How Do I Turn Vegetables Into Dinner

After my award-winning first book The Vegetable Butcher was published (and for years following), this was the #1 question I was asked over and over again. In this book, I cover how to select, prep, slice dice, and masterfully cook vegetables from artichokes to zucchini, but it seemed vegetable lovers as well as the vegetable curious, now wanted me to tell them how to compose a produce-centered meal. So I listened. I took notes. I cooked and I cooked some more. Then I got to work on my just-released book The Vegetable Eater: The New Playbook for Cooking Vegetarian.

This new book is made for “the vegetable eater,”  that is, anyone who eats vegetables or wants to eat more vegetables. It focuses on the abundant, delicious produce in the center of the plate—not on what is absent from it. And by design, quite intentionally, every recipe is a super-satisfying, wildly delicious complete meal that you and everyone at your table will love.

I share countless variations, tips, and notes to make cooking with vegetables feel possible, doable—in every season, for every celebration, and, perhaps most importantly, on random Tuesday and Wednesday nights. For you and for me, I designed this cookbook to be a modern playbook that we can turn to over and over again throughout the year for inspiration, ideas, and direction. 

Connect With Produce In Its Prime

It is always my goal to help you discover that one of the greatest joys of being a vegetable eater is cooking in tune with the seasons and connecting with nature and produce in its prime. There is nothing like anticipating an ingredient—asparagus, young onions, and artichokes in the spring, sweet corn, green beans, and tomatoes in the summer, and winter squashes, hearty greens, and all kinds of roots in the fall. With The Vegetable Eater, you can fully and completely enjoy each one when it's at its best (and until the last one is gone). Then get excited about and creative with what is to come. 

And when it’s time (again!), to figure out what’s for dinner, you’ll find the answer in 100 super delicious, vegetable forward dishes, mostly familiar-sounding ones (think burgers, pastas, grain bowls, entree-worthy salads, stews, stir fries, savory pies, and sheet pan meals). Plus, very important, there’s dessert! (RIght now, I’m making Strawberry-Citrus Olive Oil Cake on repeat.)

So here’s to turning produce into the meals that feed us in all the beautiful seasons ahead and bringing out the vegetable eater in all of us …

Readers can purchase the book through Cara Mangini's website and everywhere books are sold.