Salt and pepper tomato and corn salad
Choy Love Club is the paid subscriber area of To Vegetables, With Love…Everyone (free and paid) will see a preview of this newsletter but only paid subscribers will see the recipes. As always, thank you for being here.
This week, I present a tomato and corn change of pace. It adds another weapon to your summer cooking arsenal and encourages us to think outside of the usual ways we eat summer produce. It does require cooking, but those 3 minutes of high heat will give you juicy, syrupy tomatoes that will burst in your mouth, and corn that pops with sweetness. Flash frying is not new, it is a technique used regularly and often in Chinese cooking, and is a great way to effortlessly change the structure and texture of your tender vegetables. The rawness is muted but its seasonal freshness endures.
This week, I created my own shopfront on Bookshop.org, a handy one stop shop where you can find all my cookbooks (US ONLY). Bookshop.org is one of my preferred online retailers as it is powered by indie bookstores. I’ll be adding some of my favorite books to my store over the coming weeks.
Note, if you purchase from my link, I do earn a small commission.
Vegan and Gluten Free Recipes in TENDERHEART
This week, I received a few messages from people wondering about the amount of vegan and gluten free recipes in Tenderheart. I didn’t know the exact answer to this, so I got out my book, went through every recipe and created a tally (this was easy because each recipe is labeled vegan and/or gluten free if it is). The results surprised even myself. The number of recipes that are either vegan or gluten free, or veganizable or able to to made gluten-free are:
VEGAN - 166 recipes out of 180+ = 92%
GLUTEN FREE - 169 recipes out of 180+ = 94%
REVIEWS ARE LOVE ❤️ and they also help others find my book. Leave Tenderheart a review on Amazon by clicking this button. Thank you!
This week
Cook or don’t cook? New York City is a sweatbox this week, so I’m bringing you 3 of my no-cook recipes from NYT Cooking - all with gift links. There’s this delightful cucumber salad - you could make this heartier by tossing with cold soba noodles or eating with brown rice. This broccoli salad is a favourite - it keeps for several days in the fridge so its a good one to make at the beginning of the week; also great for gatherings. And of course, my dish-of-summer, cold silken tofu - I dress this up with leftover roasted veggies, pi dan (century egg), lots of herbs, and sometimes if I’m feeling lazy, I’ll just top it with soy sauce and chilli crisp. Another excellent cold tofu dish is this one from my Washington Post Plant Powered II newsletter - it’s a cold mapo tofu! Stay cool.
For those in in the Southern Hemisphere, I’ve got these four essential noodle soups to get your through the season. Stay warm.
And for those who don’t yet have Tenderheart, New York Times Cooking is giving you a sneak peek. They just published an excerpt from my book, 4 Easy Dishes That Embrace Everyday Vegetables, featuring 3 Tenderheart recipes - salt and vinegar kale chips with fried chickpeas and avocado, crispy potato tacos, cashew celery - along with one original recipe for soy-butter corn ramen. All perfect and easy weeknight friendly meals. Give them a go.
Read these two very different posts on two cult Substack newsletters. Firstly,
aka shares some touching words about Tenderheart (and some witty thoughts about people who don’t like vegetables), along with two recipes from the book. And then there is this interview that I did with for . This is one of the favourite interviews I’ve done recently, the questions were so well researched and both provocative and fun. Thank you to both Emily and Anne for sharing my work - this community is so supportive.Listen to my chat with
for her substack podcast series. We talked about being vegetarian in food media, DIY in mainstream publishing, the line between recipe development and cooking for my family, and much more. I really enjoyed talking to Alicia, whose newsletter I subscribe to and love reading every week. Alicia also has a book out later this year called No Meat Required about the cultural and culinary history of plant based eating in America. It’s available for pre-order now.