Vegetarian
6931 recipes found
Summer Squash Caponata
Caponata, a sweet and sour vegetable dish of Sicilian origin, is usually made with eggplant, but this version is made with zucchini and yellow squash, and dotted with capers and olives. Served at room temperature, caponata often graces the antipasto table at restaurants, but it can also be a main course or a side dish. At home, it can top crostini, a perfect accompaniment to drinks. For a picnic, serve it with good canned tuna and hard-cooked eggs.
Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Fresh Figs
This dish from Yotam Ottolenghi, a chef and an author of "Jerusalem," the beloved Middle Eastern cookbook, takes inspiration from a city where fig trees grow in abundance. Roasted sweet potatoes, along with wedges of fresh figs, are piled onto a plate, drizzled with a green onion-chile sauce and a balsamic reduction then dotted with generous pats of goat cheese. Do plan ahead, as this recipe does require a bit of preparation, but it's easy work that's more than worth it.
Brown Butter Lentil and Sweet Potato Salad
This simple lentil salad has a little secret: a toasty, brown butter vinaigrette perfumed with sage. The dish has as much texture as it does flavor. French green lentils or black lentils are the ideal choice, as they hold their shape well after cooking, but brown lentils will work too, though they’ll be a bit softer. Start testing your lentils for doneness after about 15 minutes of cooking; you want them cooked through but not mushy, and they’re best if they retain some bite. Roasted until tender, the sweet potatoes add richness, but feel free to substitute just about any roasted vegetables. Carrots, beets or red bell peppers would all be delicious in their stead.
Baked Sweet Potatoes
These make a great lunch or snack. If you can wait long enough, they will get sweeter over time in the refrigerator, so bake some extra and cut thick slices to go with cottage cheese, goat cheese, or feta for a quick lunch.
Sweet Potato Hash Browns
A riff on Josh Ozersky’s famous minimalist hash browns, these are made by sprinkling grated sweet potato over hot butter in a very thin layer, then waiting patiently for the starch to work its magic. Crisp, salty, buttery and addictive, these hash browns are so good, you could probably eat the entire batch in one sitting (or force yourself to be generous and share with a friend). Serve with a fried or over-easy egg for a complete breakfast.
Pasta Alla Norma
This traditional Sicilian pasta dish of sautéed eggplant tossed with tomato sauce and topped with ricotta salata makes for a satisfying vegetarian dinner, and it can be thrown together in under an hour.
Chile Sweet Potatoes
The chef Rick Bayless offers a wonderful recipe for sweet potatoes glazed with an ancho chile paste in his book “Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen.” Instead of making the paste, I make a thinner glaze with canned chipotle and some of the adobo they’re packed in. The glaze makes a spicy contrast to the sweet potatoes. You can make this recipe vegan by using light brown sugar instead of honey.
Roasted Sweet Potato Oven Fries
I don’t know what I like best about these sweet wedges – the way the sweet potato skins crisp and caramelize, the creamy texture of the sweet flesh, or the subtle flavors of the spices and infused oil.
Sweet Potatoes Baked With Lemon
This recipe first appeared in The Times in 1992, with an article by Molly O'Neill, when Edna Lewis, many years after writing her seminal cookbook “The Taste of Country Cooking,” was the chef at the Brooklyn restaurant Gage & Tollner. The addition of lemon zest and juice make this brighter and less sweet than typical sweet potato dishes.
Bademjan Kebab
Bademjan kebab is traditionally pan-fried eggplant stuffed with bieh, a herb-and-nut sauce that, in Northern Iran, uses sour fruit molasses along with the typical sweet and sour pomegranate molasses. An important Northern Iranian spice, Persian hogweed is earthy, sour and slightly bitter, with a pungent scent; you can find it at Middle Eastern groceries. Mr. Sadr sautés the bieh until the herbs and nuts cook down into a dark green, thick paste, which is spooned onto partially roasted eggplant halves then roasted. Northern Iranian cooking doesn’t use a lot of spices, so the herbs, nuts and molasses create a deeply flavored, almost meaty vegan sauce. It’s flexible, so sub in dill, basil, tarragon, savory or scallion for any of the herbs. The bieh will keep for 1 week in the fridge and up to 3 months in the freezer, so you can make it in advance. If eating this dish as a main, Mr. Sadr suggests serving it with plain or turmeric basmati rice.
Baingan Bharta
This satisfying vegetarian dish is adapted from a recipe belonging to Julie Sahni, the popular Indian chef, cookbook author and teacher. Its preparation is very similar to baba ghanoush in that you roast and mash the eggplant before seasoning it with aromatics, herbs and spices, but its flavor profile is wildly different. Here, turmeric, garam masala and jalapeño add warmth, while the addition of lime juice provides brightness. Serve it as a dip with flatbread (like pita or store-bought roti), or as a main dish with rice and raita.
Eggplant and Tomato Pie
Tomatoes have another week or so to go in most farmers’ markets. This robust summer pie, topped with a layer of tomato slices flecked with thyme, is a nice party piece. It also packs well once cooled, so take leftovers to work for lunch.
Fiery Sweet Potatoes
Coconut milk and Thai red curry paste turn up the heat, but brown sugar and butter are part of the mix too in this side dish — an amazing combination of flavors. It would be a fine addition to any table from Thanksgiving through May.
Pasta With Eggplant and Zucchini
This timeless summer pasta dish was brought to The Times in 1991 by Pierre Franey in one of his 60-Minute Gourmet columns. Like so many of his dishes, it is at once elegant and easy, and no trouble to put together on a weeknight. Sauté the sliced eggplant and zucchini until golden while you make a quick sauce of canned crushed tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and herbs in another pot. Throw everything together, and simmer for about 15 minutes. Toss with cooked pasta and a shower of Parmesan. Dig in.
Eggplant Caponata
Caponata became part of Sicilian cooking centuries ago, when the island was under Arab rule. The Arabs brought eggplants and sugar, along with citrus and spices. Other versions of caponata contain raisins and pine nuts; this one has capers and green olives. Some cooks add a lot of tomato, but I prefer just a touch of good tomato paste. The seasoning is sweet, sour and salty, and laced with olive oil. Like pickles and other savory preserves, caponata is often made in quantity and stored in jars for use throughout the year. Serve it on little toasts as an appetizer or to accompany a meal.
Eggplant Parmesan Pasta
The unassuming eggplant is the star of this comforting weeknight pasta that manages to capture the flavors of traditional eggplant Parmigiana without the fuss of frying, layering and baking. Cubed eggplant is browned with onion and garlic until golden, then simmered in a quick pantry-friendly tomato sauce until meltingly tender. Mezze rigatoni, fusilli and shells all do great jobs of capturing the thick sauce. The pasta is finished with slivers of fresh mozzarella that soften and offer cool, creamy bites, and a final sprinkling of a Parmesan bread-crumb topping offers familiar moments of crunch to contrast the creamy sauce.
Roasted Eggplant
This is the first step in most of my eggplant recipes. Large globe eggplants take from 20 to 25 minutes, depending on how plump they are. Small narrow eggplants like Japanese eggplants take about 15. The roasted eggplant is fragrant and delicate; if you need it to hold its shape in the recipe, roast for a shorter time, just until you see the skin beginning to wrinkle.
Mini Sweet Potato Pies
Coconut milk gives the spiced sweet potato filling in these small pies a delicate custard texture, and coconut flakes on top deliver a toasted nuttiness. This recipe calls for pressing two dozen tiny crusts into a mini-muffin tin, which may seem tedious, but is easy with the help of a wine or champagne cork, which is the ideal size for tamping down the graham cracker crumbs. These two-bite (OK, one-bite) pies need to be chilled, so they’re ideal for making ahead and can be refrigerated for up to three days.
Spiced Eggplant and Tomatoes With Runny Eggs
A little like an eggplant version of shakshuka, this velvety skillet meal features sautéed eggplant and tomatoes seasoned with garlic, spices and lemon zest. It’s topped with runny eggs and a crunchy garnish of toasted nuts. The yogurt and hot sauce simultaneously heat things up and cool things down, and really add a lot to this hearty, meltingly soft dish. Serve it for brunch or dinner, with a crisp green salad and some flatbread on the side.
Yotam Ottolenghi’s Chermoula Eggplant With Bulgur and Yogurt
A mixture of herbs and spices used in North African cooking, chermoula is often used to season fish. In this recipe from "Jerusalem," the famed Middle Eastern cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, it is rubbed over eggplant, which is then roasted and topped with a tabbouleh-like salad.
Tomato, Squash and Eggplant Gratin
This is one of the simplest Provençal gratins, a dish that takes a little bit of time to assemble, then bakes on its own for 1 1/2 hours. It tastes best the day after it’s made.
Miso-Glazed Eggplant
Miso-glazed eggplant (Nasu dengaku) is on many Japanese menus, and it’s a dish I always order. It’s incredibly easy to make at home. I roast the eggplant first, then brush it with the glaze and run it under the broiler. The trick is getting the timing right so the glaze caramelizes but doesn’t burn. That’s a guessing game in my old Wedgewood oven, because the broiler door has no window.
Crunchy Eggplant Parmesan
In most eggplant Parmesan recipes, crusty slices of fried eggplant go into a casserole with sauce and cheese -- where they quickly turn to sludge. This recipe holds on to the crunch by transforming each whole eggplant into a crisp cutlet. You can make one eggplant per person to serve this as an appetizer, or add a bed of pasta to make it more substantial. There's no Parmesan cheese in this recipe, but that's not a mistake: in Italian the phrase "alla Parmigiana" refers to a style of dish. It doesn't refer to Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.
Pan-Fried Eggplant With Chile, Honey and Ricotta
For the crispest, most burnished pieces of eggplant, nothing beats frying, and it’s worth every last splattered drop of oil to get there. This dish pairs the golden spears of fried eggplant with milky ricotta cheese, fried garlic slices, red-pepper flakes and a generous drizzle of honey. You can serve it as a first course, a substantial side dish or a light main course with a green salad on the side. Note that tender, young eggplant cook a lot more quickly than denser, larger ones, and are worth seeking out here.