THE ENDLESS PLEASURES OF VEGETARIAN COOKING

3 healthy recipes full of flavour

By trade, I’m an omnivore. The only food rule I follow is that I eat everything, because anything can lead to deliciousness. Maybe it’s goat meat on the bone, cooked low and slow and served in a dark pool of its own cooking juices. Maybe it’s a bloomy wheel of cheese made from cashew milk, dense and creamy in the middle. If it’s good, I want it, and then I want seconds.

But when I cook at home, what I want more and more of is vegetables. Right now, this instant, I want long, skinny tongues of charred eggplant dressed in soy sauce and maple syrup, over rice. I want bright tomato pulp puréed with bread and olive oil, right from the lip of the bowl. I want a big pile of lettuce leaves filled with Hetty McKinnon’s sweet and spicy tofu larb.

When the weather cools down? I want a hot pot of winter greens and chewy noodles in miso broth.

I want my favourite toor dal with whole boiled peanuts. I want sweetedged, wrinkly roasted root vegetables over heaps of cheesy polenta, swimming in olive oil.

I don’t know exactly when my appetite became so intensely focused on vegetarian foods in my own kitchen. It happened slowly, then all at once, like a custard thickening on the stovetop. I revised my food shopping, and my home cooking followed, branching out and expanding. I went back to old, favourite cookbooks that included meat and fish only occasionally, or not at all, like River Cafe Cook Book Green, by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, and Classic Indian Vegetarian Cookery, by Julie Sahni.

Maybe you’re drawn to vegetarian food for ethical reasons, for health reasons, for ecological reasons, for reasons you can’t quite explain just yet. Maybe you’re trying to get out of a kitchen rut. Maybe, like me, you really love to eat well, and you want to cook with vegetables more.

Persian cucumbers, roughly peeled, chopped and plopped into a blend of buttermilk and yoghurt, quickly form the base of Naz Deravian’s abdoogh khiar, an Iranian chilled soup, crunchy with walnuts, which is quick to make, and life-affirming in this late summer heat.

I’m energised by cooks who coax the best out of vegetables, and not only professionals — restaurant cooks, recipe developers, cookbook authors who’ve been working with vegetarian food for far longer than me— but also friends, family and other home cooks who have patiently walked me through a technique, or documented their workonline.

Just when I thought I might be getting alittle bit sick of salads, for example, Ali Slagle went and put one on apizza. And not just any pizza, but a superthin-crust pizza covered entirely with acrisp, lacy layer of Parmesan cheese.

With all due respect to California Pizza Kitchen, and thechain’s tricolore salad pizza, it is infinitely better than its inspiration.

Piling salad on a cheesy, thin-crust pizza is the kind of smart, simple technique I know I’ll practise again, not only exactly aswritten,with baby arugula and white beans on top, but maybe with crunchy lettuce in a tahini ranch dressing, or lots of sautéed summer squash. Or maybe with some cherry tomatoes, roasted until they burst, tossed with olive oil and big pieces of torn basil. It’s official, salad pizza is now a part of my repertoire.

And that’sthe thing about a good vegetarian recipe: It leads youtoa delicious meal, thenmakeshundredsmore possible. © 2021 THE NEW YORK TIMES