Provecho Vegan Cookbook Review

My Provecho vegan cookbook review is my most anticipated post of 2022 thus far.

My copy of Edgar Castrejón’s Provecho: 100 Vegan Mexican Recipes to Celebrate Culture and Community is never on the shelf with my other cookbooks. It has a permanent spot on my little gold cookbook stand because if I’m not making something from this book, I am thinking about making something from this book. 

When I first flipped through the sample pages of Provecho on Amazon, the shredded jackfruit tacos spoke to my soul so much, I didn’t even read the ingredients before I bought the book. 

Edgar Castrejón was in college, studying horticulture and plant science, when he became vegan. After years of preferring plant-based foods and a sweet encounter with the campus cows, he vowed to never eat meat again. If you know anything about Latin culture, you know perfectly-spiced, meat-centered dishes are a big deal, and as a proud first-generation Mexican American, Castrejón worried about how his newfound plant-based lifestyle would affect his place at the family table.

It is hard for generations of people who grew up on hearty, meaty stews and piles of fragrant ground beef served over rice or stuffed into tortillas to understand why one would ever want a meatless meal. My Cuban grandparents, while supportive of how our diet has helped us grow healthy great-grandbabies for them, cannot wrap their minds around choosing not to buy the meat, cheese, milk, and yogurt that abounds in the American grocery store. 

Castréjon grew up in a family that passed recipes down from generation to generation. These recipes were not scribbled on pieces of paper, but taught in the kitchen—transferred from one set of hands to another. And so, he set out to veganize the heart-and-belly warming foods he grew up on.  

As a lover of all Latin foods, Provecho makes my plant-based dreams come true with every recipe. The vibrant flavors of the sopa de lentejas, the no-bake enchiladas verdes, and the quesadillas de brócoli y tofu satisfy my craving for the filling, comforting, and flavorful foods of Mexico, and it’s eleventy million times better than whatever vegan food I might find at the local Mexican joint. The adobo mushroom tacos are, as Castrejón himself describes them, addictive. 

But my very favorite—and the most surprising thing—about Provecho is the simplicity of the recipes. I do not know how Castrejón pulled off this Mexican magic, but every recipe fits on a single page. I’m not talking about a single page with size six font. I’m talking a solid size 12 font with space to breathe. You won’t find 1500 words explaining how the recipe works and you won’t find endless lists of obscure ingredients here.

I was genuinely shocked and delighted at how doable these recipes are. If you don’t have a local Latin market, you may need to order special order the chiles Castrejón uses for his savory sorcery. I got everything I needed from Amazon. (Not my favorite place to buy food, but it got the job done.)

And now the question on everyone’s mind: Isn’t all this Mexican food too spicy for my kids?

This was a very important question for me to answer before I came out and declared this my favorite cookbook purchase of 2022, because I am a one-meal-for-everyone kind of mom. So here’s the deal: the recipes that call for chiles and spicy green peppers usually call for them in the sauce. If your kids don’t mind food that’s a little spicy, you can cut the pepper content by half in most recipes and it’s usually the right spice level for my two-year-olds. If your spawn are just not here for a tiny tingle on the tongue, you can always blend a small batch of sauce for them on the side sans spice. 

Remember, there’s nothing inherently wrong with feeding toddler spicy food. In Bee Wilson’s Book, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat she writes, “In the Mexican village [Rozin and Schiller] studied, almost everyone over the age of five or six ate chili in some form at every meal.” While parents usually protect their kids from the burn of chili (except when mothers use it on the breast to wean their babies off their milk) they eventually watch their family season their food with all the spice, and when they start to season their own food, they go for it. The burn and irritation it causes may make them cry at first, but they keep doing it because it’s what’s modeled for them. Eventually, “they develop a perverse enjoyment of the very aspect of the chili they first disliked,” Wilson writes. 

Don’t fear giving your toddler a little spice. It will surprise you what they can handle when you gradually turn up the heat. The exposure to different tastes and unfamiliar sensations will make them better eaters in the long run, which is why I totally recommend you buy Provecho RIGHT NOW. 

There you have it friends, my Provecho vegan cookbook review. I’m kind of sad it’s over, TBH.