Madison - Vegetarian suppers from Deborah Madisons kitchen

Also by Deborah Madison

The Greens Cookbook

The Savory Way

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

This Cant Be Tofu!

Local Flavors

All Rights Reserved

A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 2005 by Broadway Books.

Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Previously published by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2006

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

Book design by Elizabeth Rendfleisch
Photographs by Laurie Smith

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Madison, Deborah.
Vegetarian suppers from Deborah Madisons kitchen / Deborah Madison.
p. cm.
1. Vegetarian cookery. 2. Suppers. I. Title.

TX837.M2355 2005
641.5636dc22

2004045899

eISBN: 978-0-307-95621-7

v3.1_r1

For Doe,
who always puts supper
on her table

For Patrick McFarlin, many kisses and a great big rib eye for considerable patience with supper recipes that didnt always work out the first time and for your evermore honest critiques.

The pictures would not have been made without a wonderful team of talented friends. Thank you allLaurie Smith for your beautiful photographs and ever-cheerful disposition, the altogether fabulous Marja Martin for taking over on the styling front, Kathi Long for your beautiful knife work, and Kimberly Sweet for your excellent support in the kitchen. Without such a team, there would be no pictures. And without the generous support of Judith Espinar and the Clay Angel staff, we wouldnt have all those pretty dishes in the pictures either.

Greg OByrne, friend, neighbor, producer of the Santa Fe Wine and Chile Fiesta, and generous sharer of food and wine, provided the wine notes. Certainly people are as individual about wine pairings as they are about food, but Ive always found Gregs wine sensibility a good fit with my food. While I always enjoy his wine choices, hes much better on the specifics than I am, and I am grateful to him for his thoughtful notes and years of experience drinking wine with food.

There are many cooks, writers, and food experts who have in one way or another helped in the creation of the suppers, through the inspiration that has come from their kitchens and their writingsNeelam Batra, Anne Bianchi, Nancy Harmon Jenkins, Evan Kleinman, Greg OByrne, Richard Olney, Nathalie Waag, Alice Waters, and Laura Werlin. Thank you all for your inspiration.

And of course there wouldnt be books without the belief and support of a publisher, an editor, and an agent. Thank you, Stephen Rubin and Jennifer Josephy, for the challenge of creating 101-plus vegetarian suppers that are worth their salt. And, as always, my gratitude to Doe Coover for representing me with such passionate conviction.

Finally, I would like to thank my readers who have written, called, and otherwise introduced yourselves to me over the years. I can truly say that these recipes are written for you.

i love supper. Its friendly and relaxed. Its easy to invite people over for supper, for theres a quality of comfort that isnt always there with dinner, a meal that suggests more serious culinary expectationstruly a joy to meet, but not all the time. Supper, on the other hand, is for when friends happen to run into each other at the farmers market or drop in from out of town. Supper is for Sunday night or a Thursday. Supper can be impromptu, it can be pot luck, and it can break the formality of a classic menu. With supper, theres a willingness to make do with whats available and to cook and eat simply. It can also be special and beautifully crafted if thats what you want.

This collection of supper recipes is, for the most part, for straightforward weeknight and weekend dishes that are made from authentic, seasonal foods with flavors to match. More than just dishes, these are really recipes for menus . A far cry from those fifteen-minute meals that taste of the brand of tomato sauce youve used, these recipes sometimes look long, consisting as they do of two or three elementssquares of grilled polenta, the greens and beans, and a luxurious little Gorgonzola sauce, for example. Its not unlike having meat with a starch and a vegetable. We dont usually eat just one thing for supper, but a small constellation of foods. As you become familiar with this collection of recipes and the dozen suggestions for making supper good, enjoyable, and altogether possible, youll see that they come together with fair ease.

Whats been helpful to me in thinking about suppers is not so much the use of short cuts and prepared foods, although leftovers are certainly a boon, but rethinking what the last meal of the day looks like. Im happy to saut some spinach, pile it on a rustic piece of toast, drink a friendly little wine, and call that supper.

Supper can be a sandwich. It can be an omelet, eggs baked over smoky-scented potatoes, or tofu simmered in a spicy coconut milk sauce. On a hot summers night, supper might consist of a collection of many little appetizers or grilled vegetables with their sauces. On a chilly winter evening, it might well be macaroni and cheese or plump parcels of stuffed cabbage leaves. Sometimes, for my husband and me, supper might be as simple as a roasted sweet potato and a salad.

Ive long wanted to put together a collection of vegetarian supper dishes, because after teaching others and observing my own moments of consternation in the kitchen, Im convinced that coming up with a vegetarian main dish is a big challenge for people. If you cook vegetarian all the time, its not so hard, of course, because its a habit. But if youre a vegophile like meyou love vegetables and cook vegetarian most of the time, but you also cook fish, an occasional rib eye, or a roast chickenits harder because you have to shift gears and mentally start from scratch each time. Why? Because fish, meat, and fowl are the ingrained answer to the question Whats for supper? For most of us, its not quite second nature to answer the question with fennel, potatoes, lentils, or a dish like a vegetable flan.

Speaking of flans, Laura Calder, in her charming book French Food at Home , writes, I place [the vegetable flan] in the category of main dishes because it also makes an interesting, attractive supper for nights when Ive had it up to the eyeballs with meat. So heres a clue about where to look for vegetarian main dishes and how to think about supper. Those main dishes are hiding right among the first courses in most cookbooks and restaurant menus. Not only vegetarians are delighted by the tasty, small items that begin so many meals; lots of diners like to put a few of them together and call them dinner. Ive learned through years of cooking vegetarian food that, with some tweaking, these firsts and sides can assume center position on a menu. In fact, the recipes in this book not only serve as main dishes but also can be deconstructed to serve well as first courses or as side dishes to a meat entree, and many of them can be paired to make a more complex main dish. This allows for everyonevegetarian, vegan, carnivore, and omnivoreto eat happily at the same table.