What Omnivores Get Wrong About Vegetarian Cooking
'When you (or your kid, partner or roommate) goes vegetarian, you’ll need to change up your weeknight cooking strategies.
On Jan. 1 of this year, I began cooking as a vegetarian. Not because I became vegetarian — that would be professionally untenable — but because my younger child did, thus upending most of my hard-won weeknight cooking strategies.
I didn’t think of myself as an animal-centric cook, just your basic modern omnivore. Steaks and lamb chops were an occasional treat, not a routine dinner. But I soon realized that I’d been relying on shortcuts like bacon, anchovy paste, pancetta and fish sauce.
At the same time, I began research on a project about how to cook and eat with less impact on the environment. What I learned made me want to eat not only less meat but also less dairy, which can be just as harmful. It didn’t seem right to simply replace recipes that call for a pound of meat with recipes that call for a pound of cheese, so vegan cooking was also newly intriguing.
It didn’t seem impossible. I knew about putting vegetables at the center of the plate, I had mastered “put an egg on it,” and we already ate salad most nights. So I collected a fresh batch of recipes, laid in a supply of legumes and embarked on my new kitchen life.
The first few weeks, I did what felt normal: I cooked a couple of different things on the nights we all sat down to eat together. But dinner was never on the table before 9 p.m., the food was strangely unsatisfying and the kitchen was absolutely wrecked. . .
To make sure dinner was filling, I was stuffing everyone with starch.
“A plant-based diet is not going to work exactly like a meat-based one,” said Rich Landau, the chef and co-owner of Vedge and other vegetarian restaurants in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. “It’s just not going to fill you up the same way.” In other words, it’s likely that a plant-based dinner at 7 p.m. may not carry everyone over until breakfast the next day. “Herbivores are grazers,” he added.
The fact that my kids were peckish at 9:30 p.m. didn’t mean that I had failed at dinner. It simply meant that I needed to lay in more substantial snacks and let go.
I needed to push more flavor into everything. . .
“Just using enough salt will get you halfway there,” . .
I was avoiding meat and dairy substitutes for no good reason.
Growing up among hippies made me perpetually suspicious of anything offered as a healthier substitute for something good. The fact is that there are many products on the market that are delicious on their own terms, and more and more foods that are doing a good job of pretending to be meat and dairy. Go out and try them. Thanks to the recipes in “I Can Cook Vegan,” a new book from the chef Isa Chandra Moskowitz, coconut oil is my new best friend.
I was being snobbish about frozen vegetables. . .
Bhavna Patel, a home cook in Lake City, Fla., with a popular YouTube channel, grew up in Gujarat, India, where a majority of people are vegetarian or vegan. She has streamlined her family’s recipes, she said, and often relies on homemade frozen vegetables. If you are peeling and cutting them anyway, it’s just as easy to boil them in salted water and freeze them in resealable bags. Or, find a brand you like and buy them. The route to dinner is much faster. Pav bhaji, her go-to meal for her sons, is a vegetable curry served on toasted buttered buns.
I was trying to cook too many things. . .
one or two vegetables to work with on a weeknight is plenty for most home cooks. A bunch of roasted carrots with yogurt and the nutty spice mix dukkah is dinner; a pile of lemony broccoli or broccoli rabe on grilled bread is dinner; spicy tomato soup with bread and cheese is most definitely dinner.
I also needed to read recipes differently. . .
So a recipe that begins with a pound of washed, stemmed and sliced kale, two cups of chopped onions and six minced garlic cloves is always going to take longer than the estimated time.
I had to stop living in fear.
I felt guilty when my eyes strayed toward the stash of chicken stock in the freezer, and worried about adding fish sauce to a vegan recipe. But your kitchen is not a restaurant, and you are not a giant corporation subject to labeling laws. If everyone decides that the Caesar salad dressing needs anchovies this week, no one will break down your door or take away your membership card. You still get to decide how to cook in your own home.
Recipes: Spiced Seared Eggplant With Pearl Couscous | Savory Thai Noodles With Seared Brussels Sprouts | 22 Recipes to Feed a New Vegetarian'
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/dining/going-vegetarian.html?
