My first vegetarian cookbook was no more than fifty pages long and one of those book subscriptions from Time-Life publications. That book taught me more about vegetarian cooking than the Vegetarian Times Complete Cookbook. I rarely use VTCC. If I do, it's probably under the circumstances that I've lost my creativity and there isn't a piece of living room furniture that's wobbling, but even then I'll use VTCC just as a blueprint for leftovers crowding my fridge. Perhaps with the emphasis on nutrition and the efforts to depart from Non-American (actually, even American) vegetarian cooking styles, the book ends up pretty tedious and "tasteless." If you feel you must buy it, please borrow it from a fellow vegetarian first - they probably have it somewhere as a doorstop or something. If you're thinking of buying it as a present, take my word as a former gift recipient of the book: "you shouldn't have, really."