7 Cookbooks You Absolutely Need If You're a Vegetarian

First published in 2011, this tome quickly became a smash hit for its unique yet approachable take on vegetarian cooking. Inspired by Ottolenghi’s Mediterranean background, these 120 recipes—for everything from a quinoa, garlic and sourdough salad to a caramelized garlic tart—are veggie-driven, delicious and beautiful to look at.

We’ve praised Bittman’s How to Cook Everything in the past, and the vegetarian take on his expansive cookbook doesn’t disappoint. Perfect for beginners, it gives enough of a foundation that once you read it, you’ll be able to put a bunch of seemingly random ingredients together and end up with a delicious meal. Clocking in at an impressive 836 pages, it contains tons of recipes, plus simple instructions for must-know tasks like boiling an egg and cooking a pot of beans.

Founded in upstate New York in 1973, Moosewood Restaurant revolutionized the art of vegetarian cooking. This 2013 book contains recipes for 250 of the restaurant's most-requested dishes, from red lentil soup with ginger and cilantro to apple spice cakes with sesame seeds.

In addition to including more than 300 vegetarian recipes (like griddled artichokes with tarragon mayonnaise and fresh peas with sage on baked ricotta), Vegetable Literacy is an encyclopedia of veggies, as well as an exploration of the relationships between vegetables, edible flowers, herbs and wild plants.

Made for those nights when you get home late and the last thing you want to do is spend hours prepping an involved meal, Jones’s cookbook has more than 150 recipes broken down by time, with dishes that can be prepared in under 15, 20, 30 and 40 minutes, from smoky pepper and white bean quesadillas to chickpea pasta with simple tomato sauce.

From a husband-and-wife blogging and podcasting team, this book contains 100 recipes with an emphasis on whole foods and getting into the kitchen together. With recipes for meals like crispy cumin chickpeas and veggie lasagna, the Overhisers’ non-diet approach features simple lifestyle changes to make healthy cooking sustainable, rather than a short-term fix.

The legendary New York Times Recipes for Health columnist has a way of seamlessly imparting her method for creating delicious plant-based meals every day—especially for beginners. Shulman starts with simple recipe templates (for, say, a frittata or a rice bowl) that you can build on to create more complex meals, regardless of season or vegetable availability.