Vegetarian
6931 recipes found
Haluski (Buttery Cabbage and Noodles)
If you ask 100 people about haluski, there will be many different answers — and some might know it by another name. Simple to prepare, economical and more than the sum of its parts, haluski typically refers to a Central and Eastern European dish of sweet, buttery cabbage and onions tossed with dumplings or noodles. In the United States, haluski is often made with store-bought egg noodles, which are more convenient but no less lovable than homemade. The strands of caramelized cabbage become happily tangled in the noodle’s twirls. This version includes a final step of tossing the cooked cabbage and pasta with some pasta water and a final pat of butter, so each bite is as comforting as can be.
Tomato Salad With Smoky Eggplant Flatbread
Buy lavash or pita at a local Middle Eastern market, heat the flatbreads in a skillet or toaster oven, and smear them with this delicious eggplant spread, enriched with spices and tahini and pleasantly smoky from a cook over an open flame. Serve the flatbreads with this Turkish-style tomato salad, a variation on one I learned in Istanbul from the Turkish chef Gamze Ineceli. Hers is more traditional — finely chopped tomato is customary — but you can also choose the colorful cherry tomatoes at the market and cut them in halves or quarters.
Eggplant Caponata Pasta With Ricotta and Basil
This weeknight pasta is inspired by traditional caponata, a tangy, salty-sweet Italian dish made with sautéed eggplant, tomatoes, caramelized onions, capers, anchovies, olives and vinegar. Though caponata is often served as a side, salad or relish, this eggplant sauté forms the foundation of a hearty vegetarian pasta. For the best results, taste and season your eggplant mixture with salt and pepper as you cook little by little. It should taste quite salty and tangy on its own, but will mellow when tossed with pasta, pasta water and creamy ricotta.
Sumac-Scented Eggplant and Chickpeas
The cookbook author Cathy Barrow always finds creative ways to make use of ingredients. She created this recipe as a savory pie filling for her book “Pie Squared: Irresistibly Easy Sweet & Savory Slab Pies,” but it also makes a good vegetarian supper when served over rice, and a nice side dish too. (Make it vegan by omitting the yogurt to serve.) Pomegranate molasses can be found in Middle Eastern markets and health-food stores and adds bright, tangy sweetness to this hearty dish.
Charred Cabbage and Lentil Soup
To make a soup that is different and perhaps more interesting than the last, play with how your usual soup ingredients are put to work. Instead of layering ingredients in the pot, build the foundational flavor in the oven. Here, cabbage is roasted until mostly charred and chip-like, while lentils, cubed carrots and onions simmer on the stove. When the smoky cabbage, sweet vegetables and earthy lentils meet in the bowl, they offer a range of textures you’d never achieve if everything boiled away together. (And once you roast cabbage, it’ll be hard to think of it as drab again.) As with most soups, this one’s adaptable: Roast sausage with the cabbage, use cauliflower instead of cabbage, or finish with lemon and so on.
Spiced Seared Eggplant With Pearl Couscous
This is a great weeknight one-dish dinner, and vegetarian (or vegan if you like) to boot. It is from the cook Adeena Sussman, who divides her time between New York and Tel Aviv, where pearl (or Israeli) couscous is called “p’titim,” meaning flakes.
Eggplants in a North-South Sauce
The cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey calls this "one of our most beloved family dishes, very much in the Hyderabadi style, where North Indian and South Indian seasonings are combined." Over the years, she has simplified the recipe. "You can use the long, tender Japanese eggplants or the purple 'baby' Italian eggplants," she says, "or even the striated purple and white ones that are about the same size as the baby Italian ones. Once cut, what you are aiming for are 1-inch chunks with as much skin on them as possible so they do not fall apart." Serve hot with rice and dal, or cold as a salad.
Creamy Asparagus Pasta
In this quick pasta dinner, umami-rich seaweed stars twice: first, in the form of dasima (dried kelp), which seasons the pasta water and sauce with seaside savor; second, as gim (roasted seaweed), which lends deep nuttiness and some salty crunch, too. The pasta finishes cooking in a blush of heavy cream and a splash of the dasima broth, transforming into a dreamy emulsion balanced by rice vinegar. In this recipe’s final moments, a rich glug of sesame oil glosses the chewy rigatoni and echoes the toasted flavor of the gim, which sings.
Sabich Bowls
The traditional Israeli sandwich known as sabich features fried eggplant that’s tucked into pitas and topped with sliced hard-boiled eggs, chopped tomato-cucumber salad, pickles, tahini sauce and sometimes shredded cabbage. This weeknight recipe turns the popular sandwich into a one-bowl meal that is prepared on a sheet pan. Eggplant and chickpeas are roasted side by side; the eggplant becomes tender and creamy while the chickpeas turn golden and crispy. Canned chickpeas do double duty: Some are a part of the roast, while the remaining beans transform into a luscious, garlicky tahini sauce. The eggplant mixture is served on top of rice in this recipe, but all sorts of grains would work, including bulgur, farro and quinoa.
Scrunched Cabbage Salad With Fried Almonds
Crunchy and succulent, this hearty salad takes the humble cabbage and celebrates it as a leafy green. Raw cabbage can be tough and fibrous, which is why it is often thinly sliced for coleslaw. Massaging the leaves with salt — a technique common in kale salads — tenderizes the vegetable. The softened greens absorb the lemony dressing while nuts and seeds fry in olive oil. Store-bought roasted, salted almonds and toasted sesame seeds can be substituted, but adding freshly fried nuts and seeds to the salad while they’re still warm showcases their rich, earthy aromas. Serve alongside a fried chicken cutlet or on a plate with hummus and pita.
Spring Barley Soup
This soup is as cozy as mushroom-barley soup and as vibrant as spring. Chewy barley, crisp asparagus and peas lay in a broth bolstered by umami-rich soy sauce and miso. Hits of fresh ginger and vinegar enliven the mix. Feel free to swap in other vegetables that catch your eye: Add leeks and hearty greens with the barley, and quicker-cooking vegetables like sliced turnips or snap peas with the asparagus. Thinly slicing the asparagus makes it easier to eat with a spoon, but cut them larger if you prefer it. For more protein, add cubed soft or firm tofu to bowls, or stir a beaten egg into the pot as you would for hot and sour soup.
Lemony Asparagus Salad With Shaved Cheese and Nuts
Less is more when it comes to asparagus, especially those first tender stalks that show up in spring. Here they’re quickly steamed and turned into an elegant salad tossed with a lemony, shallot dressing, and enriched with plenty of grated Manchego or other cheese. Chopped pistachios add another shade of green to the plate along with their sweet crunch, but use any nuts you like, or skip them entirely. This tangy, bright salad doesn’t need them.
Miso-Glazed Eggplant With a Bowl of Rice
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. You know how to make rice. For the rest of this dish, grab some small eggplants — the Japanese variety is a good option — and cut them on the bias into little steaks. Drizzle them with neutral oil and roast in a 400-degree oven for 20 minutes or so, turning them once or twice, until they’re soft. Then crank the oven to broil, and paint them with white miso that’s been cut with splashes of sesame oil and rice wine, a smaller splash of soy and a few grinds of black pepper. Let that get going until the skin begins to pop, then serve those little vegetarian flavor steaks over rice, with a spray of sesame seeds over the top. Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Silky Eggplant With Almond Salsa and Yogurt
Eggplant that’s silky-soft and bubbly-brown all over (rather than tough, oily or fossil-like) is a revelation — and, with just a little maneuvering, it’s not that hard. You’ll want to sear the eggplant slices in hot oil, cover them for a minute or two, until they’re soft, and then add a touch more oil until they’re beautifully golden. You could, of course, eat these rounds on their own (and you might!), but spicy almond salsa, cubes of salty, crispy halloumi, and a bed of garlicky yogurt make them a full meal (especially if have warmed pita for swiping everything up). While salting the eggplant slices before you cook isn’t completely necessary, it will help draw out some of the vegetable’s moisture, making it less prone to bitterness and oil saturation.
Roasted Cabbage Wedges With Lemon Vinaigrette
Sliced into wedges and drizzled with a tangy lemon-mustard dressing, cabbage roasts in high heat as it tenderizes and sweetens for this easy, make-ahead salad or side. Apply some heat and the cruciferous vegetable loses its crunch, turning sweet and silky like leeks vinaigrette, with unexpected nutty notes. This salad is best enjoyed chilled, but it can also be enjoyed hot or at room temperature, making it particularly party-friendly. Because sturdy cabbage holds up better than fragile salad greens, this dish can be prepared in advance and refrigerated. Drizzled with a tangy crème fraîche-and-mayonnaise sauce that is faintly reminiscent of ranch dressing, this wedge salad is fresh and cooling, its chill an unexpected delight.
Grilled Asparagus With Lemon Dressing
Although steamed asparagus has an unmatched purity of taste, I love the earthy, charred flavor added by the grill, a flavor that can also be achieved with stove-top pan grilling, which combines high heat and a dry, heavy skillet.
Cabbage Rolls With Walnuts and Sour Cream
Packed full of flavor, the filling for this stuffed cabbage is inspired by pkhali, a Georgian spread prepared by mixing ground walnuts, onions and spices with different vegetables, often cabbage. This version is eaten warm and uses allspice, cumin and cinnamon in the filling. To get ahead, stuff and bake the cabbage rolls the day before, but don’t finish with the sour cream until just before serving. Serve with rice, as a vegetarian main.
Pasta al Pomodoro
Pomodoro, the Italian word for tomato, comes from pomo d’oro (“golden apple”), and also refers to this sauce. A good pomodoro leans into the inherently savory, umami-rich flavor of the tomatoes, so use the best ones you can find. Any combination of low-water, high-flavor tomatoes like plum, grape, cherry and Campari, cooked down to their purest essence, makes for the most vibrant result. Thin spaghetti works best here, as its airy bounciness catches the pulpy tomato sauce beautifully, but regular spaghetti would taste great, too. Add basil at the end, if you’d like, or a dusting of cheese, but a stalwart pasta al pomodoro made with peak-season tomatoes needs neither.
White Bean and Asparagus Salad with Tarragon-Lemon Dressing
Papadzules (Eggs and Asparagus in Tortillas With Pepita Sauce)
A dish from the Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico, papadzules are similar to enchiladas in that they feature tortillas that are dipped and coated in a sauce, then filled, rolled and topped with more sauce. Traditionally, papadzules are served with hard-boiled eggs and topped with a toasted pepita sauce and a spicy habanero-tomato salsa. In this late-spring version, jammy eggs and blanched asparagus serve as the filling, and an uncooked sauce of pepitas and jalapeños finishes everything off. Be sure to cook the eggs for the full 6½ minutes or the yolks will be too runny.
Spring Ramen Bowl With Snap Peas and Asparagus
This lighter take on ramen, with snap peas and shaved asparagus, comes from the vegetarian cookbook author Lukas Volger. The flavors are perked up with pounded or grated ginger and lemon zest. You can skip the frizzled scallion garnish, but it does add nice texture to the finished bowl.
Country Panzanella With Watermelon Dressing
Consumed plainly or with a salt sprinkle, fresh watermelon conjures warm-weather memories. In the U.S. (primarily in the American South), master gardeners are growing heirloom (seedful) varieties: sugar baby, jubilee and Georgia rattlesnake. In Apex, N.C., Gabrielle E.W. Carter is the new steward of the property once owned by her maternal great-grandfather, where she grows herbs, tomatoes and watermelon. As a multimedia artist, she is documenting the food ways of Black families in Eastern North Carolina and preserving cooking traditions using fruits and vegetables straight from the garden. Crimson-flesh watermelon transforms the classic panzanella with a balanced sweetness. Using a coarse grater is essential in achieving a vibrant, textured dressing. Bocconcini can be substituted for feta cheese in this salad, which pairs well with festive mains like dry-rub mushrooms and spicy tamarind pork ribs.
Tofu and Cabbage Stir-Fry With Basil
Tofu and cabbage make ideal partners in a stir-fry, bringing contrasting soft and crisp textures. For best results, the tofu is pan-fried until golden, then stirred in at the end to maintain its shape and preserve its creamy texture. Scrambled eggs add fluffy bites, while fresh basil perfumes and brightens the dish. The hot mustard sauce complements the caramelized cabbage. Green cabbage is used here, but Napa or Savoy varieties are fantastic alternatives.
Pasta With Fresh Tomato Sauce and Ricotta
This wonderful pasta is made with nothing more than fresh tomato sauce and good ricotta, plus a little pecorino. It’s most delicious if you keep the pasta quite al dente; use just enough sauce, no more; give it a good pinch of crushed red pepper; and season it with enough salt of course.