Book Summaries

“More Than Veggies cookbook – Asian Favourites Made Plant-Based” by Joy Yuen

More Than Veggies

Book details

  • Paperback : 132 pages
  • ISBN-10 : 9814893374
  • ISBN-13 : 978-9814893374
  • Language: : English

About the Author

Joy Yuan is a Singapore-based creative, food and travel blogger. A professionally-trained visual designer and self-taught photographer, she has been creating plant-based recipes for the past decade. She shares her creations online and is often consulted for her knowledge of plant-based food options. She has also appeared on MediaCorp’s Channel 8, Hello Singapore, to share her recipe for plant-based bak kwa (Chinese pork jerky).

Review of “More Than Veggies” cookbook by Joy Yuen, published by Marshall Cavendish.

Reviewed by George Jacobs of HealthPartners.sg

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, people are spending more time at home, and some people are using that time wisely. For example, they are exercising, bonding with family, and developing hobbies. A great hobby is cooking, especially for those interested in vegan food, which is an exciting cuisine, full of new creations.

Fortunately, more and more resources are available to guide us when we expand our vegan food preparation horizons. One outstanding new resource for those keen on plant-based eating is the cookbook More Than Veggies by Joy Yuan, a long-time Singapore activist on behalf of farmed animals.

For many years, Joy has been sharing recipes via her More Than Veggies website, blog, and social media. The name More Than Veggies signifies that yes, vegetables are great, and veggies feature prominently in the cookbook, but vegan cuisine also includes so many other delicious ingredients.

Joy’s cookbook has a least three outstanding features:

(1) Incredible photography – Your taste buds will be sad if you never prepare any of the dishes in More Than Veggies, but your eyes will still adore the book, and your imagination will have a feast.

(2) Emphasis on Southeast Asian and other Asian dishes – We hear so much about plant-based burgers from the West, such as Impossible and Beyond, and they are great, but at the end of the day, we still crave our traditional foods. Among the 45 dishes in More Than Veggies are such Asian favourites as kway chap, nasi lemak, traditional dumplings, and tempeh rendang.

(3) Really clear instructions – The cookbook’s written instructions are oh-so-valuably supplemented by step-by-step photos for each recipe to keep us on the right track. Yes, the photos of 45 final dishes are lip-smackingly entrancing, but it’s the many little instructions photos that help us reach vegan nirvana.

Covid-19 has changed our world irrevocably. Everyone now knows the link between zoonotic diseases, such as AIDS, Covid-19, and SARS, and our cruel and unnecessary use of animals for food. Thus, the More Than Veggies cookbook comes at the perfect time to make vegan the new normal, so that we can greatly reduce the chance of another, even worse pandemic.