- This week on Milk Street... - Vegetarian, very, very easy.

- For something so simple, it came together fast.

- Mm!

(chuckles) That sauce is so delicious.

- Everything is wrong about vegetable prep, I think you'll agree.

That's coming up-- stay tuned.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ One of the first major vegetarian cookbooks was Moosewood, back in the 1970s.

But for most cultures around the world, vegetables have been at the center of the plate literally for centuries.

So we begin with an Indian- spiced butternut squash soup inspired by cookbook author Sri Rao.

Then a recipe for lentils with Swiss chard.

And then we finish with cauliflower steaks with chipotle cashew sauce.

Please stay tuned.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

- That meal.

You sautéed, you seared, and you served.

Cooking with All-Clad, bonded cookware designed, engineered, and assembled in the U.S.A. for over 50 years.

All-Clad: for all your kitchen adventures.

♪ ♪ - This recipe brings together two of my favorite worlds, India and the United States.

This is our Indian-spiced butternut squash soup, and I'm so excited to share it with you today.

We learned this recipe from cookbook author and screenwriter Sri Rao, and it brings together the best of Indian spices and flavors with classic American butternut squash.

To begin, I'm going to start cooking my vegetables.

Gonna heat some oil.

In goes my butternut squash.

(pan sizzling) And then to this, I'm going to actually add some carrots.

The carrots add sweetness and really bump up this lovely orange color of the soup.

A little bit of salt.

And I'm going to cook this for about four minutes.

(pan sizzling) Okay, my butternut squash is beginning to get browned.

I'm going to add my onions now.

(pan sizzling) So I'm going to cook this for another four minutes or so, until the onions have started to soften.

(pan sizzling) So my onions have softened, and I'm going to add some of my favorite spices from my spice box.

I have some grated ginger.

Going in.

Some cumin and coriander.

(pan sizzling) Wonder Twin powers.

I have cayenne and salt.

Now, these are ground spices, so it's important you don't add ground spices directly to hot oil.

These are going on top of my vegetables, and the heat and the oil are going to bloom those flavors straight into the dish.

(pan sizzling) So it's just going to take 30 seconds for this flavor to bloom-- I can smell it already, it's fragrant, wonderful-- and I'm going to add some water.

Now, we're using water instead of stock for a couple of reasons: we're keeping it vegetarian, and the water keeps the flavors really clean instead of muddy.

(pan sizzling, water hissing) Great-- now that that's done, I'm going to bring this to a simmer and cover and cook it for about ten to 15 minutes until the squash is tender.

So my squash is cooked.

I'm going to turn off the heat and take off the lid so it can cool.

And while the soup cools, I'm going to move to another member of the squash family.

I'm going to toast some pumpkin seeds.

A little bit of oil.

I'm adding some cayenne.

Pinch of salt.

And into this mixture go my pumpkin seeds.

You want to make sure you keep stirring these very evenly so they don't burn, and I'm going to toast them for about three to five minutes.

So my pumpkin seeds are toasted and browned all evenly.

I'm going to transfer them to a bowl to cool, and I will use this later for garnish.

I'm going to purée my soup using an immersion blender.

You can also use a regular blender and do it in batches, and return the puréed soup to the pot.

(blender whirring) Okay, my soup is blended and puréed to velvety smooth.

I'm going to reheat this on low and add some yogurt.

So I'm adding plain, unsweetened, whole milk yogurt to the soup-- it's going to make it really rich, add a little bit of tang.

And the important thing here is not to overheat the soup.

I want to keep it on really low so that the yogurt doesn't curdle and break.

Okay, my soup is looking great.

I'm ready to serve this and taste it.

I'm going to garnish this with a little extra dollop of yogurt.

And I'm going to add some of those toasted pumpkin seeds for some crunch and texture on top.

Let's see.

♪ ♪ This is so good.

So many flavors reminiscent of both my homes, India and America.

I've got all of those rich, warm spices underneath and the thick, creamy texture of the butternut squash, with that pop and crunch of the pumpkin seeds and the smoothness of the yogurt.

This is our Indian-spiced butternut squash soup.

Vegetarian, hearty, creamy, very, very easy, and reminds me of all my homes.

♪ ♪ - So I like really great, fresh vegetarian options that have a lot of depth, a lot of dimension.

And so today, I'm going to teach you all how to make the lentils with Swiss chard and pomegranate molasses.

It has so many awesome notes and textures, and it's sure to be a winner on your dinner table.

First, I'm going to start off by stripping my stems of chard.

Some folks like to use rainbow chard for color.

If you can get it, awesome.

It's just a way to make your dish sing.

Got my stalks stripped.

I'm going to set them aside for just a second, and I'm just going to roughly chop these chard leaves and put them into my bowl.

I want pieces that are about three-quarters of an inch wide, but you don't have to be a scientist about it.

All right, let's put these guys in here.

So now for the stems, we're actually going to quick pickle them in a little bit of lemon juice.

That's going to make this a little bit brighter and also give it a lovely crunch.

So I'm just going to slice these super thin.

And if you look at the color of this chard, it just looks incredible in the dish.

Really offsets all the other components and it should offer us a bright little zip.

That looks pretty good.

So I'm going to put my thinly sliced chard stems into this bowl here.

And to that, to pickle them, I'm going to want an acid.

So in this case, I'm going to use lemon juice, because it's bright, it's fragrant, it's going to bring out a lot of the high notes in this dish, and when combined with the pomegranate molasses, it's going to be awesome.

So, I'm going to juice up a lemon over here, give it a quick slice.

I have learned that you can get a little bit better of a yield by lopping off the top, too, just so.

So I'm going to put this in, give it a squeeze, let it drain out.

Second half.

All right, give that a quick stir.

And I'm just going to set this aside while I work on my other ingredients.

So for this recipe, I'm going to be using brown lentils.

They are readily available, pretty easy to get at your grocery store.

But if you want a lentil with a little bit more bite, and a little bit firmer of a texture, you can use the green French Puy lentils as well.

So, to get my lentils started, I've got about five cups of water going.

I'm going to put my lentils in.

About two cloves of garlic, minced up.

And about a teaspoon of salt.

So my lentils have come up to a boil.

Now, I'm going to drop my heat, but I'm not going to drop it all the way down to a low simmer.

I want to maintain some of this bubbling and a rapid simmer to make sure that my lentils are cooked through.

In the meantime, I'm going to work on another component of this dish.

So I've got some olive oil here.

I'm going to use about two tablespoons in my nonstick skillet.

There we go.

And I'm going to put this over medium high heat.

So my oil is shimmering now.

I'm going to add my onions.

And I'm going to let these cook down with just a little pinch of salt to start.

So I want to cook these onions on medium high heat for just a few minutes, about three or four, just to get them translucent and softened.

So now that my onions are softer and just a little bit translucent, I'm going to drop down the heat to medium and make sure that I cook it until it's nice and brown.

That'll take about five minutes.

So my onions are now nice and brown.

So, to this, I'm going to add the rest of my garlic.

This is about two cloves minced up.

Stir that around.

And my chard leaves.

All right.

I'm going to cook this for about three to five minutes.

I just want my chard leaves to be wilted down with my onions and garlic.

In the meantime, I'm going to go drain my lentils.

So I've got my lentils all tender, drained off.

I'm going to add my chard, onion, and garlic mixture into the bowl.

And then now it's time to bring back my quick pickled chard stems.

I'm going to use a slotted spoon and drain these off from the remaining lemon juice.

All right.

And then I'm also going to add another three tablespoons of olive oil.

Make sure you're using a good one here.

You want to be able to taste it.

About one and a half tablespoons of my lemon juice from the lemon I squeezed earlier.

I'm going to put in my pomegranate molasses.

It is tart and tangy, and, honestly, has become one of my favorite little meal additions.

Okay.

I'm going to give this a quick stir.

You can use fresh herbs in this dish just to bring some brightness, some herbaceousness.

Now, cilantro would go great here.

I am not really a cilantro person, so I've got a bunch of fresh chopped parsley.

So I'm just going to sprinkle this in.

Before I stir it all up, I want to make sure that I've got about a half teaspoon of salt.

And a full teaspoon of pepper.

Let's give it a stir.

Look at that.

Look at all the beautiful colors we have.

For something so simple, it came together fast and really gives a lot of brightness to the lentils.

When you're using an earthy ingredient, bringing in brightness With lemon and herbs is a really great way to accentuate it.

It highlights all the good stuff.

I think I'm ready to eat.

All right, let's put this into our serving bowl.

Almost ready to serve.

just need to add a little bit more or olive oil.

And give it a good drizzle.

Comes together quickly, has a lot of dimension, and the lentils are so hearty and super healthy, too.

And there you have it, the lentils with Swiss chard, and pomegranate molasses.

♪ ♪ - You know, my family has a famous motto which is always wrong, but never in doubt.

In over 40 years in the world of food, I've come across a lot of things where I think everybody is wrong about how to do something.

Now, this segment today is everything is wrong about vegetable prep.

We're going to do onions, bell peppers, and cauliflower.

I think you'll agree at the end this is a better way.

So let's start with an onion.

So the first thing I would do is cut it in half.

I'd remove the ends like that, and if the peel is still on, it's a good time to peel it.

Now, the first thing you want to do is look and see where the root end is.

The root end is darker, so this is not the root end.

So the non-root end towards you.

Then I'm going to take a knife like this and start it really like this.

Putting it in the onion and coming through it, changing the angle as I do that.

So this way the knife is not going to slip because you're starting it in the onion and pulling it through.

It's very safe.

And you can make big cuts or small cuts.

Now, I'm not going to cut through this way.

A lot of people do that.

You don't need to do that.

The onions already has layers and I'm just going to go through.

So it's just two cuts.

A series of cuts one way and a series of cuts the other.

And now you have a nicely diced onions.

You can go through a couple more times if you like.

And one last thing about this.

You know, you don't need perfect little dices like they teach you in French cooking school.

That's only for restaurant chefs.

Most of the time you're cooking them down.

It just doesn't matter if you have a perfectly even little dice.

So that's how to do an onion.

Let's take a bell pepper.

This is something people have to do a lot.

And there is a great trick here.

Again, I'm going to use this knife, and I'm just going to do slabs.

You do that because the core comes out.

You just throw that away.

If you have a little bit of extra you just get rid of it.

We'll go through... (continues chopping) So this method, you get rid of the core really easily.

You have nice slabs of peppers to work with and it's really easy then to cut them into a dice.

So we'll just cut across... And there you have a diced pepper.

So instead of trying to work around the core of the pepper, you just cut slabs, the core goes away, and it's easy to prep the rest of it.

My last tip is about cauliflower.

When you cut it this way, it's flat on both sides, which means that when you go to roast it in the oven on a hot baking sheet, when you flip it over, you're going to get browning on both sides instead of just on one side.

So this method gets you more flavor and more browning, and by the way, it's easier to do.

So we'll do slabs like this.

And now we can just break the pieces apart, get rid of any of the root there.

So this way, you're creating a flat side on both sides of the cauliflower, unlike the typical floret.

Now both sides, when you flip it, are going to have contact with the baking sheet and get nice and brown.

So you end up with a cauliflower that has a nice browning on both sides instead of just on one side.

So that's the way to do a cauliflower, a pepper, and an onion.

It's easier, it's safer, and in this case for the cauliflower, you get a lot more browning.

♪ ♪ - This recipe for cauliflower steaks with chipotle-cashew sauce proves that even vegetarians can have steak-- if they cut them from a whole head of cauliflower, which we're going to show you how to do to get thick slabs that don't fall apart.

Those slabs are seasoned and roasted at high heat and then served with a flavor-packed sauce inspired by Chef Alex Stupak's recipe for his smoked cashew dip.

Our sauce gets tangy brightness from lime zest and lime juice.

It gets deep, smoky heat from the chipotle chilies, and it gets a good amount of crunch from roasted cashews.

So, to cut those cauliflower steaks, you need two whole heads of large cauliflower.

They've been trimmed on the bottom, but the core has not been removed-- that's important.

You need the core in there to help hold the steaks together.

So we'll set this bottom side down and cut them exactly in half from top to bottom.

We'll do that to both of them.

Okay.

And then, looking from the inside, that's going to be one side of your steak slab.

We're going to cut an inch and a half away from that, straight down.

And there you have a nice, big, meaty cauliflower slab.

We'll put that flat side down here.

We'll do the same to the other side.

Good.

Put that there.

And go to our other head of cauliflower.

And cut two slabs from there.

There we go.

So we have these on a piece of parchment on a sheet tray.

No oil is needed because we are going to brush the steaks with a little bit of oil on both sides.

This will help the seasonings adhere.

That... And then we will brush on like this.

Okay.

Now, the seasoning is very simple.

It's a little bit of salt, and pepper, and some paprika.

That's it.

The sauce that we're serving with this later has a lot of different flavor in it, so you keep the seasonings very simple here.

What's nice about this is this is really a technique.

It's a technique for making roasted cauliflower steak.

The seasoning is very simple.

You can then take a variety of sauces and serve it with.

Okay.

You want to make sure you get the top sides of these cauliflower steaks and the other side as well.

Great.

And the little bit left over, just sprinkle it right over the top.

Okay, these are seasoned and ready to roast.

We have the oven at a very high heat of 450 degrees.

These take about 25 to 30 minutes to become just tender through the core, and you can test that with a skewer.

And about halfway through that time, you want to turn them over to the other side.

While the cauliflower finishes roasting, we will make the sauce.

We'll start with one clove of garlic, and we'll grate it finely.

And then we'll grate the lime.

We need about a half teaspoon of lime zest, so that will probably be about half of this lime at this size.

That looks good.

Okay.

Then we're going to juice the lime, and we need about two tablespoons.

This one is pretty small, so I'm thinking we'll need the whole lime for two tablespoons.

Okay.

Now we'll set this aside and let it sit for about five minutes.

What happens is the acid from the lime juice helps to mellow the garlic a little bit.

So it's been 30 minutes on the cauliflower.

I'm going to take it out of the oven.

Ah, you can see these perfectly roasted steak.

Just tender right through the center.

If you don't have a skewer, just use a knife, you can see it goes through very easily, but the whole steak still holds together.

And we'll let those sit for about five minutes while we finish the sauce.

To our lime juice we will add the remaining ingredients.

We have a little bit of salt.

We'll taste that a little bit later.

All the roasted cashews.

Now, you want to make sure the cashews are roasted, not raw, because raw cashews are very delicate in flavor, and this is a strongly flavored sauce, so you need roasted cashews.

Then we will add the chipotles in adobo sauce.

Now these are canned chipotles.

They're already packed in the adobo sauce.

This is a very smoky chili, so the sauce is beautifully deep and smoky.

They are also pretty darn spicy, so you can adjust the spice level to your preference by how much chipotles in adobo sauce you use.

This is two chipotles and two tablespoons of adobo sauce.

Then we have some chopped cilantro for a really nice punch of bright, herbal notes.

Get that mixed a little bit and then we will add the olive oil.

You can smell the sauce, you smell the lime, you smell the cilantro, and you definitely smell those chipotle chilies.

So the sauce is ready.

We're going to serve it on top of those beautiful meaty cauliflower steaks, and I cannot wait to taste it.

Ah... see?

See how well that held together?

These make a really nice vegetarian main course.

It could also be a side course, it could be a first course, it could be part of a larger meal.

Whichever way you choose.

We're going to add some sauce on top of it.

Right as we serve it.

People can help themselves if you want, or you can just put it, on and spread it out however you like.

Top it with a little more fresh cilantro.

And if you like, a little extra squeeze of lime.

And, of course, because this is a steak, we will use a knife and fork.

Mm!

(laughs) That sauce is so delicious.

It's bright and tangy.

You taste the cilantro coming through.

And the crunch from those roasted cashews is the perfect textural contrast.

That is our recipe for cauliflower steaks with chipotle-cashew sauce, perfect for any night of the week.

You can get this recipe and all the recipes from our season at MilkStreetTV.com.

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- Funding for this series was provided by the following: - That meal.

You sautéed, you seared, and you served, cooking with All-Clad, bonded cookware designed, engineered, and assembled in the U.S.A. for over 50 years.

All-Clad-- for all your kitchen adventures.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪