Category — Vegan Recipes

When I was growing up, my mom would often make carrots in the oven cooked with butter and dill. I loved them back then, but after experimenting over the years with different herbs, spices, and fats, the version I almost always make is this one: with olive oil, coarse salt, cumin, and just a hint of cinnamon. The natural sugars in the carrots caramelize and brown a bit in a hot oven, and the sweetness is balanced out by the spice and the salt.

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The other night, I got home from work around 5:15 and had dinner guests arriving at 5:30. I had this easy chicken dish planned, but very little in the way of side dishes. I knew I had some half bunches of produce here and there so thought I would quickly invent a salad on the fly based on what was laying around.

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This is one of my favorite holiday snacks – crunchy sugar-coated nuts with balancing hits of salt and spice.

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I love broccoli soup, but I get tired of the same old cheese- and cream-laden preparations. I decided to do an Asian-inspired variation with coriander, ginger, lemongrass, and sesame oil – toasting the broccoli at the beginning, to add an extra layer of flavor.

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Last weekend I had the great fortune to spend some time in Yosemite. I went with some friends who are really excellent cooks and hosts, so I wanted to impress them by showing up with homemade granola bars for our hikes so I could seem like one of those overachieving perfectionist-types. Of course, these guys have known me for about ten years, so we all knew I wasn’t fooling anyone! Still, the end result for all of us: homemade granola bars with dried cherries, almonds, and cocoa nibs to fuel us through our very non-strenuous and pleasant hikes.

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With the last tomatoes of summer, there is something you must do. You must make jars and jars and jars of this extremely addictive tomato jam so you can have some until next summer comes.

It’s a little sweet, a little spicy, and a lot delicious. You can put it on toast with a little ricotta or cream cheese, you can put a little dish of it on a cheese platter, you can put a dollop on a pork chop or some chicken, or you can eat it straight from the jar. No judgment here.

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I used to think eating granola was healthy. I would eat a big bowl with milk for breakfast, feeling virtuous about starting my day right with one of those “balanced breakfasts” people are always going on about. Several years back, I took a temporary job making granola for a high-end, organic boutique granola business. I was more than mildly surprised to learn that this expensive, hand-crafted, and much sought-after granola was loaded with Wesson oil. I mean, we’re talking bottles and bottles of the stuff for a reasonably small batch. Virtuous? Hardly. I might as well be eating a giant plate of french fries dipped in mayo for breakfast. An order of large fries from McDonald’s has fewer calories than a cup of most kinds of granola! Of course some of the granola’s calories come from the sweetening and the nuts, but the oil is definitely not helping. So why not make your own?

The weird thing is you can make really terrific granola with no oil, so it’s unclear to me how that practice got to be so commonplace. You do need something sweet, or else you just have some dried-out oats, so let’s not be crazy here. But you actually don’t need very much sweet stuff to make good granola. Also, making it yourself is really cheap, especially if you’re like me and you use it as a way to clean out the hodgepodge collection of nut remnants that lurks in your freezer. (Or am I the only one who has miniscule amounts of 15+ different kinds of nuts leftover from other projects?)

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Every year, it seems like all of the restaurants get together and decide they’re going to put some new food on every single menu in town. Whether it’s purslane, chicories, Calabrian chiles, or ramps–I’m quite convinced that the restaurant mafia is constantly figuring out how to promote some non-mainstream produce item that suddenly shows up everywhere. A few years ago, you couldn’t eat out in San Francisco without being offered roasted Brussels sprouts (not new per se, but new to fancy food). Years before that, you couldn’t open a menu that didn’t have fingerling potatoes on it. Last year, this nouveau item was padron peppers (or sometimes, shishito peppers, which look pretty similar.)

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Earlier today I was eating the most delicious salsa (the homemade kind which is often referred to as pico de gallo, not the supermarket jar–you know, the kind that looks like this) and I found myself wondering how I could get more of it into my piehole. And was it a vegetable? And could it be a healthy lunch if it involved tortilla chips as a vehicle? And then it dawned on me: salsa is just chunky gazpacho without the cucumbers. And gazpacho is a totally reasonable thing to eat for lunch. And cucumbers are gross. But avocadoes are good, and they sometimes go in gazpacho, right?

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I made some kale chips this weekend, and I was reminded how much I like kale in chip format. I think it’s mostly because the whole time I’m eating them, I feel so superior for eating KALE instead of “real” chips. It makes me feel very grown up and mature.

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