Post Punk Kitchen Forum

Over the weekend I made Alicia Silverstone's Rustic Pasta for the 5th or 6th time. It's a very strange sounding recipe - way outside my comfort zone - but its SO good! Spaghetti, cabbage, onions, garlic, marinara sauce (just a little), soy sauce, celery. The reason I made it is because my (omni) mother was coming over and requested it. It's super easy to make and seems very fancy. :)

Her other recipe that has been requested by my entire circle of family and friends is her Peanut Butter Cups. They completely mimic Reese's pb cups. She has graham cracker crumbs mixed into the pb mixture to give you to same sort of texture. To die for!

I prefer Isa's cookbooks overall of course, but these 2 recipes are outstanding!!

The oatmeal, nut and dried fruit cookies in that book are to die for! And I love the Cuban Style Roasted Sweet Potatoes, although I use cilantro instead of the parsley she calls for.

I love both of those too!

I love the raw balls! I make them all the time to take to work. Sometimes I switch it up with peanut butter instead of almond butter.

(The PB cups are the exact same recipe from How it all Vegan. I know she doesn't claim most of her recipes are original, but she also doesn't give any credit to Sarah Kramer.)

i've only made the barley tahini casserole! it's good.

what i hate, but not her fault - at my local totally overpriced HFS they have umemboshi plums with a little "as mentioned by alicia silverstone in the kind diet" and they're like $16

I made the radicchio pizza tonight, with a mix of radicchio and mustard greens. It was delicious and felt quite fancy!

I noticed the recipes were VERY similar, Alicia just uses 'healthier' ingredients like maple sugar and grain sweetened chocolate.

I love her Tofu salad recipe and the Rustic pasta. The rustic pasta is the only vegan recipe my mom will eat. She refuses anything else I make.

Oh, and I love the granola recipe too, I make it all the time. It's not all that clumpy but it tastes awesome!

I have to admit, I'm pretty obsessed with the recipes in this book. Everything I've tried, I've liked--even the stuff that sounded weird at first. And now I love umeboshi plums; yeah, they are expensive, but you only use part of one for most recipes and one package lasts forever--I'm down to four plums in a pack I bought in July.

stuff I love:
mushroom "pizzas" (now one of my all-time favorite things to eat)
ume sesame dressing or flax/umeboshi vinegarette (good on everything)
peanut butter rice crispy treats
braised daikon (seriously, I can't NOT eat the entire batch)
nishime (I was skeptical, but I ended up eating the whole pot)
nori burritos
fried mochi
watercress, beet, & heirloom tomato salad

The rustic pasta does sound weird, but is in fact awesome.

As soon as I get ahold of some burdock, I'm gonna try the kinpira.

That barley casserole is one of my go-to recipes. It's so good!! I've been adding spinach to it too.
On TKD message boards, people have talked about the plums at great length. There are cheaper ones at Asian food stores but they are not up to the standards we would want. Everyone says to stay away from the cheap ones.

Please tell me your secret for the braised daikon! I tried it with disastrous results. Does yours look like the picture in the book? Mine wouldn't absorb much of the liquid at all.

I love the raw balls! I try to keep some in my freezer at all times. :)

I wanna try the Kind Diet book, wasnt sure if it was anygood or not..

I think I pretty much followed the recipe, but I turned the heat up until the liquid was barely simmering. The first time I made them, I had the heat too low and the took much longer than the time given in the book, so the next time I made them, I made sure to fiddle with the heat. They did end up looking pretty similar to the picture in the book.

I just picked this up at the library this morning, was really restrained and read a lot of the info in the book for jumping to the recpies. We do have a macrobiotic veg in our family already, so while I understand some of how it works. I can't say it's a choice I'd make for myself, but some of the Superhero recpies were very delicious looking and I may have to rethink my ideas on macrobiotic food.

Prior to seeing this book for myself I was dubious about what it would be like, I wondered what a celebrity diet book would be really like even a vegan one. It's well written and I found it an interesting read, a good all round book. I'll have to get a copy for my own colleciton.

That just might be the trick. I do tend to go low with the heat. Thanks!

I skipped the parts of the book about meat/dairy because I was already on board at that point. But I read everything else. I like the way she writes, her personality really comes through. I thought that the recipes (although not all her own of course) were so creative and different from what I had seen prior to that. I have been so happy with the book.