Vegetarian

Like air-fryer French fries, air-fryer sweet potatoes achieve similar success, utilizing less oil and requiring less time than deep-fried versions. While sweet potato fries won’t crisp up as much as their potato counterparts, that’s part of the appeal, offering textural contrast of creamy centers and charred tips. Oomph from any of your favorite spices would work well here, along with the paprika.

Crispy tofu is attainable without frying. In this mostly hands-off recipe, firm tofu is dredged in cornstarch (one of our pantry’s most versatile staples) before being baked at high temperature. The tofu becomes golden, with an enviable crunch that stays crisp even when drizzled with teriyaki sauce. Traditional teriyaki sauce contains just four ingredients — soy sauce, mirin, sake and sugar — but this one also has ginger and garlic, which add a bit more punch. In Japanese cuisine, teriyaki refers to any grilled, broiled or pan-fried food with a shiny glaze.

Here’s the thing about tabbouleh salad: Most of the ones I’ve had invert my preferred proportion of bulgur to parsley. What you usually get is a bowl of tabbouleh studded with bits of parsley. I like a salad that is mostly parsley, studded with grains of tabbouleh.

A hearty vegetarian dinner-in-a-bowl, farro is dressed in a lemony tahini sauce spiked with garlic, and topped with charred broccoli florets, thin slices of turnip or radish, and a soft-yolked egg. To streamline the cooking process here, the eggs are simmered in the same pot as the farro. But if you want to substitute leftover grains for the farro (brown or white rice, for example), cook the egg separately using the same timing. Or leave off the egg altogether for a vegan variation.

While diner-style Greek salads made with chopped romaine, crumbled feta and often grilled chicken have become ubiquitous in American restaurants, a traditional Greek salad, or horiatiki salata, is a simpler affair. An assembled salad of large-diced vegetables with Kalamata olives and sometimes capers, this salad has no greens at all, and the feta is served sliced on top of the salad rather than crumbled and tossed into it. A traditional Greek salad is dressed lightly with olive oil and red wine vinegar; this recipe adds garlic and oregano.

This is a lentil soup that defies expectations of what lentil soup can be. Based on a Turkish lentil soup, mercimek corbasi, it is light, spicy and a bold red color (no murky brown here): a revelatory dish that takes less than an hour to make. The cooking is painless. Sauté onion and garlic in oil, then stir in tomato paste, cumin and chile powder and cook a few minutes more to intensify flavor. Add broth, water, red lentils (which cook faster than their green or black counterparts) and diced carrot, and simmer for 30 minutes.

Simmering chopped onions in a generous amount of olive oil is a two-for-one deal: The onions go soft and sweet while the oil gets infused with deep flavor. While the onions sizzle and simmer, the lentils and farro boil together until al dente, keeping the dish a speedy weeknight option. This makes a great warm side dish or a satisfying make-ahead grain salad. (Leftovers keep for up to three days.) Red-pepper flakes add heat, and lemon peel provides floral sweetness; you could also add whole spices, capers or other additions, if you like.

Suya is a Nigerian street food of spiced, sliced meat that is threaded on skewers and grilled. We make our suya spice mix by processing peanuts, paprika, ginger, garlic, and a touch of brown sugar, then use it to add flavor and crunch to potatoes. We add a bit of oil and toss the mixture onto halved potatoes before roasting. A simple fresh tomato relish with chili and lime served on the side brightens up the dish.

The vegetables for Turkish turlu turlu are sometimes stewed, sometimes roasted; we chose the latter approach, as we’re fond of the browning and flavor concentration that results from cooking in the dry heat of the oven.

This wintry combination of carrots, parsnips, Brussels sprouts, and shallots starts on the stove top, covered for a portion of the time to facilitate cooking. Cast-iron skillets often do not have lids, so if needed, borrow one from a similarly sized pot or simply set a baking sheet on top. After a toss with butter and a savory-sweet mixture of umami-rich miso, ginger, and honey, the vegetables finish in a moderately hot oven, where the even heat renders them fully tender and nicely browned.