Rainbow vegetable bowl
Welcome to To Vegetables, With Love, a celebration of a vegetable life, less ordinary. Find archived recipes on my new recipe index.
My book Tenderheart is available from Books are Magic, Kitchen, Arts and Letters, Book Larder, Bold Fork Books and also here or here.
It’s almost Mother’s Day! Here’s a 20% off annual memberships to celebrate all the mums and moms out there.
I was in Columbia, Missouri last weekend to speak at the Unbound Book Festival. I was lucky to share the space with two incredible, compelling storytellers - Stacey Mei Yan Fong and Crystal Wilkinson (check out their excellent books here and here). Our panel was titled Kitchen Traditions Old and New, and featured a discussion about food as a lens to tell family and personal stories. At the end of talk, there was an audience question which asked for our thoughts about the “farm to table” movement, spearheaded by Dan Barber and his restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and the importance of eating seasonal, local farm produce.
About here, I will pause, and ask you to listen to a reading of an essay that I wrote for the introduction pages of my latest book TENDERHEART:
This is a topic very close to my heart. I have lived both sides of this story.
When my father was still alive, we only ate market produce. He worked at one of the largest fresh produce markets in the Southern Hemisphere and every day, he brought home the freshest, the ripest, the best in season. But after he passed I experienced a different approach to accessing food. My mother, as a non-English-speaking immigrant, was not able to provide us with the same hyper seasonal market fruits and vegetables. She took buses and trains to shop at Chinese grocery stores when she could, but most of the time she relied on my uncle to drive her to the local supermarket once a week. I saw her continue to create beautiful, wholesome, comforting meals with what she picked up from there. Did I notice a difference in the types of food we were eating? Honestly, yes. But was it still delicious and nourishing? Absolutely YES.
My aim in TENDERHEART, this newsletter, and in all my editorial work, is to show that eating well, eating healthily, eating vegetables, is more than just about “farm to table” “slow food” “local and sustainable”. It is about giving ourselves permission to do whatever we need to do to feed our families, friends and, importantly, ourselves, well. Guilt-free.
Even though vegetables are my muse, my ethos is firmly grounded in showing home cooks how to create delicious dishes, surprising flavours, and lasting memories with everyday vegetables, without a focus on where you bought your food.
I will add this though: supporting farmers and local food ways is important. Many years ago, when we left Australia en route to New York, we spent a month in the south of France during the off-season. We didn’t do much – we played cards with the kids, went for walks along the canal and fed bread to the ducks when we probably shouldn’t have. And twice a week, we shopped for ingredients at the local farmers market which was the town’s main source of produce. It was eye-opening to see how lucky some are to have this easy access to locally grown produce, to know their farmers, cheese makers and olive growers, to be connected to where their food comes from. The experience also amplified what some people have and what others have not; it felt like a huge travesty that anyone should live without their own local farmers market. It made me more determined to show home cooks how they too can create bountiful vegetable-laden meals even if they don’t have their own market close by.
On this topic,
shared her insightful thoughts on seasonality in her newsletter this week. Read it here.I shared these words today because I always think it’s important to present a different point of view. And it’s only when we open our ears and listen, that we can fully appreciate and understand why the world is the way it is. That we can step back from judgement and respect the experience of those who have walked a different path. In the world we are living in, this is more important than ever. And I may not be speaking about just vegetables here.
That is the end of my diatribe.
In theme with my thoughts above, I am sharing a recipe that is very simple but is a blueprint for a vegetable bowl made not with hyper seasonal vegetables but with ones that you can get all year round – kale, broccoli and carrot. In fact, you probably have these ingredients in your fridge right now.
Obviously this recipe is highly adaptable so use whatever vegetables you have on hand. The important thing is to remember to incorporate different textures and flavors. I start with store bought hummus; before you all tell me that homemade hummus is better (I agree), I also think store bought is just fine and it is something we always have in the house for after school snack. Needless to say, opt for a good brand of hummus - my favourite right now is this one. I dress the hummus up with fresh herbs and lemon and then it’s ready. The carrots are roasted with harissa flakes but you could use any spice blend to add some contrast. Kale could be substituted with fresh leaves. The textural topping is important too. My initial plan was to top with dukkah but I was out of that so I used everything bagel spice instead. I will be making iterations of this bowl for the months ahead.
COOK / EAT / SHARE
In The New York Times newsletter this week, Mia Leimkuhler said:
“Hetty Lui McKinnon” is shorthand for “excellent vegetarian recipes” in my mind; her tom yum soup with tofu and vermicelli is a fine example. It’s wildly flavorful: sour from the lime juice, spicy from the ginger and sambal oelek, verdantly citrusy from the lemongrass and rounded out with silken tofu and optional evaporated (or coconut) milk. Several readers tucked shredded roast or rotisserie chicken into their soup, an excellent idea for adding a bit of heft.”
This is one of my daughter’s favourite recipes - I’m making it this week, so maybe you’d like to also.
Speaking of soupy meals, in Australia, it’s gradually moving into soup season. ABC Everyday shared some warming soup recipes this week and one of them was my vegetable and tortellini soup. It’s lovely to be reminded of my own recipes…and solve my own ‘what to cook for dinner’ quandaries LOL
This stir-fried lettuce with crispy garlic and fried eggs could be an easy midweek meal too. Serve with rice, of course. Or how about honey-glazed mushrooms with udon?
Do you enjoy cookbook clubs? There are lots around the web and in real life too. One of the bigger and more popular ones is the Food52 Cookbook Club and Tenderheart is their 2024 Bonus book. Read about some of the recipes the members have been cooking and get the recipe for my carrot peanut satay ramen from the carrot chapter of the book. Also, it’s not too late to join if you want to share your creations from Tenderheart (or their other cookbook club picks).
Also, for ABC Radio National listeners in Australia, I am a Jonathan Green stan so I was thrilled to speak with him again recently about my last supper. Listen here.
THIS WEEK’S RECIPE
Rainbow vegetable bowl
© Hetty Lui McKinnon for To Vegetables, With Love
Serves 4
2 small heads (580g / 20-ounces) broccoli, cut into florets
4 carrots (400g / 14 ounces), peeled and cut into 2-3cm / 1-inch chunks
extra virgin olive oil
sea salt and pepper
1 teaspoon harissa flakes, or other spice blend such as ras el hanout, baharat, shawarma
4 cups (120g) kale leaves (about 1/2 bunch)
285g / 10-ounces store bought hummus
1/2 cup chopped soft herbs such as dill, mint, parsley, coriander (cilantro)
1 lemon, halved
3-4 cups cooked quinoa, brown rice, black rice or lentils
Everything spice blend, dukkah, furikake, toasted sesame seeds or chopped nuts, to top
Preheat oven to 220˚C / 425˚F. Place the carrots on one side of a sheet pan (baking tray) and the broccoli on the other. Drizzle both with olive oil and season both with salt and pepper. Scatter the harissa flakes (or spice blend) over the carrots and toss them to coat. Toss the broccoli to coat. Place in the oven and roast until the vegetables are tender and golden around the edges - the broccoli will take around 15 minutes remove that first whereas the carrots will take closer to 20-25 minutes.
Meanwhile, place the kale leaves into a large bowl. Drizzle with olive oil and add a little sea salt. Massage the leaves vigorously for 30 -60 seconds to tenderize them.
Scoop the hummus into a bowl. Add the herbs, and squeeze in the juice of 1/2 lemon. Stir to combine.
Set out 4 shallow bowls. Place a large dollop of hummus into each bowl and smear it across the bottom and sides. Top with 3/4-1 cup of quinoa, brown rice, black rice or lentils, and then divide the kale, carrot, and broccoli between the bowls. To finish, season with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil, squeeze over a little lemon juice and finish with a scatter of everything spice blend, dukkah, furikake, or toasted sesame seeds/nuts.
If you’re looking for a newsletter recipe, see my Substack recipe archive here. For recipes with a 🔒 symbol, you will need a paid subscription. Everything else is free.
🥦 My cookbook, Tenderheart is for cooking vegetables, all year round. Pick up your copy here. It is also mostly vegan (or vegan-izable) and gluten-free adaptable.
Very glad you shared your thoughts on seasonality and access to local produce — the way we shop depends so much on where we live, how we get around, what is available, and what we can afford, that it can be easy for some of us to feel like quality, seasonal produce is a luxury that just isn’t accessible to us. My background in public health makes me view this very much through a systems and equity lens, and the solution in my mind would be policy-based, but until governments can ensure that all members of society have the opportunity to easily access affordable, available, and attractive produce grown by producers in their local, regional, or national area, I do believe that highly seasonal eating will remain a privilege for some and a near-impossibility for many (on a more personal note, since moving from France back to Norway where farmers markets don’t exist, finding seasonal produce has become the bane of my days!).
First of all, thank you for the mention, and for sharing my latest newsletter.
Then, I absolutely agree with everything you say here, and I dare say it completes my thoughts.
I'm one of the lucky people who can access a weekly market, and I visit it very often with my cooking class students, I love to show them what is in season and what it tastes like when it has been picked in the morning. Then, we also buy those more common vegetables that can be present on market stalls and supermarket aisles all year around, to show them how you can get the most out of them.
The concept of seasonality is important, but it should never be judgmental or dogmatic (nothing about food should be judgmental or dogmatic!).
The way you present vegetables in your recipes is the highest praise to these ingredients: I've tried countless recipes from your newsletter and from the NYT Cooking, and every time you make me fall in love a bit more with vegetables.