“Is this where I can submit questions??”Such was the subject line of an email I received from Mia, a reader. And yes, it is! In the interest of a bit of much-needed inbox maintenance, it’s time for another Recipe Matchmaker. Your highly specific cooking dilemmas, my solutions. And don’t miss our “Veg Everything” book tour announcement below!
Three cabbages? You’re rich! Sadly, I won’t be able to get a new C.S.A. video up in time for Ema, but I’m pocketing this idea for next year. To hold you over, make Ham El-Waylly’s brown butter bucatini with charred cabbage, which uses up a whole head of the green stuff and requires only five more ingredients (as well as salt, pepper and oil). Cooking cabbage down with noodles is how I’ve been using up the multiple heads I also happen to have in my fridge, leftover from a recent video shoot. You could make Samantha Seneviratne’s creamy cabbage pastina or Hetty Lui McKinnon’s soy sauce noodles with cabbage and fried eggs. Hetty’s noodle okonomiyaki similarly plays with the noodle + cabbage = dinner formula, but in pancake form. If you’d rather keep things crunchy and fresh, get Melissa Clark’s cabbage Caesar salad (with capers instead of anchovies!) in the rotation, stat. Cabbage Caesar Salad
Time to wake up! I’m particularly moved by this pluot tomato salad with suya pistachio crunch, which Genevieve Ko recently adapted from the Los Angeles chef Keith Corbin. He layers a pistachio cream beneath tomatoes and fresh or lightly grilled stone fruit for a dish that feels so L.A. in the best way. Until I can hopefully try the restaurant version on the West Coast leg of my “Veg Everything” book tour (more on that below!), this recipe will hold me over. The combination of tomatoes and stone fruit is one you should continue to lean on for the next month or so. I recently made Christian Reynoso’s sweet and spicy summer fruit salad with tiny stone fruit and colorful cherry tomatoes, and it was a fun little surprise not knowing which I was about to bite into. And if you loved Ali’s combination of cooling dairy and tangy vinegared strawberries, don’t miss her stone fruit caprese, which is similarly balanced. Use juicy fruit in Alexa Weibel’s spicy tomato and nectarine salad, garnished with ricotta salata and thinly sliced jalapeño, and throw any slightly underripe ones in Kristina Felix’s seared peach and panela salad.
This seems like a great opportunity to play with the textural possibilities of tofu. Shred it for Nisha Vora’s super-savory grated tofu and incorporate that into all sorts of dishes. You can even treat her recipe as a template and play around with spices and seasonings, and then make shawarma-esque wraps (or pan-fry planks of tofu for Nisha’s crispy shawarma). But if that doesn’t speak to your kid, I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t like something bouncy and cheesy. How about Eric Kim’s cheesy cabbage tteokbokki (That’s a great one for cabbage-rich Ema, too!) or Zainab Shah’s saucy and luxurious butter paneer?
Such is the power of a marinade or a brine, as evident in Ali’s herb-marinated tofu and Kenji López-Alt’s marinated chickpeas. Kenji’s chickpeas are tangy with plenty of sherry vinegar, but I encourage you to play around with pantry ingredients you like to hit those briny notes — capers, perhaps? You need only water and salt to brine something, but there are ingredients with a built-in brine worth reusing on tofu especially: Think the juice in a jar of pickles, olive brine, the liquid of pickled peppers. You can marinate tofu in a combination of pickle juice, hot sauce and mustard and then fry it, as in Superiority Burger’s crispy fried tofu sandwich. Try making your own feta-like brine with water, salt and any other aromatics or herbs you like. I think lemon zest, dill and oregano would be a great place to start! Then treat your tofu like feta, crumbling it over dishes or tossing it with olive oil, lemon juice and fresh herbs.
Pluot-Tomato Salad With Suya Pistachio Crunch
Butter Paneer
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Chicken (Super Savory Grated Tofu)For a limited time, you can enjoy free access to the recipes in this newsletter in our app. Download it on your iOS or Android device and create a free account to get started. One More Thing!
When I say “Veg Everything,” that includes a city (hopefully) near you! I want to meet as many of you as possible this fall as we take this little veggie-loving enterprise on the road. You can get your tickets to any of our 10 events now! We’ll gab with some of our favorite food people, we’ll sign books, maybe we’ll even Recipe Matchmake live. And if you haven’t yet preordered your copy of our cookbook, you can pick one up at any of the tour venues. See you in Seattle; San Francisco; Portland, Ore.; Los Angeles; Darien, Conn.; Detroit; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; and Atlanta. And if not there, see you here next week. Email us at theveggie@nytimes.com. Newsletters are archived here. Reach out to my colleagues at cookingcare@nytimes.com if you have questions about your account.
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