Few things of note. I am a chef, so some of these ingredients may not be attainable. If you can’t get something I recommend, don’t worry about it. If I say chili flake, I mean pretty much any dried chili seeds. I usually use pasilla or guajillo when I have them. You can get a bag of either of these dried chiles for a couple bucks in the “ethnic” section of the grocery store. Cheapest and best chili powder in the store is buying those dried chilis and blending them. Any of these recipes can be added to pretty easily, these aren’t set in stone recipes, rather bases for you to explore further. For example, I hate most common dried seasonings as far as veggies go. Garlic, onion powder, dried herbs and such, all those take away from the fresh flavor I like in veggies, so I don’t use them much. However, you may find that you love onion and garlic powder on your food. You may find that you like a different oil in a recipe than me, and that’s cool! Also, these aren’t vegan recipes, but could easily be converted
Roasted brusselsprouts
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Get a flat baking sheet. A warped baking sheet will actually mess with this recipe quite a bit. Put it in your oven and preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
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Stem and half your brusselsprouts, keep them in a bowl for later. Mince/grate/slice a shallot and toss it in the same bowl. Chop the shallot however you prefer them. If you like garlic, DO NOT add it at this stage, otherwise your garlic will all burn in the oven. For this reason, I don’t add garlic to my brusselsprouts, and just lean on the shallot to give the onion/garlic flavor.
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Pour in olive oil or any other good tasting oil, and gently toss. Don’t wanna break all the leaves off, you just want the oil to be evenly distributed.
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Season brusselsprouts with salt, ground pepper, paprika, and chili flakes, and toss the bowl. Do this after oiling, otherwise it’s way harder to get everything even.
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Pull out your hot oven pan, and set your brusselsprouts down on the pan face side down. This is labor intensive, but makes the final sprout way better.
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Throw it back in the oven for 20 minute or so, you want to pull them out when they’re looking nice and brown.
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Finish with a light drizzle of olive oil and paprika
Also, a note on brusselsprouts. You will find recipes online telling you to deep fry brusselsprouts. Deep frying brusselsprouts at home is a god awful idea, they have too much water in them. It’s a great way to have oil covering your entire kitchen and be dissapointed because it’s still not as good as roasting like this.
Steamed brocolli
- Frozen or fresh, doesn’t matter. Boil some water and throw your brocolli over it with a steamer basket. Let steam for 7 minutes or so. Finish by tossing them in olive oil and/or butter, salt, pepper, paprika, and mushroom powder if you have any dried mushrooms. You can add more to these, I really enjoy adding lemon pepper seasoning. Cheesy broccoli is also better this way since it maintains the crunch. One of my favorite ways to flavor this is making either a lemon-honey emulsion (Honey, lemon juice, salt, pepper, a sweet pink\white wine, a touch of soy sauce, shake the shit out of it in a bottle.) Another variant of this is lime, agave, cumin and a pinch of those ground up flying ants. Yes, some bugs really are worth adding to your cooking if you can get them. The flying ants are a popular ingredient in Oaxaca for a reason. It has a citrusy yet strongly umami taste, kinda like chinese fermented black beans, it’s great. Very cheap, and an ingredient that once you try it you love eating bugs.
Roasted carrots
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Rinse fresh carrots and cut them into coins. You can peel them, but I find that the skin bitterness works with the rest of the flavor I put down. Also, frozen carrots aren’t worth trying to roast. Just microwave them if they’re not fresh.
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Toss in butter, salt, pepper, chili flakes, some dried microplaned chiles, brown sugar and dried ant powder if you have it. If you happen to be eating any fruit in the moment, squeeze some of that juice in, it’s tasty and different.
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Roast carrots at 425 degrees for 25 minutes
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Pull carrots out of the oven, and finish with honey or agave. If you use agave, skip the brown sugar. But definitely use agave if you’re using any dried ant powder. Agave is like 5x sweeter than honey, so it can work really well.
Spinach
I don’t recomend making spinach on its own, it’s just too hard to get truly right imo. HOWEVER, adding it as an ingredient to something else is a great idea. Toss spinach in with your pasta when you finish cooking it and cook it with your sauce. However, IF you’re going to, this is a decent way.
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Butter in a pan, fry off some garlic, a bit of shallots, and red pepper flakes in the pan. I’d recommend using processed chili flakes for smaller red pieces, the red and white of the aromatics makes it look way better and taste better too. Try not to soften anything, you want them kinda fried. Add a splash of soy sauce and salt at this point.
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Add a shit ton of spinach. Shit shrinks like crazy, so use a big pan.
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Cook with the aromatic butter for 2 minutes and pull off the heat. Finish with pepper.
Potatoes
This is a necessary food prep thing. You start doing it and you never go back. Either bake and/or boil your potatoes for the week and keep them in your fridge to be used when needed. Example of this is baking off 8 potatoes for me and my partner to eat throughout the week. Now, I have a baked potato that all I have to do for it to be ready is microwave it. If they’re smaller potatoes, I can make smashed potatoes at a moments notice and those are the absolute shit. You can instantly roast off boiled potatoes, or mash them and have a 3 minutes mashed potato throughout the week. Same thing goes for sweet potatoes. Also, longer you bake potatoes, the better they taste, so you can get really good baked potatoes really easy.
Sweet potato fries
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Chop sweet potato into fries
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(optional) toss sweet potatoes in potato or corn starch. This will give you normal potato fry crunch if you do this
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Season with salt, pepper, chili flake, a proportionally small amount of cumin, and olive oil.
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Roast at 425 degrees for 20 minutes. If you have an air fryer or a convection oven, take off 5 minutes. Longer you cook these, the more your sweet potatoes will release sweetness.
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Check sweet potatoes for texture. If you tossed them in starch, they’re probably done at this point. No matter what, let them cool for about 5 minutes on a cooling rack, and throw your empty pan back in the oven to heat up. If you’re still going, raise your oven temperature to 450 degrees.
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Pull out your pan again and throw your sweet potatoes back in for another 10-15 minutes to crisp up, replenishing the oil in the pan. Doing a double bake like this makes the sweet potatoes crispier. You can repeat the process as much as you’d like, but it stops being useful after about 4 passes. You can do this with pretty much any starch to make them crispier.
Arugula/rocket
I don’t cook this one, I’m just picky with raw greens. Arugula is related to spinach, but has this really pleasant black pepper flavor that makes me enjoy having it on my sandwiches or even for salads. This is a more expensive green, but it can be had at decent prices in the right time and place.
Sauteed green Beans
This is for fresh green beans, if your green beans are canned or frozen, don’t bother trying this because there’s no way to make the texture right
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Butter in pan, fry shallots, garlic, and red bell pepper, and chili flakes with salt and soy sauce/worcherster sauce in a pan. Thinly sliced sun dried tomatoes also make a pleasant addition at this point if you have them.
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Crank the heat on your pan and add fresh green beans. Fry them aggressively, you wanna keep them moving. The high heat brings a lot of good flavors out of the green beans quickly. Sautee for about 5 minutes or until your green beans are cooked through but still have a pleasant crunch.
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Remove from heat, finish with white pepper and a very light sprinkle of Parmesan cheese. Cheese is optional, but the white on top makes it look really pretty and if you use a SMALL amount, it’s a good flavor additive.
I could probably come up with more, but my arthritis hands are telling me to stop typing so
GOOD post.
My best advice to people who want to add more veggies into their diet which is maybe one step higher in effort but with a decent reward for it is twofold:
- Learn how to make salads properly
There are a some “secrets” (that the US government doesn’t want you to know about) to making good salads which home cooks often aren’t aware of.
(Example 1, Example 2, but there is plenty of other advice out there on this.)
If you know how to make say 3-4 salad dressings or, better yet, if you learn the food science behind making good salad and dressings then it opens up a whole world of options for you. (As an example here, I’m tinkering around with improvising a middle eastern style carrot and chickpea salad using a tahini emulsion as a dressing to prep en masse for the local Food Not Bombs-esque thing that happens locally to me - think something approximating a deconstructed [ugh 🙄] hummus distributed through a julienned carrot base. Simple, cheap, vegan, healthy, and tasty.)
- Learn how to stir fry
Similarly to above, all you need to do is to learn maybe 3-4 stir fry sauces (i.e. the finished product, not the individual sauces that are used as components for the final sauce) and learn the techniques of stir frying.
(Keep in mind that I’m not just talking Chinese cuisine here - there are plenty of great stir fry dishes especially in Thai cuisine that are some variety of stir fried Veg + Protein + Sauce that you’ve probably seen in restaurants.)
Once you have done that, suddenly a whole world of opportunities opens up for virtually any vegetable you have lying around in the fridge, provided that you prep it appropriately. A good quality mandolin slicer and maybe a cheap slash-proof glove from AliExpress can make a big difference here especially if you’re thinking of doing larger amounts and/or you’re not that handy with a knife (most home cooks aren’t, and that’s totally fine.)
This also means that you’ll be able to use up leftover veggies and stuff that is about to go bad, meaning that you should save money in the long run while reducing your amount of food waste, you goddamned first world labour aristocrat.
(Chinese Cooking Demystified and Kenji-Alt Lopez are some good places to start with if you’re lost, although they come with a word of caution - don’t let them set your standards unreasonably high for yourself here. Sue And Gambo do remarkably unremarkable Chinese cuisine in a way that you should be aiming for if you’re new to stir frying.)
As an intermediary step between OP’s advice and mine, familiarising yourself with the main Thai curries is a good compromise. Same story - learn 3-4 sauces and, although it’s more of a home cooking thing than a restaurant-tier thing, you’ll be able to throw in most veggies and get a very satisfying result.
Do food snobs sneer at something like thinly sliced carrot in their green curry? Yep.
But they can seethe and cope, this is about cheap, healthy, accessible food and not satisfying some arbitrary standards of “authentic” cooking. After all, if we want to talk about authenticity in food then why do we draw the line at the Columbian exchange? If you want real authenticity then western cuisines like French shouldn’t be using potatoes, Italian shouldn’t be using tomatoes and eggplants and capsicums, Indian and SE Asian shouldn’t be using chilli, and also Mexican shouldn’t be using watermelon in their agua fresca, West Asia shouldn’t be using lemons (as much as I do love me some sumac) etc.
You get the idea; there’s a bourgeois food snob in your head and they must be destroyed.
(Honourable mention goes to Indian cuisine which also offers virtually infinite options for incorporating vegetables into dishes once you learn the basic techniques as well.)
If this rant hasn’t been long enough for you, here’s my final thoughts:
I have a real love-hate relationship with the cooking industry.
If it wasn’t for that, I’d be eating horrible, bland British-style fare in a bleak and hopeless landscape of pablum. I wouldn’t have been exposed to wonderful foods from around the world otherwise.
But at the same time I hate the culture that has formed around cooking and people like Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay, along with a whole slew of other names that are probably less known to the average person such as Escoffier, have a lot to answer for. Although I do have a sincere appreciation for the people who work to bridge the divide between home cooking and the Chefing-Industrial Complex, like Kenji.
Think about it like motorsports.
People might go to see a race every now and then as a treat.
Some people might even do a bit of small-time racing themselves or learn some specialist motorsports techniques if they are real enthusiasts and it’s a hobby of theirs.
But nobody of note sneers at the average car that gets someone from A to B without any fancy techniques and which requires no specialist equipment nor a highly skilled team and exquisitely fine-tuned maintenance regimes to achieve the basics for transport. (Though god forbid someone go off-script and use micromobility or things like bicycles for transport!)
There’s no inherent shame or guilt in hopping into your daily driver to get to work or the shops, in the sense that the cultural expectation is telling you that you should get there at the lowest possible time using highly skilled techniques and by not doing this every time you ought to be embarrassed.
Yet for some reason when it comes to food and cooking we have this cultural expectation that everyone must be the equivalent of a racecar driver and we sneer at eachother, and even at ourselves, if we aren’t doing something incredible in the kitchen all the time.
Fuck that.
If you use peanut butter in your phanaeng curry or satay sauce? Okay.
If you use a jar of pasta sauce or a can of soup for the base of a dish? Fine.
If you use frozen vegetables or pre-prepped ingredients? Sure.
If you use sweet chilli sauce in your stir fry or you use ketchup in your pad Thai? Whatever.
All that matters is that you’re making food which is accessible and which suits your needs and your taste. You don’t need to impress anyone. It’s not a competition.
If you want to step it up or you want to do dinner parties and similar stuff then more power to you - if that’s your hobby then go wild with it.
But if you’re cooking at home then always remember that good enough is good enough.
I agree with everything you said, but have something to add to the stir frying advice that’s a game changer that turns your advice from good to great. In the way you talk about the Colombian exchange bringing new ingredients, it also made techniques more universal. While Stir Fries belong to Southeast Asia, the idea is not exclusive to them. Taking leftover starch, protein and veggies and frying them together is a classic. Assassin’s spaghetti, paella, Mexican rice, red beans and rice ect. I like doing my red beans and rice like fried rice, or will do stir fries of whatever culture mirrors my vegetable choice the most for the week. It keeps things varied, keeps me using my leftovers because I always have a direction to take them. Haitian fried rice is really good, I’ll do that when I have plantains, sweet potatoes, okra, anything I’d typically think of as an African ingredient. I want to get more into African food, but haven’t really had the chance. However, I’m sure you guys have noticed I like Central American flavors from my talk of ants. Haitian is somewhere between African food and Central American food, I really like the flavors that come from there.
Food is infinitely better when people are trying new shit casually, just because it’s what they have available. Muenster cheese became a Mexican staple in some areas post WW2 for this exact reason.
However, Southeast Asian/Indian food are the obvious choices for anybody looking for a vegetarian diet IMO. Easy to cook, infinitely riffable. So much of India is consciously vegetarian that pretty much any modern Indian recipe can be converted to vegetarian with no issue.
I make a very similar roasted carrots recipe as a weekly staple, though cooked w/ potatoes and no butter or bugs (I should see if the local Fresca market has it) and highly recommend it.
I will definitely be trying that steamed broccali recipe, thank you for sharing!
It’s definitely worth trying. I don’t like the idea of using bugs as a replacement for meat, I think that’s kinda really fucking stupid, but the flavor profile of the ants is good enough for me to keep them. Like this hit of lemon with a nutty flavor. Chicatanas (the ants) are a delicacy in some areas of Mexico, they’re just really good. They have this nice dark flavor, kinda like tobacco, but also this freshness like there’s like lemon soy sauce on them. If they didn’t actually taste good, I’d never recommend eating ants, but they have such a specific flavor I can’t even think of any good replacements besides for Chinese fermented black beans, and those are still much different.
Fried Rice is my go-to for using up stuff that is about to go bad
Take some old rice thats starting to dry out and toss it in enough oil to coat (fresh rice works too, but you’re better off finding another use for that). Break up the clumps with your hands and make sure there arent any dry patches. It’s messy but necessary.
Chop up some aromatics. Shallot, onion garlic, whole spices. Tablespoon of so per cup of rice but you can eyeball it. It doesn’t matter. If you have tender aromatics like green onion or basil, keep them seperate.
Chop up just about any veggie into cubes, or use frozen bagged ones.
You can do all kinds of different sauces. But a classic is some combination of soy sauce/oyster sauce/fish sauce for salty/savory beats, and white sugar for sweet (feel free to mess around with other sugary things). Most of your flavor is coming from the sauce, and you can add stuff. Try spice mixes, sesame oil, fish paste, MSG. You could make your own mixes, but this is medium-lazy food. Aim for a couple tbsp per cup of rice. Mix to taste. It will take more sugar than you expect, no matter what you expect. It’s okay if it tastes incredibly concetrated – Don’t water it down. I’d avoid adding much sourness. Salty, umami, and sweet are the trick.
- In a wok, heat a couple tbsp of oil on high until it smokes.
- Throw in your aromatics and toss for 15-30 secs until very slightly brown an aromatic.
- if you’re adding meat, this is a good time. Toss occasionally till slightly undercooked
- add your veggies and toss periodcially until soft.
- You can add an egg here. Push the veggies and crack an egg into the oil. Add oil first if needed. Just do a quick swirl with your spatula or whatever to make a half-assed scrambled egg. Let that cook until it congeals and toss.
- Add rice and toss until warm, and no longer. It just needs to be heated through.
- Add just enough sauce to coat the rice. If the sauce pools, that’s too much.
- Kill the heat and taste it. Add more sugar, soy, or spice if needed.
- Garnish with your tender aromatics.
I said it in another comment, but I will add to this by saying that you can make fried rice from absolutely any culture. The way I usually break people’s programming on this is by pointing out that Worcherster sauce IS a variation of fish sauce. Making a “white” version of fried rice es easy. So if whoever is reading this doesn’t like Chinese food, you can still try fried rice.
Cut a butternut squash in half and clean out the stringy bits and seeds.
Cut an onion in half.
You can season and cover these in oil first if you want.
Score the squash with a knife and roast it with the onion, 2 carrots, and a garlic clove. (both halves of everything)
When done blend all veggies and add coconut milk until thick soupy consistency. Salt to taste.
There you go, butternut squash soup. Vegen/Veg friendly.
Dandelion leaves are arugula for poor people. Best in spring, just rinse em well. If you harvest them late, they’ll still taste good, they’ll just be bitter. Use fewer and toss them with other greens
