Vegetables

On a blustery evening, a pot full of well-seasoned vegetables is a satisfying meal. This saucy curry includes chunks of potato, squash, cauliflower, carrots, and green beans, with a handful of chickpeas. What makes the dish delectable are the aromatics — onion, garlic, ginger, chile pepper, and plenty of warm spices. Yes, you can easily reach for a jar of curry powder, but the stew will taste fresher and brighter if you mix coriander, cumin, turmeric, and cinnamon to create a blend of your own. Heat the spices in oil so the flavors toast and mellow.

Dried chickpeas, soaked overnight, typically take less than 20 minutes to cook and have a dreamy texture. If you want to use canned chickpeas in this recipe, use two cans (about 16 ounces each). In the Andalucia region of Spain, writes Jeff Koehler in the book “Spain: Recipes and Traditions From the Verdant Hills of the Basque Country to the Coastal Waters of Andalucia,” spinach and stewed garbanzo beans (as they’re called there), are popular tapas fare. Traditionally, crusty bread is pounded with toasted garlic to make a paste, which is stirred into the dish.

Kathy Gunst says in 2014, vegetables will be the new meat. Gunst’s celery slaw is a recipe that has veggies front and center. (Kathy Gunst/Here & Now)

Kathy’s Note: Make the dish at least an hour before serving.

Serve this sauteed zucchini, turmeric, and yogurt dip as an appetizer with toasted pita or flatbread or as a sauce with kebabs.

Loving the flavor and look of Hasselback potatoes, I knew it wouldn't be long before I found myself grilling them again. This time around I went with a sweet potato rather than a russet since they're one of my favorite winter foods.

I kept the process exactly the same: slicing, washing, then jump starting the potato cooking process in the microwave. Then the partial cooked spuds were finished on the grill, where they fanned out and got crisp around the edges, while being soft and smooth on the inside.

Of all the Thanksgiving staples, I've never been able to get behind candied sweet potatoes. These orange tubers are one my favorite fall vegetables for their warming sweet flavor, and I can't understand why you'd want mask that sweetness with more sugar, and then top it off with marshmallows? In contrast, if I were doing a sweet potato dish, it'd be something more in line with this sweet potato and corn salad.

I was psyched about this recipe from the get-go. I have a growing affection for vegetarian Indian cuisine, and thought the pairing of sweet potato and eggplant couldn't possibly go wrong. This recipe also included a heartwarming little story of a guest bringing this meal over with a few roses for the author, Aum Shanti. I was so locked in that I didn't bother to read the specifics—and when the finished dish emerged, it was a perfectly dry mix of sautéed vegetables. It wasn't repulsive, but nothing was really there to bring it all together.

For our roasted smashed potatoes recipe, we chose Red Bliss potatoes for their moist texture and thin skin. Parcooking the potatoes on a baking sheet covered in foil on the oven’s bottom rack, with a splash of water in the pan, gave us creamy flesh that tasted sweet, deep, and earthy. Letting the hot potatoes rest after they parcooked meant they wouldn’t crumble apart when smashed, and drizzling the potatoes with olive oil before and after smashing them ensured that the oil reached every nook and cranny.

For a baba ghanoush recipe that would fulfill its potential as a dip full of redolent, smoky eggplant flavor and brightened with garlic and lemon juice, we grilled the eggplants directly over a hot fire until they were wrinkled and soft. To avoid watery texture and bitterness in our baba ghanoush recipe, we drained the flesh of excess fluid before combining it with flavor-enhancing ingredients. 

For potent garlic flavor in our grilled potato recipe, without bitterness or charring, we needed to introduce the potatoes to the garlic-oil mixture not once but three times. So in our final grilled potato recipe we brushed on the garlic mixture before cooking, after parcooking in the microwave, and after grilling.