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Four books + two recipes = a delicious start to eating for a healthy planet!
Cooking with the climate in mind is easier when you have sustainable recipes and approaches aplenty on hand. That’s why we’re launching a column pointing you to our very favorite Earth-friendly cookbooks.
It’d be fair if you’re wondering, what exactly is a climate cookbook? Great question. It’s one whose recipes address carbon emissions one bite at a time, whether by being plant-forward or vegan, by going ham on strategies for reducing food waste, or by addressing warming in some other mouthwatering way.
As a writer covering how food culture and climate intersect, I’m perpetually watching for new releases that fit this bill. I reported a few years ago that a sub-genre of explicitly pro-climate cookbooks had materialized nearly out of thin air, as chefs and authors began weaving sustainability into their recipe collections in response to the ever-expanding ecological crisis. They’re taking approaches like more mushrooms and less meat, more use-it-up flexibility, and more seasonal produce that eschews the use of energy-intensive greenhouses and cross-planet flights for asparagus and berries. That mini-trend has continued, and there are many more books that cook up climate solutions without calling attention to it.
With each issue of this column, I’ll introduce you to one new climate cookbook I’ve tested, loved, and think could be worth getting, if you’re so inclined, to expand your sustainable recipe repertoire. We’re starting with a feast of four of my favorites. Among them are two leftovers-themed cookbooks I come back to again and again, a new standby for quick plant-forward meals, and a delicious love letter to the oddball vegetables in your seasonal CSA box. So tuck in — there’s a plate of Pan-Seared Endive With Balsamic-Roasted Grapes, Feta, and Toasted Pumpkin Seeds and a slice of What’s-in-Your-Fridge Citrus Cake with your name on it.
Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking
Leftovers take center stage in Perfectly Good Food, which chef-author sisters Irene and Margaret Li published in 2023. It’s full of highly riffable recipes that act like scaffolding for whatever wilting or forgotten ingredients are rolling around in the back of your fridge. Any hearty leaves will do, for instance, in a flexible all-the-greens saag paneer. Vegetables of all kinds will work for the cream-of-anything soup. Any citrus can star in the aforementioned What’s-in-Your-Fridge Citrus Cake (see below), which is, to this day, the citrusiest loaf cake I’ve ever made. In addition to recipes, vivid illustrations — like a chart plotting dairy ingredients from the thinnest consistency to the thickest — teach you to think of ingredients in categories, which makes it that much easier to make a swap and avoid a trip to the store when you’re missing something specific.
Check out their Crispy and Crunchy Noodle Salad, which uses up odds and ends of raw veggies!
The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z
The leftovers party continues in Tamar Adler’s The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, which came out in 2023. Helpfully organized by ingredient and exhaustive in its encyclopaedic approach, it contains 1,500 recipes for turning everything from stale popcorn to “carrots, huge” to eggs in eight distinct forms into delicious dishes. The recipes, along with lyrical essays in each chapter that could enamor even the most resistant cook with odds and ends, combine to teach that staleness and wilting are nothing to fear — just think of them as a headstart on the cooking process. Most often, Adler says, one need only cook the thing — or cook it again.
Cooking Fast and Slow: Easy, Comforting, (Mostly) Plant-Based Recipes for Busy People
I’ve been waiting for Natalia Rudin’s first cookbook since I came across a reel of her chickpeas in kale sauce with stracciatella two years ago and proceeded to make it five nights in a row — it was that comforting and easy. Cooking Fast and Slow, which hit bookstores in September, does not disappoint. The plant-forward collection of recipes are healthy-ish, actually feel possible to make after a long day, and come together quickly. Kimchi udon noodles are ready in 11 minutes flat (I timed it, since they were in the under-15 minutes section), and a miso mushroom gnocchi takes less than a half hour to make and is nice enough to serve a friend for dinner. The plant-forward approach is also accommodatingly flexible: Many recipes are vegan by default, or can be easily made vegan or vegetarian, which is a climate win since plant-based ingredients have far lower carbon footprints than animal-based ingredients. A few recipes call out when it could make sense for meat-inclined readers to add animal proteins.
Misunderstood Vegetables: How to Fall in Love With Sunchokes, Rutabaga, Eggplant and More
If you’ve ever opened a CSA box and lost a staring contest with a knobbly root you couldn’t identify (looking at you, celeriac), Misunderstood Vegetables is the cookbook for you. Out in 2024 from author and private chef Becky Selengut, it’s a love letter to everything from burdock root to romanesco. Ingredients more commonly found in American supermarkets also feature because, Selengut contends, a vegetable is misunderstood not only if it is unknown — which of course is a subjective matter — but also if a cook knows just one or two things to do with it. To that end, I stir-fried cabbage, which up to that point I’d only ever baked, until it was charred at the edges but still green and somewhat toothsome; it was delicious with Selengut’s generous dose of ginger, sesame, and chili oil. I also had a long-awaited détente with my mortal enemy, endives, which lost most of their bitterness through pan-searing and had the remaining bit balanced out with plummy roasted grapes and feta (see below).
RECIPE: Pan-Seared Endive With Balsamic-Roasted Grapes, Feta, and Toasted Pumpkin Seeds
- Yield: Serves 4
Description
This is a fairly straightforward and simple recipe that highlights how the bitterness in chicories can be such a lovely and interesting addition to recipes. If you’re familiar with cocktails, you are already aware of how important bitters can be in balancing a drink. The same can be said for recipes. But everything must be in balance — which is why fat (feta) and sweetness (roasted grapes) have been added in this recipe. Have you ever tried roasted grapes? I remember the first time I did. I was like, why have I never thought of doing this before? They are pleasantly sweet and tart, concentrated down to a plum-fig jam-like depth. Combined with the warm feta? Stop it.
Ingredients
- 2 Tbsps olive oil, plus a splash for the pumpkin seeds
- 1 1/2 lbs Belgian endive, ends trimmed, cut in half lengthwise
- 1 tsp salt, divided, plus more to taste
- 1/4 cup dry white vermouth or white wine
- 3/4 lb red grapes, picked from stems
- 2 Tbsps balsamic vinegar
- 1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
- 2 Tbsps toasted pumpkin oil (sub with good olive oil)
- 3 oz sheep’s milk feta
- Flaky salt, for garnish (optional)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 450°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
- Add the olive oil to a large skillet and heat over medium-high heat. Add the endive cut side down, in two batches if necessary. Season with 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Cook until deeply caramelized on the cut side, 5 to 7 minutes. Flip the endive over, add the vermouth, and cook for 4 to 5 minutes more, until a knife can be easily inserted. Set aside.
- Meanwhile, place the grapes on the baking sheet. Toss them with the balsamic vinegar and then season them with the other 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Roast until they are blistery and their grapey goodness is all over the parchment paper. In a good way. (A bad way, in case that is your next question, is if they explode all over your oven and then you write me an email.) This should take 10 to 20 minutes or so. Once they come out of the oven, pull the grapes with their parchment paper off the pan. You’ll need to use this sheet pan again.
- Toss the pumpkin seeds onto the baking sheet with a splash of olive oil and a pinch of salt. Mix up and toast them in the hot oven, watching them very carefully, until they puff and brown a bit, 4 to 5 minutes. (Alternatively, you can toast them in a skillet on the stove.) Set them aside for use as a garnish.
- Plate the endive, cut side up. Scatter the grapes on and around the endive. Drizzle the pumpkin oil on everything, then scatter the feta over the top. Add a bit of flaky salt, if you’d like. Finally, and with great drama, let the pumpkin seeds fly.
Notes
- Toasted pumpkin seed oil can be found in specialty markets or online.
Excerpted from Misunderstood Vegetables: How to Fall in Love with Sunchokes, Rutabaga, Eggplant and More. Text copyright (c) 2024 by Becky Selengut. Photography copyright (c) Clare Barboza. Used with permission of the publisher, The Countryman Press, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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RECIPE: What’s-in-Your-Fridge Citrus Cake
- Yield: Makes 1 cake 1x
Description
This is one of the easiest cakes out there (dump, stir, pour, bake) and oh-so-very flexible. When I first sent this recipe to my friends, we all went on a frenzy of citrus cake-baking from North Carolina to Rhode Island to the Alpine village of Klosters, Switzerland. Over the weekend, we churned out about a dozen variations (and not because I made them do it, but because the cake is that good, I swear). Everyone made their own version based on the citrus and dairy in their home at that moment, from lemon-yogurt to orange-ricotta to grapefruit-crème fraîche, and raves flew in from all locations. Whether you need to use up citrus, clear out some dairy products, or just bake a beautifully simple cake, this is the one for you.
Ingredients
- 1 3/4 cups flour
- 1 cup brown sugar or white sugar
- 2 tsps baking powder
- 1/2 tsp kosher salt
- 3/4 cup sour cream, plain whole-milk yogurt, ricotta, or a similarly thick dairy combination
- 3 eggs
- 1/2 cup oil (neutral oil if you don’t want it to stand out, coconut oil for flavor)
- 1/4 cup citrus juice
- 1 Tbsp grated citrus zest (about 2 lemons or 1 grapefruit)
Instructions
- Heat the oven to 350°F. Grease a 9-inch round cake pan or loaf pan.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the dairy, eggs, oil, juice, and zest. Slowly mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until everything is just combined and no floury bits remain (lumps are fine, though).
- Pour the batter in the prepared pan and bake until a tester or fork poked into the cake comes out clean, 40 to 50 minutes for a cake pan, 50 to 60 minutes for a loaf pan.
- Let the cake cool for 10 minutes or so, then run a knife around the edges to help release the cake before removing it from the pan. Glaze or soak the cake if desired (see note) and store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days — if it lasts that long.
Notes
Got extra juice? If you have a bit of extra juice to use up, combine it with a small amount of sugar to soak the cake or a large amount of sugar to glaze the top. To soak the cake, heat 1/4 cup of the juice with 1 tablespoon of sugar until the sugar dissolves, then pour over the cake while still warm. To glaze the cake, whisk 2 to 3 tablespoons of the juice with 1 cup of powdered sugar and drizzle over the cake once cool.
Excerpted from the book Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Copyright © 2023 by Irene Li and Margaret Li. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
