Cookbook Review: The Weekday Vegetarians Get Simple

It was a New Year’s resolution that inspired me to pick up Jenny Rosenstrach’s latest cookbook, The Weekday Vegetarians Get Simple. I started the year determined to make at least one vegetarian dinner a week for my family as a way to help two teenagers connect more deeply with their vegetables. My son and daughter are good eaters, but they’re also protein junkies and insist that a meal isn’t a meal without chicken, pork, or beef on the plate. After listening to a podcast interview with Rosenstrach, who admitted she’d been dealing with the same, I realized I needed to help them reframe their idea of protein by sharing a wider world of vegetable-focused foods.

As a follow up to her previous book, The Weekday Vegetarians, Rosenstrach published Get Simple to give cooks the tools to pull off easy-yet-filling, weeknight-friendly, vegetarian dishes. I’ve been an avid follower of Rosenstrach’s since her first cookbook, Dinner: A Love Story—my now worn-out copy contains recipes that have been in my rotation since I got the book as a gift more than 15 years ago. (She made a case for creating a nightly meal journal that I decided to start doing when my daughter was born and have kept it up ever since. Want to know what I made for dinner on this day 2017? Chicken cutlets with sauteed spinach and cherry tomatoes. Thank you, journal!)