It seems kind of rare to get a cookbook focused on a lesser well known cuisine that is not loaded with hard to find ingredients. Make It Plant Based: Filipino actually manages to be both vegan and ethnic without requiring too many unheard of ingredients, and also actually manages to make its cuisine pretty user friendly to someone (me) totally unfamiliar. Full disclosure: I haven’t actually tried anything out of here yet, but I will.
There is a brief introduction that manages to not preach the gospel of either vegan or Filipino, while still being focused and informative about the traditions that are coming in the recipes. The ingredient review is actually useful in most cases, even for things like rice (the best kinds of white or glutinous rices for certain kinds of things, and so on), the soy sauces that work best for the recipes forthcoming, and so on. Really the only two things that you probably would have to find outside of a standard grocery are the cane vinegar and the banana ketchup (this I’ve actually seen in a standard grocery, but not consistently).
There’s not a ton of fake meat, although there is plenty of tofu (including a tofu-based make your own sausage that actually doesn’t look too hard to do, and doesn’t have a mile-long ingredient list), and there’s options for turning some things that might otherwise be sides into meals, as well as suggestions for modification if you care to “free-style it”. The recipes are not that unfamiliar looking either, especially if you have some knowledge of either Spanish (hello adobo) or Chinese cooking. Probably the only two recipes that I won’t be able to try are the no-churn ube ice cream (it calls for actual ube sweet potato) and the dessert salad because I’ve never seen or even heard of pandan-flavored agar agar powder. I know what pandan is, and I know what agar agar is, but I’ve never seen the two combined pre-packaged as is suggested.
Fingers crossed.
