🍜 Eat More Plants: Issue #36
Hi friends,
With any creative endeavour, it helps to have limitations. Lately, in the kitchen, my limitation has been forcing myself to use up all the dried beans I already had before buying any new ones. This means it's been ages since we've had chickpeas, since for some reason I was extremely well stocked in black beans and three kinds of lentils, but it's also meant that in my search to find new recipes, I discovered my new favourite veggie burger recipe. Good news, right?
Other than that, I'm deep into baking definitely-not-vegan cookies (so much butter) and I've got a complicated mincemeat in progress that requires me to make grapefruit-almond marmalade first because of course I do. (The recipe is from Camilla Wynne's Jam Bake and I have high expectations.) And keep an eye out later this month, as I'm planning to send you all a recipe for a vegan holiday main that everyone will make fun of and then go back for seconds of.
This month's new recipes
These Black Bean and Mushroom Burgers from the L.A. Times are excellent. They might not be for mushroom haters but I think they'd be okay for those who are meh on mushrooms, as to me they didn't really have a strong mushroom flavour. (But then, I love mushrooms.) It is probably worth buying smoked paprika for them if you don't have some already. I used almond flour instead of breadcrumbs and it worked just fine, though they didn't have full structural integrity, but it doesn't really matter when you're putting them on a bun anyways.
This vegan sesame ramen from blog Okonomi Kitchen was really quite good. The broth was actually super rich, I think you could add more broth or cut back slightly on the nutritional yeast and maybe the oat milk. I had a total fail on the tofu katsu, my panko didn't stick at all, so I have to go back to the drawing board on that one. The recipe doesn't say but we got six bowls of ramen out of it.
I made this lima bean hummus a while ago with some lima beans I found buried in the bottom of the freezer and really enjoyed it. Reminds me, I should buy more lima beans.
Speaking of butter, if you haven't tried this super-simple tomato sauce, I suggest adding to your repertoire.
If you're not tired of squash yet, this Butternut Squash Salad with Farro and Pepitas is really nice.
And, for three Smitten Kitchen recipes in a row, this cranberry-pecan bread is excellent. The recipe is not vegan, but there is a commenter under "I made this!" who gives some good tips on vegan-izing.
I'm reading
Mr. Felipe spoke openly about the business that has made him wealthy. He acknowledged cutting down the thick Amazon forest and that he had not paid for the land. He also said he structured his sales to hide the true origins of his cattle by selling to a middleman, creating a paper trail falsely showing his animals as coming from a legal ranch. Other ranchers in the area do the same, he said.
The New York Times on how the leather industry is contributing to deforesting the Amazon.
Demand for meat isn't going away, and if we can satisfy some of the growing demand for it with plant-based or cultivated options and then you've got regeneratively farmed meat complementing that, it feels like the most sustainable approach of all.
The National Observer on the best alternatives to mainstream meat.
My videos were essentially 60-second renditions of the dinner parties that had been stolen from me: a preparation of my favorite vegan dishes with a damn good story.
The Korean Vegan writes about her TikTok dinner parties for Bon Appétit. (I've got her cookbook on hold at the library.)
I'm writing...
... about books! For Workshop, 6 books for creative entrepreneurs. And for Rewilding, all the books we recommended in 2021. Also for Rewilding, I interviewed Peter Ewins of Toronto's Project Swallowtail on ecological restoration in our cities.
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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