A great collection of recipes for long weekends, holidays, and any time you feel like preparing a special meal.

--Super Chef

Vegan cooking has been exploding in popularity over the past decade. Once limited to a small number of zealous adherents, veganism has become steadily more mainstream, and there have been numerous vegan cookbooks and diet guides that have helped aid that growth.

David Stowell and George Black contributed to that boom with their Veganopolis Cafeteria restaurant in Portland, Oregon. After starting out in 2003 with a small delivery cart, they ran Veganopolis from 2005 to 2008, and developed a huge international following for their delicious, no-nonsense, versatile vegan cooking. (Their Veganopolis website averaged more than 150,000 hits per month from around the globe.)

Now, they've captured their most popular Veganopolis recipes in their new cookbook, whose release heralds the 2011 opening of a new Veganopolis Cafeteria in the authors' hometown of Chicago. The book features the breadth of delicious, versatile, and accessible recipes that Stowell and Black popularized at their restaurant. This is not ground-level vegan cooking. Though their are plenty of simpler recipes for kitchen novices--including plenty of soups, sandwiches, and salads--Stowell and Black also offer lots of more ambitious recipes to make delicious entrees, including a range of sauces, plus a variety of fabulous desserts.

Stowell and Black made Veganopolis a popular destination not just for politically committed vegans, but also for anyone who enjoyed good food well prepared. Their approach to vegan cooking--and to cookbook writing--is to leave the politics and the attitude behind and focus on practical information, cutting-edge technique, and clear, concise presentation. The Veganopolis Cafeteria Cookbook is sure to become a popular staple of every bookstore's vegan cooking section.