It’s an interesting thing to me that sometimes cookbooks often have favored ingredients not directly related to the theme or title; case in point, Vegan Buddha Bowls seems enamored of cauliflower with lesser attention to sweet potato, carrot, and cabbages.
For example, in the first section, “Beautiful, Bountiful Buddha Bowls”, there are 17 recipes. Of those 17, 4 rely on sweet potato, and 5 on cauliflower as the main starch. The salad bowl have 1 sweet potato and 2 cauliflower out of 15 (1/5, 20%); pasta bowls have 1 sweet potato based entry (2 if you count the obvious equivalence between sweet potato and butternut squash) out of 8; 2/6 soups have cauliflower; breakfast options run 2/6 containing cauliflower (both sweet smoothie options too); and when we get to the “sides”, last but not least, 3/10 are mostly cauliflower.
Add that up, you get, out of 62 recipes, 12 featuring cauliflower. That’s roughly a 20% chance of cauliflower. 8 recipes use broccoli (not really a starch though), 9 carrots (the closest starchy rival); sweet potato and cabbage together gets you 12, but that goes up to 17 if we include Brussel sprouts (aka baby cabbages). Compare that with 3 recipes featuring with beets, and 4 with beans. Tofu is here in all of 5 recipes, and chickpeas (one of my favorites, although I was redirected to ‘garbanzo beans’ in the index) are in 6.
The recipes here in general are pretty simple and don’t feel all that original, but what I do appreciate is that I don’t have to think about coming up with my own combinations; sometimes it’s nice to have someone else do all that mental work and the trial and error of figuring out what actually works together and what might not. Bowls that involve a handful of different things make a good lunch that’s easy to pack, and it’s all stuff I can easily get a hold of. Even though the book has “vegan” in the title, it’s not preachy about that which is kind of rare. Likewise is the brief introduction which is only about 2 1/3 pages, and that’s basically a personal introduction to the author and her food journey. Most of the time a book like this gets you a long discussion of principles, equipment, and more info that, while probably useful to a beginner, gets tedious to someone who already knows most of it. This is in some ways a beginner book that doesn’t really openly treat you like one.