Gluten-Free Recipes for the Conscious Cook is an interesting cookbook – and one I’m looking forward to making use of – but not likely to become an everyday favorite around here.

Subtitled as “a seasonal, vegetarian cookbook,” it was what I expected in some ways, but not in others.  As far as “vegetarian” goes, it is largely as expected.  Obviously, there are no meat ingredients here.  (It isn’t vegan, so there are eggs.)  I was disappointed to see the idea pushed that it’s more “efficient” use of resources to eat lower on the food chain.  In some ways that may be true.  There are a lot of nutrients, though, that humans don’t process efficiently from vegetable sources; we get more of them in lower quantities of food by consuming meat, thus making more efficient use of our food. 😉  Tofu is used here on a couple occasions, too; we don’t eat soy (except in traditional soy sauce), preferring the far more healthful dairy products instead.

As far as “seasonal” goes, I was a little disappointed.  There are plenty of seasonal ingredients here, but the layout of the book doesn’t highlight these.  I would have expected a cookbook billing itself as “seasonal” to be organized by season, or at least to have a prominent notation on each recipe indicating when the ingredients are in season.  This doesn’t have anything like that.  A more accurate subtitle would have been “a vegetarian cookbook from an author who eats seasonally.”

The overall ingredients are what make the book most interesting to me; they’re also what prevent its being a useful “everyday” sort of cookbook.  There is a wide variety of unusual ingredients in this book.  Now, that makes it great for experimenting.  “What do I do with quinoa?”  Try South American Quinoa Stew or Lemony Quinoa Salad with Toasted Sunflower Seeds.  “What about nori?” Check out Nori Rolls with Gingered Tofu.  It makes it far less likely that I will already have in my kitchen all of the ingredients necessary for any one recipe.  (And I have some strange stuff in my kitchen, believe me!)

There is some helpful information in the beginning about cooking various grains.  There are also tips sprinkled throughout the book that offer “how-to’s” with usefulness that extends beyond the recipes in which they’re found.

My conclusion is that this is a great reference, but most readers shouldn’t expect that it will replace their current “everyday” cookbooks.

Disclosure: I was provided by the publisher, New Harbinger Publications, with a copy of the book to facilitate this review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.