TANYA: I think so much of what makes good vegetarian cooking great is leaning into the seasons and not thinking of recipes so much as a mandate, but a suggestion and the way to think about substitutions and swaps. You really just need to think about, is this vegetable like this other vegetable? And by that I mean, is it similarly textured? Is it similarly starchy? Is it similarly leafy? Is it going to take roughly the same amount of time to cook? Does it have a similar water content?
CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.
ROSIE: I’m Rosie Guerin, and you’re listening to The Wirecutter Show.
Hey, there. Before we jump into today’s show, I want to let you know about a special offer. If you’re not already a subscriber to the New York Times, you can now explore the Times for free. No paywalls during your first month in the New York Times app. You can find all of your favorite shows like, I don’t know, this show, Modern Love, Cannonball, and more on the new shows tab. Okay, let’s get into it.
CHRISTINE: Rosie, hello.
ROSIE: Hello.
CHRISTINE: Hello, hello. I am curious, I know that you don’t really eat meat. Are you a strict vegetarian?
ROSIE: No, I’m not anymore. I was a vegetarian beginning in college. Actually, it was the first year I was in an apartment having to cook all on my own. It occurred to me that I was never going to cook meat. I knew I never would prepare it. And so I thought if I’m not going to prepare it, why don’t I just stop eating it? And I stopped for about a decade.
CHRISTINE: Okay. But now you eat chicken and fish and things like that.
ROSIE: Now, I can be tempted by a piece of chicken.
CHRISTINE: I think a lot of folks are trying to incorporate more vegetables into their diets… but maybe they have trouble knowing how to cook them… or feel like they get in a rut… or are working with specific dietary restrictions that feel limiting… And today, we are talking to the person who can help. Tanya Sichynsky [SI-CHEN-SKI] is an editor for the food and cooking sections at the New York Times and the author of the weekly newsletter, The Veggie. She just came out with a new cookbook called Veg Everything. She’s going to talk to us about the book, the recipes, and her ideas for making vegetables the star of your table.
ROSIE: I’m so excited for this book. I am constantly wanting to incorporate more vegetables into my life, into the kids’ lives. And I love Tanya. We had Tanya on the show last summer to talk about recipes that would be perfect for beach days specifically. And today we’re going to talk with her about getting back into that cooking groove. It’s September now.
CHRISTINE: Yeah.
ROSIE: We’re back to school. We’re busy again and we want to eat vegetables ideally.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. And it’s also a fun time to experiment with some new recipes.
ROSIE: There’s a lot of stuff that’s really, really yummy and in season. So Tanya is going to talk us through this amazing new book and talk about preparing some really easy and some showstopping vegetarian dishes, and she’s a delight.
CHRISTINE: I cannot wait. We’ll be back with Tanya after the break.
ROSIE: Welcome back. Today, our guest is Tanya Sichynsky. She’s an editor for the food and cooking sections at the New York Times and the author of The Veggie, which is a weekly vegetarian newsletter. She just came out with a new book. It’s called Veg Everything. Tanya, welcome back to the show. Good to see you.
TANYA: Thank you for having me again.
CHRISTINE: Tanya, everybody listening to this podcast knows that you’re supposed to eat veggies, that we’re all supposed to eat lots of veggies. It’s kind of foundational to our health and all that good stuff. You edit the veg newsletter. You must get a lot of questions from people about cooking vegetables. I want to know what are people’s biggest problems, hangups, roadblocks to integrating more vegetables into their meals?
TANYA: Complaints.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, complaints.
TANYA: Oh, okay. So I think the kind of big buckets of questions come down to technique limitations. “I only know how to do this. What else do I do with this particular vegetable?” Another question is always, “I have too much of this.”
CHRISTINE: Too much zucchini.
TANYA: And I’ve made too much zucchini, too much… a winter squash. Cabbage is a big one and I’ve exhausted my Rolodex of options for preparing this. What do I do next? And then the other kind of bucket of questions is something I often deal with in… I have a recurring series in the newsletter called Recipe Matchmaker and these are sort of hyper-specific questions that often run in either a dietary lane. So not only do I need something to be meatless or vegetarian or vegan, whatever, but also gluten-free or, “I don’t like mushrooms,” or, “I have a soy allergy,” or something like that or hyper-specific occasion-based questions. I’m having eight to 10 people come over, a variety of different dietary limitations. I don’t know what to do.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, that’s the tough one.
TANYA: Yes. So it is, I would say probably a 50-50 split between knowledge and skill-based questions. I need to expand my vegetable cooking expertise or I need ideas.
CHRISTINE: I feel like there’s sort of a continuum of people who… I have friends, for instance, who were raised in families that ate canned vegetables and they never had a fresh vegetable until they were adults. On the other end of the spectrum, I grew up in a hippie family with a huge backyard with a garden and we were eating fresh vegetables all the time. But even coming from that perspective, I grew up only eating certain vegetables. And Brussels sprouts, for instance, forever I though I hated them. And then when I figured out that roasting them was amazing, I was like, “Oh, boom.” But I do feel like that it can be intimidating. There’s just so many vegetables, so many ways to prepare them, but it can be intimidating if you don’t have much experience.
TANYA: I actually get at expressly what you just described in the intro of the book, my own upbringing and relationship with vegetables. I grew up in a meat and three, meat and two kind of family. My parents are exceptional cooks, but they made a lot of the same vegetables in similar preparations. I didn’t grow up eating eggplant, really. I was eating a lot of zucchini, a lot of green beans, a lot of leafy green salads, tomatoes, corn, but it was very simple salads, tomato, avocado, red onion.
I’m half Cuban, so that was always on the table. Frozen vegetables, which I love and everyone should have stocked because those are picked at their freshest and oftentimes sometimes better than what you might get at the grocery store, especially out of season. But frozen broccoli with cheese and frozen corn. It’s not that there wasn’t effort necessarily put toward these dishes because I don’t want to shade my mother. She’s an incredible cook and so, so, so thoughtful, but they were focused on making the centerpiece, which was always meat, really exceptional.
And then it was like, “And now we need sides. What are the sides going to be?” You don’t know what you don’t know. And so when I moved to DC after college and that was my first real experience with these kind of big sprawling farmer’s markets. I remember walking around being like, “I’ve never seen this vegetable.”
ROSIE: Jicama.
TANYA: Jicama. “What is Romanesco?” And I’m standing there Googling on my phone like green spiral cauliflower. You see these things that are so beautiful and you see other people shopping and buying things in an informed way and you’re kind of like, “Where did they learn? Okay. What do I do with this now?” I don’t think it’s something to fear. I think it is okay to kind of screw up and mess a few things up. There are a lot of things to try. I feel like as much as there are a lot of different ways to prepare meats, it’s a little bit less, I don’t know, exciting to me.
CHRISTINE: Meaning that it’s more exciting to explore all the range of ways you can make vegetables.
TANYA: Yeah. I mean, a really beautiful steak. I’m going to salt. I’m going to put it in a cast iron skillet and I’m going to get a really nice sear on it. It’s going to be beautiful and it’s going to be delicious, and I know what it’s going to taste like. Yeah, I could marinate it, but I feel like it’s… For certain cuts of meat-
ROSIE: It is what it is.
TANYA: … you know what you’re getting, you have a loose idea of how you’re going to prepare it and you know what it’s going to taste like. That I can take a green bean and turn it into a saucy casserole for Thanksgiving, or I could cut it into one-inch pieces and throw it into a kaprao style stir-fry with tofu and it be still crunchy or that I could… There’s a great recipe for this on cooking actually, that I could do tempura green beans and you basically get a french fry kind of situation. They look like french fries, that you can have an entire green bean salad, that you can eat them snappy, that they could be cooked into oblivion, like you would get a canned green bean. There’s just things so much more range, which maybe is part of what is intimidating about it.
ROSIE: Yeah. When you can do 50 different things, what do you do?
TANYA: Right. How do you choose?
ROSIE: How do you choose?
TANYA: And not to be a shameless self-promoter, but how do you choose? I will help you choose. We’ve got a book full of recipes that will help you choose.
ROSIE: Christine. Whoa, right here. We got a book right here.
TANYA: We got a book right here.
CHRISTINE: We can look right in there.
ROSIE: All right. So let’s talk about recipes a little bit and that process of taking a humble veg and brainstorming around it. What am I going to make with this? What am I going to do with this? I’m curious, are there things you keep in your pantry that make cooking veg dishes easier or more interesting? And that might be a tool. That might be a set of spices. That might be a sauce. Are there things that you want to have on hand that you know will help inspire?
TANYA: So, for me, it’s always going to be canned or dried beans. I’m really big on… I get a lot of emails about this where people will say, “You’re always recommending canned beans or canned whatever. You can make dried beans.” Absolutely. I know that. A lot of this is about accessibility. Not everyone has the time to prepare dried beans.
Not everyone has the skillset. Not everyone knows how we have a dried bean recipe in the book. We’ll help you. But if you want to make canned beans, you should be equipped to do so. So one thing that I love to have on hand right now is Trader Joe’s canned lentils.
CHRISTINE: Oh, yeah.
TANYA: Lentils don’t take a long time to cook, but I don’t always have 10 minutes to bring a pot of water to boil and then another 10 to sometimes 30, 40 minutes, depending on how old your lentils are to make a pot of lentils.
ROSIE: Extra dishes.
TANYA: Extra dishes. There is a great recipe that I have been kind of fixated on. We’ve made it on… I have a YouTube show on the New York Times Cooking Channel. We did an episode on snacks and I made Kay Chun’s tomato marinated lentils. It’s a tomato marinated greens and beans on toast. And she uses canned lentils, grated tomato, Swiss chard. She makes this tomato-y dressing, tosses the lentils in, stirs it up, and then scoops it onto toast. No cook. If you don’t count toasting as cooking, which I don’t, I feel like I’ve mentioned this before on this podcast, but that is something that I can and will have lunch in 10 minutes. Canned beans are a must. I am going through so much nutritional yeast. I love it.
ROSIE: So that’s another one of those things. I grew up with my hippy, crunchy mom and we always had nutritional yeast. We always-
CHRISTINE: I feel like it has entered into a more sophisticated space at this point. I mean, not that our moms weren’t sophisticated, but just it was very hippy at one point.
ROSIE: And now it’s more mainstream.
CHRISTINE: Now it’s like an alternate for Parmesan.
ROSIE: I thought we were the only… I was like, “Ugh.” Thought we were the only kids who had to put nutritional yeast on our popcorn.
TANYA: I mean, that is a perfect example of an item that I did not know about growing up. I learned about fully as an adult, and it has completely changed my life. I have a specific blend of nutritional yeast and other seasonings that I put on my popcorn.
CHRISTINE: Yes.
TANYA: It’s my house popcorn. I have a lot of fans who come to my house to eat my popcorn.
CHRISTINE: I want to know what’s in this spice.
ROSIE: Is it a secret recipe?
TANYA: Actually, it’s not. I did it on the YouTube and it’s actually very, very simple, but I do all of it in a blender so that it gets really powdery because you know the flakes and then you need to use a lot of oil. Anyways, tons of nutritional yeast, more salt than you think you need, brown sugar, cayenne pepper, a certain alchemy of those ingredients. If you do it just right, it will make your popcorn taste like the spicy nacho Doritos.
ROSIE: Okay. So nutritional yeast, you got canned beans, you got the lentils.
TANYA: Yes.
ROSIE: What else is always stocked for you?
TANYA: Oh, really good olive oil. This is actually not a thing that I always have stocked, and I was really off that I didn’t have it the other day because I was craving something with it. I always have peanut butter, but I don’t always have tahini, but I need to always have tahini. I would count this as a pantry item. I love dates. I always, always, always have dates. I love a sweet and savory dish. I love a savory dish that happens to have dates in it. I also love using dates as an alternative sweetener if you don’t want to use ground sugar. Maybe you’re making something vegan. You don’t want to use honey, for whatever reason you don’t have maple syrup. Anyways, dates are the best. I love a date.
I’m thinking about my pantry. I try to always have a really kind of short, tiny pasta, like an orzo or a ditalini, really quick cooking. I love a spoon pasta moment.
ROSIE: I had orzo last night and I loved… It’s so sweet-
TANYA: It’s so sweet.
ROSIE: … eating with a spoon.
TANYA: What else do I have? I have panko always. I try to keep some sort of store-bought fried shallot or crispy garlic because I love a crispy crunchy topping. Dijon mustard, big for me. That to me is the anchor point of a lot of dressings that I’ll make or marinades.
ROSIE: I didn’t even think that you could buy pre-crunched shallots and garlic.
CHRISTINE: I have gotten those before. They’re great. They’re so green. You can usually find them in Asian grocery stores.
ROSIE: Making some sense.
TANYA: I think this might be newish, but I just picked them up and I actually have them downstairs at my desk because I brought in a recipe test from home. They now make crispy fried shallots and the garlic at Trader Joe’s and they sell the separately.
ROSIE: Oh, that’s awesome.
CHRISTINE: Hot tip and it’s a hot take.
TANYA: And actually… Hold on. I’m flipping to something in the book because we have a… There’s a chapter in the book called New Comforts. Kind of the thesis of this chapter is if you keep a well-stocked pantry, you can make any of these recipes with the addition of one fresh vegetable. So you have a head of cabbage, then you can make one dish from here if everything else is pantry ingredients. Not including a lemon or maybe a little herb topping. I’m not counting that, but you might be able to leave that out if you’re really pressed.
But I’m looking at this brown butter bucatini with charred cabbage, right? So the fresh vegetable, head of cabbage. Everything else, dried pasta, butter, other spices, what have you. We have a carrot risotto with chili crisps. So that’s going to have rice and Parmesan which I’m counting as a pantry ingredient, these kind of things that will hold up in your fridge for a long time.
Chili crisp. What’s the one fresh vegetable you need? Carrot. So I was trying to think of the instances where I’m looking at my fridge being like, “God, I only have one thing.”
ROSIE: I love that you did that in this book because I think it’s an extension of what you were talking about earlier, the access we have to this knowledge, whether it’s the Times Cooking app, YouTube, just broadly. There’s so many places we can go versus I’m thinking you’re growing up and your parents. And my mom too, it’s like she did what she knew and what she had in the rotation because she was trying to feed us. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let me go put a new vegetable recipe in the rotation that I can…” You know what I mean?
TANYA: Totally.
ROSIE: It’s great. The shorthand exists. It’s really cool.
CHRISTINE: I think we also all go through phases where we’re more excited to explore the cookbooks or the new recipes.
TANYA: Totally.
CHRISTINE: I know as a mom, I sometimes have to just be on the rotation.
TANYA: Totally.
CHRISTINE: This month is all going to be the same every week.
ROSIE: We’re going to take a quick break. When we’re back, Tanya, we’re going to get into your tips for using leftovers. This is a big one. We’ll be right back.
ROSIE: Welcome back. Our guest today is Tanya Sichynsky. She’s an editor for the food and cooking sections at the New York Times and the author of The Veggie, which is the weekly vegetarian newsletter from the Times. Tanya also just came out with a new cookbook. It’s called Veg Everything. Before the break, we were chatting about some of her favorite veggie recipes.
CHRISTINE: I want to dive into the book a little bit more.
TANYA: Sure.
CHRISTINE: Because for listeners who haven’t looked at the book, seen the book, it’s just coming out. You are the curator, right? You are the person who is curating all the recipes. The recipes are actually from many different New York Times contributors. Some of my favorite recipe contributors. There’s Samin Nosrat, one of our guests from last year, Eric Kim, Sarah Copeland, Kay Chun. I’m just listing all the things that are saved in my New York Times app, but so many great recipe developers in this book. Tell us a little bit about how the book came together, what people can expect if they pick it up and take it home.
TANYA: So the book is in many ways an extension of the first question you asked me about what readers have asked me in the newsletter. In curating the book, I approached it similarly to curating the newsletter. I’m trying to solve a problem, answer a question, what are the questions and the problems that come up again and again and again when people have expressed an interest in more plant-forward cooking, but just don’t really know where to start. And so I wanted to group the chapters in slightly more of a playful sense, and it’s not just sides, mains, lunch, whatever.
It is breakfast, right? If you want to start cooking vegetables, you can actually start first thing in the morning. There are many ways to incorporate them into, I don’t know, formats that turn away from the standard American breakfast. We have handheld sorts of dishes, so that’s going to be sandwiches, tacos, skewers, things you want to eat straight from the pan. I consider that handheld. It’s kind we call the chapter plate optional. Just thinking kind of about how not only I like to cook, but thinking about the way that I determine what I’m going to make, and it’s usually circumstantial. There is, of course, a soup chapter, because sometimes you just want soup, but there is also an RSVP worthy section.
So that is more impressive, more stately, maybe larger format dishes that you could make for a dinner party for entertaining. You could certainly also just make them for yourself or for your family. There’s no rule to when you have to prepare those dishes, but really it was trying to, with each chapter, identify a common problem and present some number of solutions. There is a chapter called What is a Salad? For anyone who grew up with no touch points for meatless cooking, you have a very stereotypical idea of what a vegetarian meal might look like, especially if you grew up in a part of the country where maybe your only exposure to meatless cooking is in the vegetarian options at a restaurant or at a fast casual place where it’s like you’re going to eat some limp salad with cherry tomatoes.
CHRISTINE: An afterthought basically.
TANYA: Yeah, an afterthought. And there’s another kind of pull of this where the salad could sometimes have been perceived as punishment, like a diet-based thing. And so I wanted to reframe the salad for anyone who had either of those experiences as the salad is not punishment. It is not necessarily a health food. It can be an expression of abundance. It can totally flip the script on what you think a salad is. There’s a pizza in that chapter, right? What is a salad, right? It’s a little bit of an existential.
CHRISTINE: I mean, what is a sandwich? We have this debate-
TANYA: Exactly.
CHRISTINE: … at work all the time.
TANYA: Exactly.
CHRISTINE: Is a hot dog sandwich. Is a salad a pizza? I don’t know.
TANYA: Is a salad a pizza? What do you actually need for something to be a salad?
ROSIE: So let’s talk in the morning, you wake up and you want some veg.
TANYA: Sure.
ROSIE: You’re talking about veggies for breakfast.
CHRISTINE: How am I getting my kids to eat more veggies in the morning?
ROSIE: Yeah, what are the options here?
CHRISTINE: Please tell me.
TANYA: Okay. So-
ROSIE: Is it all cloak and dagger?
TANYA: Well, so there is that. There is a green smoothie in the book because sometimes that’s maybe all you have time for. I love just a classic green smoothie. I actually was just with some girlfriends. We went upstate for the weekend and two of the dishes that I made for breakfast, I cooked every meal while we were there. And one of them is a More-Vegetable-Than-Egg Frittata that’s in the book that is from Mark Bittman. And that is whatever vegetables you have. Genuinely whatever vegetables you have in the pan, sauteed. Fewer eggs than you think you would need. The recipe calls for two to three.
You’re kind of like, “Huh?” Very, very quick, very simple. Throw the vegetables that the kids actually like in there. In this instance, I used spinach in there, cherry tomato, regular tomato, mint, basil. Just what I had on hand. Delicious. Maybe a little bit more kid-approved. I also made Yewande Komolafe’s goat cheese and dill Dutch baby.
CHRISTINE: Yum. I saw that in the book. It looks so good.
TANYA: So good.
ROSIE: That sounds so good.
TANYA: Eggy, savory pancake moment with tangy goat cheese, a ton of fresh herbs. You do a salad in the middle. That honestly could have gone in the What is a Salad chapter had it not been in the breakfast chapter. There is a couple of different baked egg in a pan situation. So we have a shakshouka that’s green with a lot of Swiss chard and similar format with black beans where you do black beans, eggs baked in. You can serve it with cilantro and queso fresco and tortillas and have a breakfast taco situation, which brings me to the breakfast burrito.
ROSIE: God, I love a breakfast burrito so much.
TANYA: That is the way. If you’re trying to trick the kid.
CHRISTINE: My kids are a bean and tortilla type of breakfast burrito clan. That and maybe some cheese.
TANYA: I would say, okay, if they like bean and cheese and tortilla, you’re going to mash some sweet potato into the bean. So much of their aversions are texture or color based.
ROSIE: Make everything look brown.
CHRISTINE: I love that you have this chapter in the book called RSVP Worthy. I feel like this is the chapter I need. It’s about centerpiece dishes, like the wow impressive vegetarian dishes. What is your best advice and what are some of the showstopping recipes you have in the book for putting vegetables at the center at a big event?
TANYA: I think so much of it lies in presentation. Something that has a crispy crunchy topping and a lot of different colors or something that’s jeweled. So we have kind of a vegetable biryani that is gorgeous with pomegranate seeds and celebratory in that way. You want it to feel like a party. Clearly, I just love the addition of a little pomegranate seed sprinkle because that also is on the Afghan style eggplant and yogurt, which is really beautiful. Another kind of, I think, element to elevating the vegetable that you’ll see in several of these recipes is layering things.
So you could do… It depends on how you prepare biryani, but there are some that layer the rice and the vegetables and what have you. This one kind of mixes them all together, but you could go that kind of layered style similar with the vegetarian shepherd’s pie, right? That’s like a exercise in layering where you scoop something out and you’re surprised and delighted by everything that comes after the next thing you just saw. The asparagus and goat cheese and tarragon tart, right?
CHRISTINE: Ooh, I want to make that one. I saw the picture and I was like, “Yes, this looks great.”
TANYA: It’s beautiful. People are obsessed with that one. That’s a big spring equinox, Easter time recipe where people I feel like make it for that time of year always. Really, really well reviewed. And that’s you have layers of puff pastry and delicious tangy goat cheese and then your vegetables. You could certainly sprinkle over whatever topping over top of that you’d like beyond just kind of aesthetics and format. I think part of it too is labor, right? This is-
ROSIE: Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask.
TANYA: You want things to be a little bit more work.
CHRISTINE: You want to know someone spent all day working on that.
TANYA: And listen, not all of the recipes in this chapter are laborious, but they give the perception of labor. So the tart, for example, you’re buying store-bought puff pastry, but it looks like somebody just… It’s very perfect hostess.
ROSIE: It’s like fragrance. You want to smell expensive.
CHRISTINE: You want to smell expensive. That’s right. Yeah. It looks like someone spent a lot of time placing those asparagus next to each other.
TANYA: Yes, exactly. I think with these dishes… Oh, and also there’s that whole… So we have this whole roasted squash with tomato ginger chickpeas, and you’re getting these little squash boats that have saucy chickpeas nestled in the concave part of the squash and bringing all of those out on a platter and each person kind of getting their own little squash.
ROSIE: Impressive.
CHRISTINE: I love that.
TANYA: It’s beautiful. It’s fun. That one is actually incredibly… It sounds more labor-intensive than it is. It actually is quite low lift. They’re not that crazy, but they definitely look like you toiled in the kitchen.
CHRISTINE: Let’s talk leftovers. This is the one that I love talking to cooks. I want to know what your tips are for using up the bibs and bobs and all the little things that are leftover after a week of cooking. What do you like to do with leftovers, specifically vegetable leftovers?
TANYA: Well, I’m actually thinking about a leftover in my fridge right now, which happens to be a New York Times cooking recipe. That is not in the book, but frankly, it should be. So I recently made Lex Weibel’s zucchini pecorino and basil salad with almonds. So I dressed the whole salad and raw zucchini once it’s salted is going to go limp pretty quickly. So I have the leftovers of the salad in my fridge right now, and I was thinking like, “Okay, what can I do with this?” It’s softened and seasoned zucchini, capers, basil, a ton of cheese, almonds.
I’m just going to toss it with pasta. Like that actually is a pasta sauce. It’s a salad that over time being marinated, can be a pasta sauce. Similarly, I could grill some toast and eat it as kind of a saucy marinated zucchini toast situation. It’s not going to have any of the kind of crunch and verve that it did on day one or day two, but there’s plenty else that I can do with it. I could also probably make a pancake batter and turn them into zucchini pancakes.
CHRISTINE: Ooh, that’d be good.
ROSIE: I love zucchini pancakes.
TANYA: Because you have the herbs in there… It’s already seasoned. I’m actually not worried about there being nuts in there. I think that would be yummy and crunchy and delicious. Or I could throw it into the recipe for the More-Vegetable-Than-Egg Frittata, just whisk some eggs and do an omelet style. For me, if I have leftover vegetables that are certainly not going to be in their prime after a couple of days in the fridge, I’m like, “What can I cook it into?”
CHRISTINE: It’s almost like does it waffle? Does it toast? Does it pasta? Does it pancake?
ROSIE: That’s huge though. I feel like having those to reach for like, what’s the vessel? That’s where I get tripped up, I think. I look in the fridge and I can’t, for some reason, conjure a pancake, like what this could end up as. And having those, I think as the building blocks is a really helpful way to think about it.
TANYA: I think there are dish formats that exist in the book that I would encourage anybody reading it to take that format and think beyond the recipe as far as ingredients are concerned.
ROSIE: What are some examples of that?
TANYA: So the frittata is a good one, right?
ROSIE: Yeah.
TANYA: That is, I think, a perfect example of whatever you’ve got goes in. There are a handful of different pastas that I think really play well to this. So Ali Slagle’s lemony orzo with asparagus and breadcrumbs. That is a recipe where whatever vegetable is in season should get swapped in with the asparagus. I would absolutely toss the salad that I have already with the orzo, add a little bit more lemon and cheese on top and do the breadcrumbs that are in the recipe with just a quick breadcrumb topping. And then you have kind of a caramelized zucchini orzo.
But the structure of the recipe stays the same. I think so much of what makes good vegetarian cooking great is leaning into the seasons and not thinking of recipes so much as a mandate, but a suggestion and the way to think about substitutions and swaps. You really just need to think about, is this vegetable like this other vegetable? And by that I mean, is it similarly textured? Is it similarly starchy? Is it similarly leafy? Is it going to take roughly the same amount of time to cook? Does it have a similar water content?
So if you’re trying to swap zucchini, which has a lot of water in it, or tomatoes have a lot of water in it, you’re not going to swap that maybe for sweet potato in some recipes. This type of vegetable, cook it this long. For this type of vegetable, cook it this long. And once you become more comfortable thinking of vegetables as vegetables as categories and not, “Oh, I don’t have green beans, so I can’t make this green bean recipe,” I think it becomes a little bit more easy to then look at recipes as the format.
ROSIE: I have an allergy to peanuts, tree nuts. So when I was a vegetarian, that was really challenging for me. I think maybe now, again, there’s more resources, there’s more access to information on how to swap and substitute and leave stuff out. But how did you think about that when you’re approaching the book? Because I think that is a thing that comes up, nuts or other dietary restrictions.
TANYA: I think this is something that I think about a lot, both with the book, but also with the newsletter because… And I think a lot of people don’t want to hear this. Sometimes it’s just not the right recipe. I often see these kinds of comments on social media where it’s like a bean dish and the person is saying, “I don’t like beans. What do I do?” Well, you know what? You actually just don’t make this dish.
ROSIE: Make pancakes.
TANYA: But there are ways to say, “Okay, what about this recipe do I like? Is it that it’s one pan? Is it that there’s chili crisp in it or there’s herbs?” I’m going to look for that in other recipes. Now, to your point about nut allergies, obviously that is more than preference. And so I think it depends on the dish, but if you’re talking about nuts as a garnish, well, what the recipe developer is trying to do is introduce crunch or textural variety. And so I might just look for some other crunchy element, crunchy onions or breadcrumbs.
In the instance of butters, nut butters, right? If it’s acting as a binder for something, you might want to try blended silk and tofu. It’s trying to think about what is this ingredient trying to do and what other things exist out there that can maybe do the same thing with some tweaking or seasoning or whatever.
ROSIE: And if the answer is nothing, then maybe making something else.
TANYA: Yeah. If the answer is nothing, then maybe make something else.
ROSIE: Before we wrap, we always like to ask our guests one final question, which is, what is the last thing you bought that you really love?
TANYA: So I just went through a breakup.
CHRISTINE: Oh, I’m sorry.
ROSIE: Sorry.
TANYA: No, it’s so fine. And the guy I was seeing had a pair of pants that I was obsessed with. I would borrow the pants all the time. And they’re this Japanese brand called Kapital that you can’t easily get in the US and is also extremely expensive. And I found them on Depop.
ROSIE: Oh, nice.
TANYA: Long story short, I think he was going to get them for me for my birthday and I broke up with him the day before my birthday, so he didn’t get me the pants. But guess what? As Cher said, “Mama, I am a rich man.” I bought myself those pants.
ROSIE: Yeah, girl.
TANYA: And I’m absolutely thrilled to have these fancy-schmancy pants.
CHRISTINE: This is great. Next time you’re coming in those pants, okay?
TANYA: Absolutely. Absolutely.
ROSIE: See you next year in those pants.
CHRISTINE: All right. Well, Tanya is a delight and we learned so many things. I loved everything she had to say.
ROSIE: She’s the best.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. I am excited to cook from this book. What are you taking away today?
ROSIE: I am taking away excitement for the book. And I think also this idea of building a pantry with things that I can reach for, for any number of dishes. I think the other thing is adjusting my brain to think about the vessels. You have your leftovers, you have your veg, whatever you have, what could this become? Could I throw it into a pasta? Could I make a pancake? Could I make a frittata? Having an idea of what it could become, I think opens it up for me.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, I loved that. I love how she presented it kind of like frameworks that you could sub in things and I think that’s awesome. And the pantry item that she mentioned that I had completely forgotten about that I am going to run out and get immediately is the fried shallots, the big vat of fried shallots.
ROSIE: Oh, yeah.
CHRISTINE: I had forgotten how awesome those are and they’re great sprinkled over all sorts of things. So I am excited to cook from the book and also just integrate those into salads and pastas and all sorts of things this fall.
ROSIE: Love it. That’s it for us. Our guest was Tanya Sichynsky. She is the author of the newsletter, The Veggie and the brand new cookbook, Veg Everything that’s out today. Thank you so much for joining us. Talk to you next time.
CHRISTINE: Bye.
ROSIE: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddie Masiello and Nick Pitman. Today’s episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, Rowan Niemisto, Catherine Anderson and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is Wirecutter’s deputy publisher and general manager. Ben Freeman is Wirecutter’s editor-in-chief.
CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.
ROSIE: And I’m Rosie Guerin. Thank you for listening.
TANYA: I can’t believe I hard launched my breakup with a pair of pants.
CHRISTINE: No, I love that story.
ROSIE: I’m gonna look up… its Kapital?
TANYA: It’s the Kapital ripstop cargo pants.
