I've been cooking a lot from this Stephan Pyles cookbook lately, and I just discovered that along with several of his other books, it's out of print. I don't really know much about cookbook publishing and what sells, and I guess it shouldn't be so surprising that this particular book is off the shelves since many of the recipes are technically difficult and it's not all that accessible. But it's nevertheless disappointing, because we've really loved everything we've made from it, and when we've been unable to follow through on a particularly demanding recipe it's still been the source of lots of great ideas. So I recommend it highly, if you can get your hands on a copy. We made the above soup for friends last night.
(As a bit of an aside, I'm not sure I have any other vegetarian cookbooks written by carnivorous chefs, apart from Mark Bittman's encyclopaediac tome How To Cook Everything Vegetarian. I wonder what possessed Pyles to do this book, especially given that he doesn't seem in the recipes to be all that sympathetic to vegetarianism. I'd like to think it has something to do with constraint as an artistic motivator.)
A couple people have requested the recipe, and since it's out of print I don't feel that bad about posting it here.
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