Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I first became interested in a Plant Based Diet after watching the documentary Food Inc. The science made sense, so I wanted to try changing my diet to better line up with their recommendations for nutrition. I knew this change would not be sustainable if I could not find a variety of food and flavors to try. This book solved that problem and really kicked off my new Plant Strong lifestyle. It has been 2 months since I started this journey and have already lost over 10lbs and sit right under 15% body fat. Wondering where to get started, I found this book was highly recommended online. I was very happy to find out that not only does it have fantastic recipes, but it also informative text for the questions you get from every single person when they find out you have stopped eating dairy, meat, and oil. Where do you get your protein? You won't be getting your vitamins. The Mediterranean diet is the healthiest, not plants, and so on, and so on. Rip's writing style is easy to read and digest. The recipes are fantastic and contain ingredients you should be able to find in your local grocery store, not just a whole foods or similar produce forward chain. One warning, this was all made easier because we already owned a food processor. Not that it's required for ALL recipes, but I find myself using it multiple times per week and it would be pretty hard to proceed if all the recipes that sounded delicious required a tool that prohibited me from making it. It has been incredibly entertaining making pizza dough from scratch and learning about what things like tempeh and saitan are. I like that the recipes are mostly from scratch and did not use vegan cheat foods like tofurkey or other 'meat nicotine patch' items. My wife has not really committed, and that is fine. We can enjoy most of the recipes together and she can add a non-plant based item if she desires. Examples of our favorites include Zeb's Waffles, Black Bean and Sweet Potato quesadillas, JR's Pizza and Flatbread Dough, Better-milk Biscuits (with the Mommy's Mushroom Gravy), Kale Butter 2.0, Plane Jane Hummus, Fast and Fresh Marinara sauce, Banana-oatmeal cookies, and Damn Good Cookies. The Absolute stand out for me was the Mad Greek Gyros which combined the Scary Easy Saitan, Tzatziki sauce, and JR's pizza dough. It was jaw dropping on not only how good this tasted, but the flavors were spot on. That said, not every recipe has been a slam dunk. If you do not like Rubens, you're not going to like a Plant Based Ruben. If you are expecting the plant based chorizo to be like chorizo, you're in trouble. Some items can come off bland, like the kale pesto sauce. To sum this up, this book is an excellent gateway to a plant based lifestyle. It contains facts and references for why the change makes sense and an excellent variety of recipes to test out. I have experienced positive results so far from the change, and can certainly thank this book for helping with the transition.