Welcome to To Vegetables, With Love, a celebration of a vegetable life, less ordinary. As always, I appreciate all of you being here! This week’s recipe is for paid subscribers.
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🥦 My new cookbook, Tenderheart is for cooking vegetables, all year round. Pick up your copy here. It is also mostly vegan (or vegan-izable) and gluten-free adaptable.
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During the last days of summer, I was asked several times to develop a ‘winter version’ of my very popular tomato dumpling salad from The New York Times Cooking. I kept this request simmering in my head for a while, until I came up with something that I felt was equally exciting, simple and pantry friendly.
Honestly, it is hard to find a winter veg that will compete with the casual everyday-ness of summer tomatoes. I usually don’t like to replicate recipes, just because they are popular. But I also acknowledge how important it is to have a recipe that you can make without thinking, one that you can toss together with pantry ingredients and one that will continue to bring joy throughout the season. I consider it my duty to ensure that everyone keeps eating their veggies, even during the cooler months.
I landed at this: Dumpling and greens with garlic, ginger and scallion oil. By greens, I’m ostensibly referring to Asian greens - baby bok choy, bok choy, choy sum/yu choy, tatsoi etc. However, other greens work too - try kale, chard/silverbeet, spinach. The idea is to serve your dumplings with a mound of greens, the more the merrier. For the ‘sauce’, I’ve added garlic to my ginger and scallion oil recipe - which I often call my mother sauce - delivering a ‘dressing’ that is fragrant, savory and very more-ish. The oil is great for so many applications - as a child I ate it with white rice, but it’s also great on noodles, tofu, eggs, jook (congee) and even on top of roasted veggies.
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This week
Cook a punchy and briny potato and white bean puttanesca soup, hearty yet full of sharp, acidic notes. This roast pumpkin salad with lentils and honey-miso dressing salad is perfect for this time of year, no matter where you are in the world - it’s also transportable so consider this as a great dish to take to a holiday gathering or picnic. I’ll be making this super quick and minimal ingredient tofu “shakshuka” this week - you can serve it with bread, or something heartier like rice or grains; I’m thinking pearl couscous, and I'll probably add a bunch of chard to the sauce, because it’s in season and beautiful in NYC right now.
Listen to my chat with
from
. This interview was recorded earlier this year when I was in San Francisco. Listen here. Salt and Spine have also shared two recipes from Tenderheart for their paid subscribers - carrot peanut satay ramen and eggplant char siu.
If you’re in Brooklyn next weekend, join me at Cherrybombe’s wonderful event for cookbook lovers Cooks & Books. The event is at the beautiful Ace Brooklyn, and I’ll be in the demo kitchen, sharing a holiday-friendly vegetarian main from Tenderheart. I’ll be in conversation with Peter Som. Tickets start from just $20 - I’ll be signing books too! Come and stock up for the holidays!
