Michael Ruhlman reviewed the book in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. Here is the link, but I don't know if you will be able to access since the paper has a paywall. So below the link, I pasted the part of the article where he got into specific details on the book. In the first part of the article he is mainly writing about Deborah Madison in general. He kind of made me want the book, even though I have the first one.
http://online.wsj.com/ne...ooking&mg=reno64-wsj
From Michael Ruhlman's review:
With "The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone," Ms. Madison shows herself to be a formidable teacher not just of vegetarian cooking but of imaginative cooking generally. Her braised fennel with pine nuts, goat cheese and arugula is a perfect example. Sliced fennel is browned in oil, then braised in water on the stovetop till tender. That's it (tasty just like that, with some salt and pepper). But add what she suggests—lemon zest, pine nuts, goat cheese and arugula—and you have a wonderfully complex and satisfying dish with little extra effort. Her basic vegetable stock is astonishingly rich, even meaty-seeming (thanks to the umami-giving nutritional yeast, a new ingredient to me).
The book begins with two chapters of basics, which are followed by 1,400 recipes (!) divided into 17 chapters, on such topics as sauces, appetizers, sandwiches, salads, soups from scratch, stews and sautés, pastas and dumplings, tarts and pizzas, eggs and cheese, breads, desserts. Oh, yes, and the longest one is "Vegetables." About 150 of the recipes are new, and all have been given some kind of note of introduction (previously lacking) and those that happen to be vegan are marked as such.
If you're after gorgeous food photography, this book is not for you. Otherwise I can't imagine a home cook who wouldn't benefit greatly from frequent immersions in "The New Vegetarian Cookbook for Everyone." One couldn't hope for a more encyclopedic volume on the plants we eat, or a broader spectrum of recipes.
Take another look—as I did—at tempeh. I didn't think any human, man or woman, chef or writer, could get me excited enough to give the dense, bland mat of fermented soy (often touted as a great meat substitute) another chance. Yet Ms. Madison's Indonesian Fried Tempeh intrigued me, and, aided by her simple peanut sauce—well, I didn't become a convert, but I can no longer dismiss tempeh out of hand, as I once did, and I could even see developing a liking for its dense bite and nutty back-flavor, in the same way that I, raised on Minute Rice, long ago grew to love the dense chewiness of brown rices.
That's the key to Ms. Madison's influence: She opens your mind, makes you see without prejudgment. Our cooking world, our country's home kitchens, need exactly what Ms. Madison is offering here—a heavily plant-reliant, diverse diet of food we cook ourselves—and she arrives with it seemingly in the nick of time. Again.