Learning to like new foods
I’ve been a vegetarian since birth. You’d think by now my taste in fruits and vegetables would be pretty fixed. After all these years, I was surprised to discover that I suddenly liked two three foods that I had never really liked much before: turnips, kiwi fruit, and dried apricots. Read the rest of this entry »
Vegetarian Chili, Serious Eats Style
Serious Eats’ Food Lab column is similar to Cook’s Illustrated in that it seeks the absolute best version of a particular recipe. But Serious Eats is a bit more adventurous. Their recipe this week was actually vegetarian chili, which I can’t imagine Cook’s Illustrated will ever attempt. I’ve tried many vegetarian chili recipes before, but I haven’t really liked any of them. (Although I have liked the waffling recipes for chili-ish lentil soup and chili-ish black bean soup reasonably well.) In the end I’ve always remained loyal to my mom’s chili recipe. The addition of the frozen, marinated, baked tofu raises it several notches above any purely bean-based recipe. But Serious Eats titled their recipe The Best Vegetarian Bean Chili, so I had to at least give it a try. Read the rest of this entry »
Tofu vegetable pie
This recipe was given to me in grad school by a football-loving, barbecue-adoring, guy from Texas. It’s creamy and satisfying comfort-food. It’s somewhat reminiscent of a vegan quiche. It doesn’t have a crust, but the outside gets crisp and forms its own crust. Read the rest of this entry »
Simple Italian lentil soup
I have a lot of recipes for lentil soup on my blog already. I have three recipes that call for brown lentils (my mom’s recipe, a simple version with only five ingredients, and a version with quinoa), plus three recipes for red lentil soup (Turkish, curried, and one with lemon and spinach). So I have no idea why I decided to try another pretty basic looking lentil soup recipe. This one comes from Julia Della Croce’s cookbook The Vegetarian Table: Italy. Read the rest of this entry »
Vegetable, lentil, and grain croquettes
I really like the five-grain croquettes in Peter Berley’s cookbook Modern Vegetarian Kitchen (especially the amaranth), but Derek was never a big fan of them. Since he’s out of town this week, I thought it would be a good chance to finally try Berley’s other croquette recipe from the same cookbook. This recipe is a bit different in that it uses fewer grains (only white rice, quinoa, and millet), but adds in red lentils, sesame seeds, and chopped sweet potato, plus the seasoning is a little different (garlic, ginger, celery, scallions, and parsley). Read the rest of this entry »
The captious vegetarian 