Vegan
3072 recipes found

Puree of Chickpea Soup
Most chickpea soups, whether savory minestrones or spicy North African stews, are rustic and hearty. This one is delicate, a puree that will have a particularly velvety texture if you take the time to strain it after you puree it.

Kaale Seerabeh Salad (Salad With Pomegranate Dressing)
To celebrate Shab-e Yalda, the Iranian celebration of the winter solstice, the chef Hanif Sadr of Komaaj in San Francisco takes the classic preparation of kaale, or uncooked, seerabeh, a tangy walnut and pomegranate sauce, and serves it as a dressing on a crisp salad. Flecked with garlic and herbs, seerabeh is typically served with fish in the northern Iranian province of Gilan. Here, vegetables provide the chromatic canvas upon which the pinkish sauce is drizzled. Mr. Sadr recommends using a pomegranate juice you like to drink for the sauce and refrigerating the sauce overnight to allow the flavors to meld. Any leftover sauce will keep for 5 days in the fridge and is great served with fish, chicken or roasted vegetables, or as a dip.

Tiger Vegetable Salad
A bright toss of cilantro leaves and scallions, this dish, called lao hu cai, is somewhere between a salad and a garnish, adding coolness, salt and juice to the mix.

Tahini Ranch Dressing
This ranch-dressing adaptation comes from Julia Goldberg, a cook at Superiority Burger, Brooks Headley's vegetarian fast-food restaurant in New York. While traditional ranch relies on buttermilk and mayonnaise for its creaminess, the base in this version is tahini, or sesame butter, mixed with lemon juice and water until it turns smooth and glossy. Maple syrup and a generous amount of salt are crucial to mimicking the intense salty-sweetness of bottled ranch. The thick herb-packed sauce can be used as a versatile dressing for raw or grilled lettuces, a dip for crudités or a tangy sauce for grilled meat. After hours at Superiority Burger, the cooks like to experiment, drizzling it over oven-browned potatoes, or folding it into burritos. The recipe makes enough so that you can experiment with leftovers, too.

Cauliflower Salad With Capers, Parsley and Vinegar
This tangy winter salad is likely to convert anyone who doubts just how good cauliflower can be. Make sure you steam the cauliflower until thoroughly tender so that it absorbs the dressing. The dish is lovely with a mix of colorful cauliflowers, but can look nice with the standard white variety.

Rainbow Quinoa Salad
Dr. David Eisenberg of the Harvard School of Public Health demonstrated along with his daughter, Naomi, a whole- wheat couscous salad that is the inspiration for this one at the “Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives” medical education conference in Napa Valley this year. You can use a variety of dried fruits and nuts, as well as a mix of herbs. Chop the larger dried fruits small so that the pieces are uniform.

Pan-Roasted Cauliflower With Garlic, Parsley and Rosemary
Nearly any vegetable tastes good browned in olive oil and showered with garlic, parsley and rosemary, but cauliflower is an especially good candidate for this technique. The inherent sweetness of cauliflower begs for a hit of lemon and hot pepper too. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Basic Sticky Rice
Also known as “sweet rice” or glutinous rice (though it’s gluten free), sticky rice is a large white grain that becomes translucent, shiny and extremely sticky when steamed. Sticky rice is a staple in Laos, where it is especially beloved, but it has ardent fans throughout Asia. Traditionally, it’s cooked over steam in a conical woven basket. If you don’t have such a steamer, you can use a standard stacking steamer, a colander lined with muslin or cheesecloth, or a fine mesh strainer that fits over a saucepan. For the best texture, cooking sticky rice over hot steam is ideal, but it is possible to pull it off in an electric rice cooker, using less water than usual, or in a pot on the stove. What follows are the basic instructions for success.

Chopped Herb Salad With Farro
This dish is modeled on a Middle Eastern tabouli. Add just one cup of cooked farro or spelt to a generous mix of chopped parsley, mint, arugula and other herbs like basil or dill. Notice that I’m calling this dish a chopped herb salad with farro and not a farro salad with chopped herbs. It’s modeled on an authentic Middle Eastern tabouli, which should be all about the parsley, with just a small amount of bulgur. I add just one cup of cooked farro or spelt to a generous mix of chopped parsley, mint, arugula and other herbs like basil or dill. There are also chopped tomatoes in the mix, all of it tossed with lemon juice and olive oil.

Warm Lentil Salad With Balsamic Roast Squash
This recipe started out as something else. I had in my pantry a bag of mixed sprouted lentils – black, green, and brown. I cooked them with the intention of making dal, but I so liked the integrity of the cooked lentils – green and black lentils remain intact even after they soften – that I didn’t want to mash them. Meanwhile I had roasted some squash with balsamic vinegar. I ended up warming the lentils in a cumin-scented vinaigrette and serving them with the squash.

Marinated Cauliflower and Carrots With Mint
This is an elaboration of one of my favorite carrot dishes. That dish couldn’t be simpler – steamed carrots tossed with sherry vinegar, olive oil, salt and fresh mint. It is good at room temperature or warm, as a starter or a side dish. I added steamed cauliflower to the mix but made no other changes to the formula. The cauliflower, which always loves a vinegar marinade, is a wonderful addition, very compatible with the carrots and pretty, too. The dish is great for a buffet as it only gets better as it sits. The dish is particularly beautiful if you use different colored carrots.

Lentil Salad With Fresh Favas
According to Jo Robinson, a food and nutrition writer whose informative new book, Eating on the Wild Side,” cites a federal survey of phytonutrient content of common fruits and vegetables, lentils have the most antioxidant activity of all legumes, with black beans a close second.

Cauliflower, Potato and Quinoa Patties
Cauliflower is a great vegetable to use in a burger, because it breaks down nicely so that it can be mashed along with potatoes to form a burger that stays together. I have always loved seasoning this vegetable with Indian spices, which is what I do here, with Aleppo pepper thrown into the mix. Black quinoa contributes texture, color and protein. Sriracha sauce is the perfect “ketchup” for this burger.

Black Rice and Red Lentil Salad
This colorful mixture is hard to resist, with its contrasting chewy and crunchy textures and the nutty Asian dressing. Black rice, high in antioxidant-rich anthocyanins, is now a staple in my pantry.

Roasted Tomatillo-Poblano-Avocado Salsa
One of my favorite new cookbooks of this season is “A Mouthful of Stars” (Andrews McMeel), by Kim Sunée. The book is a memoir, travelogue and cookbook all rolled into one, written by an author who earlier published another compelling memoir with recipes, “Trail of Crumbs.” Kim is a poetic world traveler who loves many cuisines. She is a big fan of taco trucks and loves salsa, the spicier the better. This salsa is based on her recipe for roasted tomatillo-poblano salsa. I love its balance of char, heat, acid and creamy. I’m a moderate when it comes to heat, but you can make this hotter by adding more chiles.

Roasted Mushroom Base
At this year’s Worlds of Health Flavors conference in Napa, Calif., Pam Smith, a culinary nutritionist, presented delicious recipes by the chef Clifford Pleau featuring a finely chopped roasted mushroom mix (chefs refer to it as simply “The Mix”), that she combined with beef for a delicious burger with half the meat, and with tuna for a wonderful tuna burger. Inspired, I made up a big batch of my own version of the mushroom base when I got home and had a lot of fun using it all week in adaptations of classic meat or fish dishes with the animal protein cut by half or more and replaced with the mushroom base. I recommend using pre-sliced mushrooms for this – then the mix goes very quickly. It is very easy to make and keeps well for several days in the refrigerator.

Avocado and Roasted Tomatillo Salsa
I have been making tomatillo and avocado salsa for years, but I usually simmer the tomatillos rather than roasting them. Roasting the tomatillos, chiles and garlic – toasting really, as I use a skillet for this, on top of the flame – produces a salsa with a delicious charred flavor. I learned something recently from the chef Iliana de la Vega, who demonstrated the recipe at the “Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives” conference in Napa Valley in March: she says, in no uncertain terms, that you should not add water to tomatillo salsas. Without the water, this is a more intense salsa with pleasing density.You can use it as a sauce to serve with chicken or fish, or as a dip with chips or other vegetables.

Red Pepper Rice, Bulgur or Freekeh With Saffron and Chile
This mildly spicy Lenten vegetable rice is prettiest when made with rice, because the saffron will have more of an impact on the color. But I also love it with bulgur, and especially with freekeh, which is very compatible with the peppers, chile and paprika. If you make it with rice, remember that in the traditional Greek dish the rice is very soft, as it is here. If you don’t want the dish to be spicy leave out the chile pepper.

Spiced Mango Chutney With Chiles
Chutneys are often made with unripe or dried fruit; they can include vinegar, sugar and spices. This recipe, with ripe fruit, offers a two-toned flavor: sweet and tropical offset by sultry spices and the heat of chilies. It’s welcome in a grilled-cheese sandwich, stirred into mayonnaise or yogurt for a quick dip or spread, or alongside any curry or daal. There are thousands of varieties of mangoes, but two are predominant. The Tommy Atkin is green, blushed with rose, and as large as a softball. The champagne mango, the size of a large peach, is pale gold, with a floral flavor. I prefer the champagne, which tends to be less fibrous and has an impossibly lovely scent, but any mango is a boon. The fruit is full of such promise.

Dried Porcini Consommé
A refreshing and light soup that can be an appetizer or full first course. I could drink this refreshing consommé for lunch every day. It makes a very light and satisfying appetizer soup or first course.

Turmeric Rice With Tomatoes
There are a few foolproof ways of cooking perfect, fluffy long-grain rice, and this is one of them. The pot is covered with a lid and a tea towel for a short time, then set aside to let the rice finish cooking in the steam that has built up. The finished dish is deliciously rich and lemony and would go perfectly with some grilled fish or chicken. The bright yellow of the turmeric and the red pop of the cherry tomatoes mean that it’s also a treat for the eyes.

Cowgirl Beans

Haitian Epis (Pepper, Herb and Garlic Marinade)
Epis is a foundational ingredient used to flavor a wide array of Haitian dishes. Gregory Gourdet, a Haitian-American chef, uses it to marinate everything from fish to chicken thighs to beef short ribs. He encourages home cooks to make extra to use as a marinade or to flavor stews, soups, vinaigrettes, sautéed vegetables or even meatloaf. The chunky, spicy purée keeps in the refrigerator for one week, and in the freezer for two months.

Vegan Pizza With Apple, Butternut Squash and Caramelized Onions
This satisfying cold-weather pizza from Chloe Coscarelli, the vegan cookbook author, makes a great main course, or it can be cut into pieces as an appetizer. The creamy white bean purée made by whizzing cannellini beans, oil, lemon juice, garlic, thyme, salt and pepper in a food processor makes this dish seem like a real treat, and the piles of caramelized onions, roasted butternut squash, apple and spinach finish it off beautifully. If you're a half-hearted vegan, consider sprinkling a handful of blue cheese over the top a few minutes before it's done baking. We won't tell.