A New Year’s Resolution?

I have cooked 12,000 dinners over 40 years. A number of them were meatless—sometimes due to health and sometimes due to budget. So I’m an experienced vegetarian cook, but I can’t use the V word or certain folks in the house would leave home. Today, I use less meat due to environmental reasons: according to the University of Michigan, food accounts for 10-30% of a household’s carbon emissions, and meats are estimated to generate 56% of them.

Here are some basics:

Lentils are your friend. They take 20 minutes to cook and can be used almost anywhere you would use ground beef (except for meatloaf). Lentils don’t have the umami that meat has, so be sure to add plenty of seasoning to your dish!

Tofu can be your friend. You just need to know how to work with it—simply cutting it up and throwing it into the pot rarely yields a pleasant result for American palates. You need to use firm tofu, squeeze as much moisture as you can out of it—press down with a dutch oven for example—and then you cut it into cubes. Now bread it with what you have on hand, or just use corn starch and sauté it—this will yield a slightly crunchy feel to the tofu, which works in American recipes.

Pan scrapings from cooking meat are flavor gold! The flavor essence of any meat is in the fat—for example, the “lamb-iest” lamb flavor is in the fat around the lamb chop. Same goes for chicken. So say one day I am browning chicken for a meal, I make sure to keep all the pan scrapings for the next day’s “meatless” meal—probably soup. I might sauté some onions and garlic in the drippings, add what is in the vegetable drawer and some beans, and voilà—another dinner is on the table! 

Typically, I stay away from expensive or unusual ingredients, but one I want to recommend is kombu: a sea vegetable. (It used to be seaweed but then it got better PR—the one that helped make kale a star—but that’s another story.) When starting with dry beans, it can be touch-and-go to make them get soft even after several hours of cooking. But adding kombu to the pot guarantees soft beans in a reasonable amount of time and it doesn’t affect the taste of the beans!

Let us know your tips in getting a vegetarian meal onto the table at environment@lwvchicago.org.