-find ingredients like roasted dandelion root powder and fig leaves. A lot of the photos of the food include edible flowers and, as noted, some of the herb blends and floral teas and the like seem intended more as aspiration and inspiration than functional recipes. That said, there are some really usable basics and some very innovative flavors here. Thus, I am inventing a new category for this book and rating it Vegan Coffee Table. This book would make a great gift, or a display for guests to flip through and see how colorful and varied and, of course, full of LOVE vegan living can be. They may even ask you about the few things you dog-eared that you might actually make again. Like that daggone Crumbly Cheese.

I did to receive any form of compensation in exhange for this review.