Liberation Soup

When I opened Liberation Soup, the first thing I saw was a recipe for Cow Skin. Um ... I'm pretty sure I've never seen that at my local grocery store. I was a bit worried that I had a book in my hands that I wouldn 't be able to cook from.

I thought, well, okay, maybe the stories are good. The book is from The Whole Planet Foundation and the recipes are from families being helped by the foundation's microfinance program.

Each recipe is paired with information about the people being helped by the loans and what they do with the money. It's pretty interesting what a very small loan can do to help people in developing countries, and it makes my life look crazy luxurious in comparison.

After paging through the book, I realized that there were a lot of recipes I could make pretty much as-is, and there were more that would be easy enough to make with some substitutions.

The ones I had on my short list were a spiced chicken stew, a chickpea stew, and a rice and beans.

I'll be honest and say that it's pretty obvious that some recipes were written by people who never wrote a recipe before. The stuffed zucchini, for example, listed ingredients, but no amounts. And the instructions simply said to "cook the mixture" for the filling but didn't have any more details. But, let's be serious. Anyone making the recipe could probably work it out for themselves and make it to their own taste.

Most of the recipes are more detailed. No worse than a community cookbook in the US.

Overall, it's a nice book. Probably not what I'd suggest for a new cook, but definitely nice for people who love cookbooks.

I received this book from the publisher at no cost to me.