Meatless Dishes in Twenty Minutes

Levin's brief book is indeed meatless, taking a quick but still useful look at international cuisines that offer vegetarian pleasures to the taste buds. You'll find a lot of standard dishes: cheese blintzes, frittatas and omelets, curries, pilafs, stir-fried assortments, antipasti and pita-stuffed sandwiches. The garlic fettucine and mushroom Stroganoff are tempting; baked bean and cheddar pizza isn't. Grilled eggplant and goat cheese sandwiches may overwhelm some readers. But while not the last word in vegetarian cookery, the book offers a reasonably generous glimpse of the possibilities in fewer than 100 pages. (Aug.)