Kate Friedman - 5-Ingredient Vegan Cooking

Creator of
Herbivores Kitchen

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DEDICATION

To the 7th Street Gang. Thank you to Levi (10), Ellie (8), Avery (10), Eden (7), Ike (8) and Cy (7) for telling me that my kitchen always smells good; being diplomatic when my recipes are not the best, but not the worst either; stopping in the middle of a game of tag to try something new; being my hand models when asked; and rewarding me with an enthusiastic thumbs-up when I finally get it right.

Welcome! Im so grateful to you for inviting me into your homes to share a meal with you. A lot of time, effort and consideration went into every part of this book, so the fact that youve decided to add it to your collection means so much. My heart is full.

A lot of vegan cookbooks dedicate their introductions to the benefits of a vegan dietfrom personal health gains, to environmental sustainability, to just being a kinder human to the creatures with whom we share the planet. Without question, these topics are incredibly worthwhile. They are the arguments that persuaded me to change my own diet. If digging into these subjects is of interest to you, you can find a list of great books and articles on my blog, Herbivores Kitchen, to learn more. I update it frequently. If youre just here for the food, I wont hold you up by pleading my case on these topics. However, if you will indulge me for just a few short paragraphs, I do want to use this introduction to talk about something else that I think hinders the shift to a healthier, more sustainable, kinder dietand that is the concept of perfection.

Have you ever tried a diet and failed? Yeah, me too. Plenty of times. At least by my old definition of failed. In my mind, the word failed meant not executed with perfection. A lofty (and highly unattainable) goal for sure. Maybe its a product of age or maybe it just took me longer to catch on (likely the latter), but I dont think about failure that way anymore. Instead, I have a favorite quote that I like to remind myself of: Dont make perfect the enemy of the good.

If you subscribe to the argument (and I do) that eating a plant-based diet will lead to a healthier you, living on a healthier planet, then it stands to reason that eating this way some of the time will reap the same proportional benefits. Many vegans have a tendency to frame the decision to avoid animal-based products as an all-or-nothing proposition, making it incredibly intimidating to newcomers. Actually, it makes it incredibly intimidating to me as well. Heres the truth: I am not the perfect vegan. I love vegan cooking. I love the way I feel when I eat vegan. I especially love the earth-saving heart swell that comes on when the conveyor belt at the grocery store is loaded with vegetables and grains. Look at me! Saving the planet one ingredient at a time!

Sometimes though, with family and work and travel, my execution isnt flawless. I do my best. Sometimes my best is ordering a vegetarian dish when Im out or heating up ready-made sauces (my favorite being Maya Kaimal) because thats what I have the energy for. Im telling you this because I want to be clear that I dont have it all dialed in all the time. And I didnt write this book because I expect you to either. In the end, I just want the club to be bigger. Whatever you call yourselfvegan veteran, vegan lite or vegan curiousyoure welcome in my tribe, and I think youll find that the recipes in this book make it easier (and tastier) to eat vegan than you might have imagined.

When I first approached vegan cooking, I found the list of potential ingredients daunting. I shunned tofu. Id never cooked with jackfruit or tempeh, let alone heard of aquafaba or rejuvelac (and by the way, if youve never heard of aquafaba or rejuvelac either, youre in the right place). It took a while, but eventually I hit my rhythm. I learned how to cook with a variety of new and different ingredientslike miso paste, nutritional yeast and curry powder. Pretty soon I was hookedhooked on the idea of making vegan food taste good. Really, really good.

To do this though, I used a long list of vegan-friendly ingredients. The more, the merrier! Id say. Fill your fridge! and Pack your pantry! Id sing. If you follow my blog, you know this about me. I like creating vegan recipes with a lengthy list of ingredients. And, I think, to a great outcome. You can make some really incredible vegan dishes with a wide variety of ingredients. Things like [insert shameless blog plug]: Veggie Loaded Vegan Pho, No Coq au Vin and Vegan Moo Shu Pizza. Incredible enough to sway even the most dedicated of omnivores.

It would follow then, that stepping outside of my comfort zone and writing a cookbook embracing the 5-ingredient concept was a bit new to me. I quickly learned, though, that really good vegan food doesnt have to be complicated. You can make tasty, healthy meals with few ingredients. Now Im a convert. Well, at least some of the time. Ive just come to love having easy recipes that can often be made with what I have on hand.

Building this list of ingredients was no easy task. I spent a lot of time browsing other 5-, 7- and 10-ingredient cookbooks. I evaluated how other authors approached the concept and read the reviews. What did readers like? What turned them off? In the end, these were my two takeaways from home chefs: (1) I can forgive you a very small list of staple ingredients that wont count toward the five ingredients. After all, if three of the five ingredients are olive oil, salt and pepper, this would be a very boring cookbook indeed; and (2) Please dont ask me to open a jar of commercially produced spaghetti sauce and add it to pasta. I dont need a cookbook to tell me that.

Fair enough, I decided. And these two takeaways became the principles that guided each and every recipe in this cookbook.

PRINCIPLE #1: A SMALL LIST OF VEGAN STAPLES. TEN, TO BE EXACT.

This principlecreating a very small list of staple ingredientswas a challenge for me. I swapped this for that and then swapped it back. I waffled. Could I extend it to fifteen? Twenty? In the end, though, it was incredibly important to me that I do everything I could to honor the 5-ingredient concept. What I eventually realized was that there really is a small subset of ingredients that I use over and over again. Ingredients that, without their inclusion, would leave my recipes lacking. Before long, this list wrote itself. So here it isthe list of my vegan staples: