With a nod to NASCAR, a turbocharged book that proves vegetables are hip
When I saw an advance copy of "Power Vegetables!," the second cookbook by Peter Meehan and the editors of Lucky Peach magazine, my first thought was that vegetables - and even vegetarianism - might now be officially hip. The signs of hipness have been there for a while, especially in the way chefs are treating meat-free cooking at restaurants like Green Zebra and The Chicago Diner in Chicago; Vedge and V Street in Philadelphia; Dirt Candy, Nix and the upcoming ABCV in New York; and, frankly, countless places on the West Coast.
But Lucky Peach? It's harder to get any hipper than that.
The subtitle of Meehan & Co.'s book, a follow-up to "101 Easy Asian Recipes," is "Turbocharged Recipes for Vegetables With Guts," and the book delivers, with recipes for Buffalo cucumbers, daikon radish with XO sauce, cauliflower chaat and more. On the cover, plasma globes crackle amid a pile of vegetables (Meehan's inspiration: Sharper Image catalogs and 1980s horror movies), and on the inside, Meehan describes the look as "over the top and NASCAR-y." I talked to him about how the book came about; edited excerpts of our conversation follow.
Q. What do you consider a turbocharged vegetable?
A. Part of it is overstatement for the sake of making this book entertaining and different, and part of it was, like the Supreme Court judge once said about the definition of pornography, you know a power vegetable when you see one.
We started off with 200 dishes, and we cooked through them, and it would be, "This tastes good, this is a good recipe," but we'd look at the plate and ask, "Are you powerful?" For many dishes, we couldn't say yes.
Like cachapas - they're Venezuelan. You make a fresh corn batter into a pancake to wrap around cheese. It's a cool use of corn as a vegetable turned into a delicious snack, but it just felt like too much work and too much manipulation and not enough payoff for what it was. There were these idiotic catchphrases we had - like, "ease is power." We want simple, ham-fisted ways - with no ham involved - to make vegetables fun to eat.
Q. The counterexample would have to be elote (Mexican corn on the cob, smeared in mayo and sprinkled with cheese, chili and lime). You would look at that and say, "Are you powerful? Yes, you are."
A. Yes. People have done a lot of elote coverage in the past few years - but beyond putting butter and salt on your corn, what's the best way to make corn easy and delicious in the summer? That's the way. We looked for ways to improve dishes where we could. Vichyssoise is in every 1970s cookbook, and it's a great way to use that combination of ingredients, and we made it and loved it. Then we realized: If we make it with dashi, that's the little thing that makes it more interesting. It may seem like a tired old soup, but it's not quite ready for bed yet.
Q. What are your favorite ways in general to pump flavor into vegetables?
A. Combine half white miso, half butter and keep it in your refrigerator. You can heat any vegetable and put that on top of it, and it will taste great. Miso butter is a great back-pocket trick. I think the other thing is what you see in restaurants all the time: burning the [expletive] out of a vegetable - "charring" it would be the Martha Stewart way to put it - then hitting it with a high-acid vinaigrette. That tends to please the people, assuming the people are older than 8.
Q. What made you choose vegetables for the second cookbook?
A. I am almost 40 and dealing with the ramifications of not having the metabolism of a child anymore, and trying to postpone death in any way, shape or form. So increasing the amount of vegetables in my diet is important to me.
The longer you cook, the more you realize that the interesting thing isn't the meat, it's the vegetable - you go to the market and they change all the time, they come into season - and finding ways to manipulate them requires more thought than meat cooking. Cooking vegetables is more interesting, a little more - I don't want to say fun, because I barbecue a lot on the weekends, so it's not like I don't find cooking meat fun. But having grown up with a pretty boil-this-maybe-put-vinegar-on-that, middle-American approach to eating vegetables, finding ways in my own kitchen and codifying them for myself to make vegetables delicious and fun and exciting, the kind of thing you're stoked to serve to guests - or just eat again this week - was just where I was at with what I wanted out of a cookbook.
Q. You very casually draw from all over the globe in the book. Do you think that reflects the way a lot of people cook these days?
A. I don't, but I think it should. I think it's never been easier to get ingredients, whether it's via Amazon or actually going somewhere in the real world, which I vastly prefer to do. There's no excuse to cook with a closed mind anymore. And I think somewhat prescriptively. This approach has certainly bettered my own eating and living and cooking.