Bell Pepper

Piled high with embellishments, this pizza is a good one for hearty appetites.

I’d love to be able to buy a good vegan pesto sauce for those times when I’m too lazy to make one, but so far, I haven’t found a brand that doesn’t contain cheese. No matter, once you get going, pesto is easy to make, and the one used on this pizza packs a nutritional punch with spinach. This pizza makes a splendid way to get lots of greens in one shot.

The time for this recipe may stretch to forty minutes or so, due to preheating the oven and roasting the vegetables, but it’s one of my favorites, and I think it’s worth that tiny bit of extra time. I hope you will, too.

Here’s one of my favorite uses for a terrific product, Tofurky sausage. The bold flavor is used to full advantage in this hearty Creole-flavored pasta dish. If you have more time, make a pan of vegan corn bread, it’s a wonderful addition to this meal.

Chow fun is indeed fun chow when you’re in the mood for tasty Asian-style fare.

Characteristic of some Southeast Asian cuisines is the overlapping of Asian and Indian influences. This is true of this pleasantly offbeat noodle dish, which is seasoned with both soy sauce and curry.

Colorful and luscious, this Thai restaurant classic can easily be made at home.

This is an easy dish to make, and the results are splendid. Using quick-cooking rice, you can have a magnificent one-dish meal in about thirty minutes, whether for a busy weeknight or a leisurely weekend meal.

A classic Spanish dish, this is a great choice when you want something easy and hearty. Briny olives perk up the mellow flavor of brown rice and beans.

If you’re looking for an undemanding tempeh dish that makes a large quantity, here’s a good choice.

Slender green beans, slivered tempeh, and colorful bell pepper make for a tasty trio. The time-saver here is the use of frozen organic baby green beans, available in most any natural foods store and many supermarkets. If you have more time, do use fresh slender green beans, by all means, when they make their rare appearance at your local market.

Years ago, on a trip to the Southwest, my husband and I (then vegetarians, not yet vegans) discovered the famous breakfast dish of the region and were quickly hooked. Huevos rancheros are scrambled eggs perched atop corn tortillas and topped with an incendiary sauce. It’s easy to veganize this classic, as I’ve done here. Like the next recipe, this can be served for breakfast, brunch, lunch, or dinner.

Offering an attractive presentation of steamed fresh veggies, this is a nice change of pace from stir-fries. It’s a fresh-tasting meal that gets its personality from a luscious sauce.

Serving tofu and veggies kebab-style is festive, but firing up the grill, marinating the ingredients, and soaking the bamboo skewers (so they don’t ignite) can be time-consuming. And most people don’t own a stovetop grill. Here’s a shortcut method that circumvents all those steps, made right on an ordinary griddle.

Common to many regional Middle Eastern cuisines, this is one of those supersimple dishes that, with the right ingredients, is amazingly tasty. Especially welcome as a fast summer dish, this is a good showcase for the abundance of delicious tomatoes in season. Shakshouka, in its original version, is made with eggs; in this vegan rendition, only one change needs to be made—silken tofu replaces the eggs.

This Asian-style soup is ideal when you’re in a hurry. It can be on the table in about twenty minutes.

It’s not so important which vegetables you use in these colorful, nutritious tarts—rather, that there is a seasonal bounty. Here, eggplant, red onion, zucchini, yellow squash, cherry tomatoes, kale, and red bell peppers fill cornmeal crusts, but you could easily use green beans, corn, or mushrooms. The crust is light and crisp, with less butter than many pastry doughs. To make free-form versions, spoon filling onto center of each dough round, and fold the edges inward. Serve each tartlet with a dollop of fresh ricotta cheese, if desired. Add a green salad to balance out a healthy lunch.

Marinated peppers paired with potatoes is another star addition to an antipasto platter, and is equally brilliant served alongside The Spaniard (page 14). This dish will hold for up to three days in the refrigerator and tends to taste better when the potatoes have time to absorb the marinade. If you do prepare it in advance, make sure you bring it up to room temperature before serving.

Nowadays, dolmas are standard fare throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Caucasus. But it is interesting to ponder how they became so in ancient lands that never had New World ingredients until seafarers carried them to the Old World on their return journeys. To complicate the story, they put ashore in Atlantic ports, so it was still a long trek to get to the eastern Mediterranean. Nonetheless, they did, once again demonstrating the scope and power of food as a pathway of global interconnections. Adding a bed of potatoes as infrastructure in this dolma is a particularly Greek touch, and a good one. The potatoes soak up the juices rendered as the vegetables cook and collapse into them, making a crude sauce on the bottom of the dish. I prefer green bell peppers, but it seems these days red bells are equally, if not more, favored, so I make a mix of them, including some yellow and orange ones that add sunny color to the array.

Season: Late summer to autumn. The beauty of this recipe is that it is so very simple. Moreover, you can turn up the heat or cool it down to suit your mood by the variety of the chile pepper you use. In the late summer and autumn, look for hot fruity habaneros, rich mild poblanos, tiny hot Thai chiles, or flaming jalapeños to use in this sizzling jelly relish. I like to use red bell peppers, as they are symbolic of the heat, but, of course, there’s no reason why you can’t use yellow, orange, or green, or a mixture of all four. Use this punchy jelly with cream cheese, smoked mackerel, rice dishes, and crispy stir-fried vegetables.