Vegetable Kingdom: The Abundant World of Vegan Recipes

"This is Bryant Terry’s fourth solo cookbook. He is really great and he’s plant-based. Bryant is extremely good with flavors. They’re really punchy. We ran a recipe for spinach salad with blackened chickpeas. You use this Cajun blackening spice that is amazing. He’s doing things you wouldn’t think to do with vegetables. He’s not someone who wants a vegetable to replicate the experience of meat. He does these dried, dehydrated mushrooms, which a lot of people would call ‘mushroom bacon’ but he refuses to call it mushroom bacon. For him, it is what it is. He’s African American and his wife is Chinese American. There’s this great eclecticism, pulling from different parts of both of their cultures. He talks about using recipes inspired by the African diaspora and there’s a lot of Asian flavors in there, too. They are not necessarily really delicate little recipes. These are vegetable dishes that you can eat with a knife and a fork that will be satisfying for what they are. They’re not pretending to be anything. He doesn’t like those tropes where you cook ‘cauliflower rice’—his attitude is, that’s not rice, just get over it! There’s a sweet way he breaks out the book. He said it was inspired by his daughter in her gardening class at school. It’s divided into seeds, bulbs, stems, flowers, fruits, leaves, fungi, tubers and roots. Those are the categories and each chapter starts out with an easier recipe to get you comfortable with a technique like tempura frying, or something like that, and then he has a bunch of other ones. “He’s doing things you wouldn’t think to do with vegetables” Each chapter, as with some of his previous books, includes recommendations for music to listen to while you’re making it, or that he was listening to when he made it. He cites Dr Jessica B. Harris , another cookbook author, as his inspiration for doing that. It’s fun and really clever stuff. He did this recipe with yard-long beans, which are a pretty popular Asian food. And one of the garnishes in there was just grated roasted peanuts. You take the peanuts and you grate them on a microplane zester. And I thought, ‘why have I never done that?’ That’s a great way to add flavor to the top, if you don’t want crunchy pieces of peanuts. He also has a lot of practical tips embedded in a lot of the recipes, things like how to make vegetable purées or tips on canning and pickling. And at the end he has this cupboard section of a lot of kind of pantry staples that you could just keep around to add flavour, or vegan staples like cashew cream, which is used a lot for dairy, plus flavored oils and vinegars. There’s definitely a lot in there and I kept on thinking, ‘Oh, I want to make that’. Yes. We have made dishes out of all these things, so I can tell you that there’s a lot to like. He actually addresses this in the introduction to the book. There are lots of dishes—sides and lighter things—which he says you can make in 30 minutes. Then there are also the more in-depth recipes that maybe you’d want to do on a weekend. There are standard things like a squash soup, where you just cook some aromatics and throw in some squash and simmer it and puree it. And then there are more involved ones, like jerk tofu in collard wraps, which involves marinating and frying the tofu. Wherever you are, you can hop in here and find something to make."