THE MOOSEWOOD RESTAURANT TABLE 250 Brand-New Recipes from the Natural Foods Restaurant That Revolutionized Eating in America THE MOOSEWOOD COLLECTIVE Food Photography by Al Karevy | Food Styling by Patti Harville Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page Thank you for buying this St. Martin’s Press ebook. To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters. Or visit us online at us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup For email updates on the author, click here. The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. INTRODUCTION Fourteen books and forty-four years ago, The Vegetable Kingdom, Inc., our founders, brought forth on this land of the Cayuga Nation a new eatery, Moosewood Restaurant, conceived in counterculture idealism and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created hungry and endowed with an innate appetite for real, wholesome, luscious food, and that the people who grow our food, cook our food, and serve our food shall be treated with dignity on this earth. Now we’re engaged in a great food revolution, testing whether that notion or any eatery so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We weren’t the first natural foods restaurant to put the emphasis on natural, plant-based food, and we certainly won’t be the last, but Moosewood Restaurant and its cookbooks have influenced how and what a lot of people prefer to eat today—fresh food that travels directly from the garden and the farm to the table and the fork. Somewhere between the farm and your fork is where our recipes, no-nonsense cookery, and a love of culinary adventure fit in. We’ve never aspired to haute cuisine; everything we’ve ever cooked up is well within your reach. And yeah, we’re still cooking after all these years. Welcome to our table! Many of us believe that fresh, nutritious food is a human right, and we work to support childhood nutrition and family farms, increase the number of local growers, see agricultural workers make a living wage, turn food deserts into oases with community gardens and regionally sourced foods, and make healthy food affordable and accessible to all people. People are still uncertain about what to call our restaurant’s cuisine. Is it vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian? The answer is yes, and we’ve published recipes in all of those categories. Is there any orthodoxy here? Without adherence to any doctrine or ideology, we leave the preparation of meat and poultry to other establishments and writers. We decided that this book should focus on what we do best—using our creativity in the vegetable kingdom. So, going back to our roots and the type of food that has made us famous, this is a book of 250 new vegetarian and vegan recipes drawing on multiple ethnic influences. Chapters organize everything into familiar categories: appetizers, dips and spreads, soups, salads, sandwiches, snacks, sides, entrées, sweets, and extras. There are tips and information in the sidebars accompanying some recipes. We develop recipes for our cookbooks outside the restaurant to make sure they work without the backup of a commercial kitchen. So the Moosewood table extends onto our personal kitchen tables. Before long, every horizontal kitchen surface is covered with competing versions of multiple recipes! Our goal is to make yours the next Moosewood table, maybe a little tidier. One of our talents, apparently, is to devise vegetarian meals that non- vegetarians like enough that they don’t miss the meat. That’s also how we approach vegan and gluten-free dishes now—we make them tasty and satisfying enough that most folks won’t miss the cheese, or eggs, or wheat flour. Throughout the chapters, we have included a substantial number of vegan and gluten-free vegetarian recipes that can be enjoyed by everyone at the table. Many other recipes can be made vegan by omitting a dairy product or can be made gluten-free with simple substitutions. Is Moosewood Restaurant a health-food joint? Some people certainly think so when they see fresh-squeezed juices and all the vegetables, herbs, legumes, greens, whole grains, nuts, and tofu we use. We serve folks with a sweet tooth who won’t touch sugar. We serve customers who can’t consume tree nuts, groundnuts, gluten, any food with meat, any food with wheat, any food that’s white, anything with fat, oils, eggs, lactose, glucose, fructose, fish, corn, canola, capsicum, nightshades, nitrates, sugar, honey, hominy, citrus, seeds, shellfish, sulfites, soy, wine, beer, or booze. But they still find things to eat at the Moosewood table. We’ve gotten to know our customers and readers pretty well by now. Their tastes and expectations, their curiosity and culinary IQ have grown exponentially and, like us, they don’t want to be bored with their food. So, we went on a few adventures while we were developing this book. We’ve used many new and rediscovered ingredients, tried new combinations, spices, and condiments, and explored a couple of cuisines that are relatively new to us. We dove into working with some less common fruits and vegetables that you might find in your CSA or at the farmers’ market: fascinatingly fractal romanesco broccoli, fresh fennel, jicama, watermelon radishes, broccoli rabe, rutabaga, garlic greens, garlic scapes, golden beets, celeriac; fresh shiitake, oyster, enoki, and other mushrooms; microgreens and power greens; heirloom vegetables and fruits, especially apples, carrots, tomatoes. We’ve gotten more familiar with grains like freekeh, farro, black rice, red rice, millet, red quinoa, flax, and chia seeds. Even though the market has exploded with enticing condiments and seasonings, or maybe because of it (we want to improve on what we can buy), we’ve experimented with mixing up our own versions of favorite blends, such as za’atar, preserved lemons, harissa, and chermoula sauce; our own garam masala and spice rub; and our own gluten-free flour mix. We have some new takes on familiar traditional dishes, such as our Nori Rolls with Kale, Burmese Tohu Thoke with tamarind, vegetarian Banh Mi, Cuban Picadillo with tofu, Pasta Carbonara with zucchini and smoked cheese, Spicy Filo Samosas, Butternut Squash Latkes, Power Pesto, Pozole Verde, Sweet Potato Gnocchi, Walnut-Cheddar-Herb “Meatballs,” Ethiopian Greens, and Jamaican Jerk Tempeh Patties. In case you still think we’re just a health-food joint, check out recipes for baked goods from Bialys to Apricot Frangipane Tart, and a gluten-free version of a family favorite, Erma Mabel’s Fresh Rhubarb Cake. Whether making food for you, your family, or your friends, cooking at home is self-affirming and empowering on many levels. Among arts and crafts, cooking with wholesome, intriguing ingredients is one of the most emotionally and physically satisfying of creative activities, harnessing all of our senses and intuition. It’s not just about filling up the void; being in relationship with the character, sound, color, and aroma of your ingredients, the tasks, the timing, the temperatures, the tools of your trade, and navigating the turf of a kitchen can be as engrossing as carving wood, painting from life, or soloing on your sax. You may read the chart, but you can always improvise or riff on a variation. Recipes are only guidelines. HOW HOT FOR HOW LONG? How long it takes to cook, sauté, bake, or roast depends on the size, shape, material, and weight of your pan, the exact temperature, pattern, and source of your heat, and how hot your burner is when you turn it to medium-high (whatever you think medium-high is). Cook the onions on medium heat until translucent, about 5 minutes—but getting to translucence might take 10 minutes or 4 minutes, depending on the pan and stovetop you use. The only place that cooking times can be expected to pretty well match your experience is when boiling and steaming something. Boiling is boiling, but there are still variables—how tender is your kale, how big did you cut the potatoes? How long the liquid takes to come to a boil depends on the size of the pot, the altitude, the size of the burner, and, of course, whether you’re watching that pot. Even the time it takes to “purée until smooth” depends on how sharp and fast your blender/food processor blade is, plus the shape of the container. So use what you know about your stovetop and your oven. Use your nose, cool your jets, cook with love, and use the Force. BREAKFAST & BRUNCH