Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven: Over 200 Recipes for Uncommon Soups, Tasty Bites, Side-By-Side Dishes, and Too Many Desserts

A tie-in to a forthcoming cooking series on public television, this collection from the author of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest and Still Life with Menu offers a broad range of fairly simple and often imaginative vegetarian dishes. Such dishes as Onion-Wilted Spinach Salad with Cumin, Avocado and Apple or Black-eyed Pea and Squash Soup with Shiitake Mushrooms will add spark to any meal. Sizzling Long Beans, stir-fried with garlic and chiles, and Coconut Rice, with ginger, chiles and lime, will likely delight any home cook looking for side dish variations. Mushroom-Barley ""Risotto"" and Sweet Potatoes and Spinach in Spiced Orange Sauce also deliver on the subtitle's promise of unexpected fare. Seductive desserts (Mexican Chocolate Cake with Mocha Butterceam; Blueberry-Lemon Mousse Pie) gleefully disregard dietary prudence. Remembering that great veggie pickings are slim in winter months, Katzen includes such dishes as Root Vegetable Soup and Tuscan Bean and Pasta Stew (featuring canned and frozen ingredients). Occasionally overblown prose diminishes the effect of Katzen's personable style, as when Green Beans and Tofu in Crunchy Thai Peanut Sauce is described as ""a virtual explosion of flavor and texture!"" But overall this is a fresh, respectable collection worthy of a place on the bookshelf of any cook, vegetarian or carnivorous. $250,000 ad/promo; QPB main selection; author tour. (Oct.)