The Best 125 Meatless Pasta Dishes

If for no other reason than the fact that the average vegetarian serves pasta at least twice a week, this would be a welcome addition to the vegetarian cookbook shelf. But by offering a wide variety of hot and cold recipes that take less than an hour to prepare, Toomay and Geiskopf-Hadler ( A Complete Guide to Easy Vegetarian and Seafood Cooking ) also address another concern that vegetarians, like all cooks, face: how to make interesting meals when you have no time. Especially useful are the 35 ``Almost Instant Recipes,'' like one for dried-tomato carbonara and mushrooms paprikash, which can be made in the time it takes to cook pasta, and shortcut cooking tips. Recipe instructions are talky but accessible; per-serving nutritional breakdowns are useful; illustrations of pasta types would also have been helpful. Some cooks may be put off by the ingredient listings, in which the food is named before the amount needed. In all, however, this is a affable, practical book that may end up doing for a cook what pasta itself does: make life simpler. (Feb.)