[.ca] Amazing Grains: Creating Vegetarian Main Dishes with ... (ISBN 0915811219)

Amazing Grains! Amazing Recipes! Amazing Directions!:
I never knew there were so many different types of grains, or different ways to prepare them. This book is facinating reading. Not only does Joanne explain the characteristics of different grains, but also the different types of cooking liquids, salt seasonings, oils, vegetables, herbs and spices that make up a dish, and (very helpful) how substituting other ingredients can vary the dish. My favorite recipe is "Oats, Onions, and Thyme". It uses steel-cut oats, and is a delightful change of pace from rice. I also recommend her other book "Romancing The Bean"

Not what I expected:
Very few of the recipes inspire me to want to make them. The only ones I am even tempted to try are the couple of oat recipes. There are a lot more rice recipes than any of the other grains. The book is very uninspiring. There are no photos either which might have helped. I must add that I am not a vegetarian but was looking for ways to prepare grains and get more of them in my daily cooking. But OAT GROAT SOUP WITH MUSTARD AND THYME, just doesn't sound very appealing to me, for example. She lists buckwheat, millet, oats, quinoa, rice, amaranth, job's tears, teff as the grain categories. No wheat or corn.

Needs some fine tuning:
I found this book a little hard to use. I don't really like the format which is like a textbook for a cooking class but what really frustrated me is that the index isn't right. I looked up several things and was brought to a page that had something totally different. The information on cooking methods and results was interesting but I wasn't that impressed with the recipes. A lot of them were very strange and said to be results of cooking class improvisation experiments. I would have preferred more basic and traditional recipes with just a few of the odd ones thrown in.