QUICK REVIEW: Dining at the Ravens by Jeff and Joan Stanford

Synopsis

At The Ravens, dinner is more than just a meal. It’s a feast for your spirit.

Located on the Mendocino coast at the only vegan resort in the United States, The Ravens Restaurant at the Stanford Inn by the Sea embodies a mindful, compassionate, and sustainable dining experience in an enchanting and unforgettable setting. Now in Dining at The Ravens, Jeff and Joan Stanford, the Inn and restaurant founders, bring the Ravens culinary experience into your home.

Teeming with beautiful photographs, Dining at The Ravens features more than 150 delicious vegan recipes and shares the charming history of the Inn and restaurant, cooking tips for perfect recipe execution, and even inspiration for creating your own garden.

Discover one of the restaurant’s most popular breakfast dishes, Citrus Polenta with Braised Garden Greens and a Creamy Toasted Cashew Sauce, and many others, such as:

Ravens Sea Palm Strudel
Indian-Spiced Polenta Napoleon
Mushroom Pesto and Sun-Dried Tomato Burger
Ravens Spicy Peanut Curry Sea Palm
Sweet Summer Corn Bisque
Peach Huckleberry Cobbler

Pull up a seat and find out why vegans and non-vegans alike flock to The Ravens for an extraordinary dining experience.


My Thoughts

Jeff and Joan Sanford moved to Mendocino, CA and purchased The Big River Lodge in the early '80s with dreams of creating a "stellar" resort and restaurant. As their family grew, so did their resort and gardens. During this time, Jeff became a vegetarian, and then later a vegan.

In 1997, they opened The Ravens vegan restaurant, and it became a huge hit among vegans and non-vegans alike.

Cue this cookbook. On the plus side, there are a lot of recipes in this book, and a lot of photos (a good thing for someone like me who is visual and needs a cookbook with pictures to entice me)!

However I don't like to see a list of 30 ingredients, such as with the Seasonal Wild Mushroom Crepe. I prefer my recipes simpler for the most part.

Nor do I like having to create several other things in order to make one dish, such as with the Eggplant Cannelloni (which requires you make a batch of Hemp Ricotta and a batch of marinara in order to make the dish).

I'm more for the "fresh" style of food preparation, whereby it's mostly just chopped/sliced veggies, perhaps a grain, a fat like olive oil and some seasoning to make a dish.

So I respect what they were doing here, the way they share their belief system and how The Ravens came to be. I think their recipes will do well to inspire people and show the potential to be found in vegan cooking. It simply isn't my style.


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My Rating:

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The Cerebral Girl is a forty-something blogger just digging her way out from under a mountain of books in the deep south of Florida.

I received a copy of this book to review through Netgalley, in exchange for my honest opinion. I was not financially compensated in any way, and the opinions expressed are my own and based on my observations while reading this novel. The book that I received was an uncorrected proof, and quotes could differ from the final release.