Soup With Friends / Comforting Bowls Of Gluten-Free Vegan Goodness

Soup with Friends is a delicious collection of hearty, gluten-free, plant-based, whole-food recipes for soups, salads, and sides everyone can enjoy. The recipes in this cookbook emphasize naturally gluten-free, whole-food, plant-based ingredients—starchy and non-starchy vegetables, beans and legumes, and non-cereal grains—with minimal use of nuts, seeds, avocado and soy, and exclude the use of all oils and animal products. Only a couple recipes need "specialty" gluten-free ingredients which makes this book useful for anyone who might be looking for a healthy, whole-foods, plant-based cookbook whether they choose to eat gluten-free or not.

The Welcome section introduces the recipes, reviews fat-free cooking techniques, and gives helpful tips about buying gluten-free ingredients and how to understand gluten-free labelling.

The Soups section is the largest section containing twenty-four delicious recipes with tips and variations. Many of the recipes are improved versions of existing blog recipes such as Thai Corn and Sweet Potato Soup, Silky Broccoli Chowder, and Creamy Butternut Squash and Tomato Soup with Gremolata; but I also created some brand new recipes such as Minestrone Soup, Festive Black Bean Soup, and flavourful Homemade Vegetable Stock with delicious variations for Coriander and Lemongrass Stock, Chicken-Free Stock, and Tomato-Corn Stock. A revised recipe for Shiitake Mushroom Stock adds such deep rich flavour that is has become my favourite quick-to-make stock for many recipes.

The Sides section includes recipes for Sun-dried Tomato Quinoa Wraps, Baking Powder Biscuits, Coriander and Onion Flatbreads, Zucchini Corn Bread, BBQ Chip and Curry Roasted Potatoes, Zucchini Hummus and Smoky Maple Tempeh. All these recipes are naturally gluten-free made from whole-food ingredients such as quinoa, buckwheat, potatoes, and oats (one recipe) that you can grind yourself.

The Salads section contains a variety of recipes including Apple Spring Mix Salad with Sweet Mustard Dressing, Beet and Napa Cabbage Slaw, Greek Salad with a homemade Soy Feta, Warm Roasted Vegetable Salad with Garam Masala, Three Sisters Summer Salad, Millet Tabouleh, Pesto Pasta Salad, and classic Potato Salad. All the recipes include dressings which could be mixed and matched to suit your taste.

The book concludes with an Appendix containing detailed notes supporting my comments in the Welcome section and lots of links to learn more about healthy gluten-free, whole-food, plant-based eating.

The pages are beautifully set up with lots of tips and variations. Each recipe is accompanied by a full colour photo. I have included a master set of bookmarks for each section in the book to help you navigate with ease. In addition, each section has its own table of contents with clickable links to the individual recipe pages. When you want to return from a recipe to the contents list, simply click on the bookmarks to navigate back to the table of contents and carry on from there.