🥬 Eat more plants: Issue #35
Hi friends,
Have you ever bought a caraflex cabbage? They're cute and pointy and I've increasingly become obsessed with them. Not just because they're cute and pointy, but because they're tender and delicious, a gentler cousin to your typical green cabbage.
One thing I've been using them for, of course, is slaw. This Chile + Lime Slaw from Sprouted Kitchen is a good place to start – it's just creamy enough without veering close to goopy territory. I didn't have mango or macadamias, so I left out the fruit and substituted toasted pepitas for the nuts.
But then I got lazier, and I've been winging it on the slaw front. I slice some red onion or shallot and mix it in with lime juice and a bit of salt to soften it, then add the shredded caraflex and a drizzle of olive oil and honey, and keep adjusting until it tastes just right. Topped with the toasted pepitas again, of course. Toasting them is well worth the effort. It was just right alongside the baked black beans and honey-lime mashed yams (both from the Rebar cookbook) I made the other day.
We also used the caraflex in this Sheet Pan Chow Mein from Smitten Kitchen/author Hetty MacKinnon, and it was our favourite of all the vegetables we had in there. (To make it a meal, btw, we served with edamame, and fried eggs or a simple tofu dish would work too.)
Next up? I've got my eye on this Tahini-Smothered Charred Cabbage, and on a few other slaw recipes.
As for dessert, I recently made these 5-ingredient Salted Peanut Butter Cookies, but with tahini because I was out of peanut butter, and they are spectacular, even if you don't care that they're flourless. And back in the spring, weirdly (I had come into some rosemary), I made this Apple, Hazelnut and Rosemary Cake and it was excellent, and well suited to the current crop of apples.
Tips from you
After my talk last issue of fake ground beef, Josie recommended this Cauli Crumble from Big Mountain Foods. I've got some in my fridge but haven't tried it yet.
After a disappointing quinoa experience, Helen followed the cooking instructions in this Well + Good article and recommends it wholeheartedly. She also recommends the new Anna Jones cookbook One: Pot, Pan, Planet, which focuses on simple recipes that reduce your footprint in three ways: fewer dishes (win-win), fewer animal products and less food waste.
I'm reading
Historically, human diets have been much more diverse and localized than in the West of the past 100 years or so, and the idea of cow’s milk dairy as the most neutral and “normal” is a European invention.
Alicia Kennedy tells it like it is on milk and alternatives.
"As I started exploring the possibilities of the chickpea, I realised there was a culinary universe of taste that was already etched in people's memory," she said. "It's an ingredient that plays such a role in our Mediterranean culture and culinary traditions."
BBC Travel covers the beauty of the humble chickpea.
“The big win would be when you go to some random little deli in the middle of the country, get a sandwich with cheese on it, and that cheese just so happens to be made without animals,” he says. “It isn’t even mentioned, it isn’t the big reason you went, and you didn’t pay extra. It’s just the way we do it now.”
Wired on the rise of plant-based cheese alternatives that are actually delicious.
Changing the cadence of consumption in fashion is something Bergkamp says is desperately needed. “We need to slow growth,” she says. “We cannot continue to expect that the planet can regenerate resources at the rate that we’re currently taking them.”
Hothouse on what it will take to make fashion sustainable.
I'm writing
For Rewilding Magazine, I interviewed author Emma Marris on her new book Wild Souls and what it's going to take to truly help wildlife.
And for Workshop, I interviewed entrepreneur Kaija Heitland about her beadwork-inspired fabric sold through her company Indigenous Nouveau.
The footer
Eat More Plants is a sporadically published newsletter by Kat Tancock, sharing recipes and inspiration for vegetarian and vegan dishes, restaurants, products and more. Please reply with your own tips so I can include them in a future issue, and send this newsletter to your friends.
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