This cookbook is a bit different than most in that it has recipes from actual restaurants, recipes inspired by restaurants and recipes from the author himself. Interspersed between the chapters are City Spotlight segments highlighting the vegan food situation in that city as well as stories of individuals involved those scenes. The recipes all sound very yummy. Perhaps it’s just the Kindle version I received but some recipes have no photo while others have two. Recipe photos are very important to me.

I love how this vegan cookbook provides such a wide range of flavors in easy to follow recipes. As someone who has followed a plant-based diet for many years, it's nice to see a cookbook with different recipes that are so full of flavor! I would highly recommend this cookbook for someone who is looking for something different.

I had high expectations from this book - especially since everyone on Goodreads was recommending it. However, it needs its own evolution.

This is a great cookbook for anyone looking for vegan recipes. I am not a vegan, but I do like to try to have a couple of meatless meals a week, and this book gave me some great ideas!

As someone who appreciates vegan food and enjoys cooking and finding new ways to bring out new food to people this was right up my alley! Strongly suggested.

Great vegan resource and cookbook. Highly recommended for all!

* I received an advanced reader’s copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review

“Try your hardest to cut down your intake of animal products, do your part to reduce your environmental footprint, and start taking pride in what you put into your body, because you know it’s better for your health. That’s what it means to be evolving vegan, and everyone is welcome.”

The author was born in Egypt and moved with his family to Toronto when he was a young child. While his background featured Middle Eastern food, the recipes in this book are adapted from the cuisines of many countries, including Peru,Taiwan, India, Mexico, Ethiopia and Egypt. He collected recipes from the best plant-based establishments in the Unites States and has also included home recipes. Many of the recipes include commercial vegan substitutes for dairy products, eggs and meat. The photographs in the book are nice but there’s not a lot of them. The recipes sound delicious, but they are not health food and some seem quite labor intensive since they involve multiple sauces or other components that must be made before assembling the ultimate dish.

Some of the recipes that interested me included:

Breakfast: avocado toast with bacon bits made from shiitake mushrooms, bagel and lox with carrots substituting for the lox, potato hash with cashew cheese, sausage shakshuka (without the eggs)

Appetizers: crab cakes made from hearts of palm, meatballs (from tofu and lentils) in tomato sauce with ricotta (from almonds), mango rolls

Salads, soups and sandwiches: split pea soup (oddly made with red lentils), falafel salad, burger, chicken schnitzel (you have to make your own vegan chicken), Philly cheesesteak, tuna sandwich (from jackfruit, which is also used to create pulled pork)

Entrées: soy chicken, mac and cheese, Szechuan beef (from seitan), tacos, tofu skewers, pizza, sweet potato lasagna, pad Thai,

Sides: kale chips, grilled broccolini, Moroccan carrots, cauliflower bites (like Buffalo wings)

Desserts: apple pie, pecan pie, coconut crumble cake, coconut cream pie, ice cream cookie sandwich, berry crepes

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher. If I hadn’t received the ARC, I would have bought this book.

Inspirational and encouraging, offering vegan choices from around the world. On my ongoing vegan transformation, I found this book such a treasure as my plant-based diet evolves.

Beautiful vegan cookbook! The layout and photos are very nice. I love the concept of sharing recipes from vegan restaurants across North America. I was keeping an eye out for any from Florida as several Florida cities are at the top of recent "best vegan cities in America" lists. I hope the author will write a sequel featuring some recipes from the Southeastern US. I marked quite a few recipes that I can't wait to try!

This is a great cookbook filled with unique recipes that aren't just the run-of-the-mill vegan recipes you usually find. It's a vibrant book filled with beautiful pictures and some small sections about the different places he has travelled. I really loved those parts where he talks about a certain city and highlights a restaurant from there. The one thing I wish is that it included recipes for the hardest things to make vegan: eggs, butter, meat. Instead, he recommends brands of substitutes, but it's much more helpful to have your own recipe for it incase someone doesn't have easy access to the brands and he could have just recommended a ready made solution as another option. All in all, the recipes look delicious and it is a very beautiful book.

This book is a great edition for people who are already familiar with vegan cuisine. For the rest of us, it offers too many recipes with hard to find or unfamiliar ingredients. I enjoyed reading about the different restaurants around the country. I was left with a desire to visit them rather than to recreate their dishes.

Mena Massoud's Evolving Vegan is offers something different. There is a brief discussion on how a plant based diet helps our planet, but Massoud also appeals to the reader's tastebuds as well. He shares recipes of dishes from internationally recognized Vegetarian restaurants - the recipes are straightforward (not fussy) and replicable in a home kitchen. The dishes are well worth the effort and healthy. Mena suggests ways to tweak the recipes, to make them your own.

I acquired a few vegetarian recipe books since our family began our plant based diet 2 years ago. This Evolving Vegan holds recipes that we enjoy eating and are not overwhelming in types of ingredients or steps. This supplements the basic vegan cookbooks very well.

I would recommend this for students to read, but I would also put a copy of this in our school library and in the Family & Consumer Science classroom. I really appreciated the variety of recipes and the fact that they were easy to follow and included ingredients that aren't impossible to find in rural WI.

Unfortunately, the formatting was a bit jumbled so it was not as pleasant a reading experience as I'd hoped. However, I loved the author's introduction, selection of recipes, and his overall attitude toward "evolving vegan."

Vegan Fun

I have had an interest in vegan food for two decades, though I consider myself to be more vegetarian than vegan. But I'm always happy to find new vegan cookbooks and recipes to enjoy. I found this book a lot of fun. The author has gathered recipes from restaurants around the US., written some inspired by restaurants, and also has included her own and her mother's vegan recipes. If you ever thought vegan food was boring, just flip through these recipes. You'll see an incredible variety of colors, textures, and ingredient combinations that will make your mouth water! Some ingredients are certainly unusual, especially if you're accustomed to the traditional omnivore diet. Depending on where you live, you might have a hard time sourcing some ingredients, or at least I know I will in my rural southern Oregon town. Some recipes are more complex than you typically see in cookbooks these days. This is because so many of them are actual restaurant recipes or inspired by them. Real chefs tend to make fussier dishes than us home cooks. But I certainly found this collection of recipes inspiring, and there are more than a few that I want to try. Not every recipe has a photo, but many of them do. Many photos are taken from directly above, which I don't think is the best for most food dishes as it flattens the three-dimensional nature of food, not giving a true sense of what a dish looks like. I also had a problem with some of the graphic design of the book. Some recipes are given on a colored background that makes them at times hard to read. The light blue font on the medium pink background and green on yellow/orange were headache-inducing. All in all, though, I did find this cookbook immensely enjoyable.

Right away this cookbook felt different. I love the author's story of how he grew up and the things he ate. I like how it points out how we all eat, cook, and really that should be accessible for everyone.

This book is now a bunch of photos from a blog. It's recipes collected from the author's kitchen as well as his family and restaurants.

It includes city spotlights that discuss the vegan community around the country. There's also hero spotlights that lift up people working hard for the vegan movement.

The pictures are absolutely gorgeous. I always want more pictures, but these feel evenly spread out in the book and I didn't feel like I was missing a ton. The fonts and way the recipes are written I really visually enjoy too. I will say I wasn't a big fan of the cover. There's so many amazing pictures inside that I loved so much more then the cover photo.

Something else I love are all the recipes have a short description/story with them. I enjoy the ideas of how to personalize a dish, what to serve it with, or a memory to read of where the recipe came from. There's a nice variety of cuisines and recipes. Definitely something for everyone here. The ingredients aren't too hard to come by. It includes a bit of vegan processed foods like vegan sausages, cheese options, soy curls or vegan chicken, but I think most people can find those options now (I live in a small town in the middle of hunting and carnivore central, so I hope most people can find it).

Overall a fun, slightly different feeling, vegan collection of recipes.

Classic recipes collide with the new vegan revolution. Looking forward to trying many of the recipes.

I was so excited to read this book as I recently became vegan. Mena Massoud is an actor who starred in the live action version of Aladdin, and this book is not only filled with delicious recipes, but it also traces Massoud’s evolution to living a plant-based life. Evolving Vegan is a vibrant cookbook exploding with exciting vegan cooking ideas. The pages are colorful and creative: bagel and lox are constructed using carrots, “crab” cakes feature hearts of palm and my favorite, albeit most ambitious meal is the Ethiopian dinner that includes components such as split peas, homemade wat, and collard greens. I prepared it and it delivered. This book is fun an inventive and I loved reading about which particular restaurants in various cities inspired certain dishes. Too many times chefs don’t give credit to those that influence their cooking. Mena Massoud delivers intoxicating recipes that range in flavor and I can’t wait to eat my way through this book.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. I am always looking for new yummy vegan recipes. And now there are some cool restaurants I want to try! I really enjoyed that these recipes did not seem complicated, but rather simple that anyone can make.

This cookbook is more than your regular cookbook. It's like a road trip around the world!! Massoud features recipes inspired by vegan restaurants where he has eaten meals all over the world and tells you the behind the scenes story to go with the diverse recipes. He also shares some of his Mother's recipe creations with us.

The cookbook has easy-to-follow instructions which is good for someone just starting out with this lifestyle. The first recipe I made was a potato pierogi recipe and they were so flavorful, but not very pretty to look at my first go round!

Some of the recipes contain pictures, but I would have liked to have seen pictures for all of them because the ones that were there, were gorgeous!

I am reviewing based on the digital copy and there were some issues with that. Not very easy to maneuver within the recipes, so I will be buying the hard cover when it is released.

I would recommend this cookbook to anyone starting out on the plant-based way of eating or someone that is experienced in this lifestyle.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Tiller Press for the ARC in exchange for my review.

#NetGalley #EvolvingVegan #TillerPress