Vegan Recipes of the Month: Three spring dishes

In last week's entry, I mentioned that our asparagus was one of the brightest stars in our May garden, and I promised you'd be seeing one of the new asparagus recipes we'd tried recently as our Recipe of the Month for May. But as it turns out, I was wrong. You're getting that recipe plus two more featuring spring crops: another type of asparagus pasta, and a strawberry-arugula salad. All three are vegan, and all three were tasty enough to be worth making again, should we have the opportunity.

Recipe #1: Asparagus, Leek, and Mushroom Pasta
Adapted from Cooking Light

Years ago, my sister-in-law got us a subscription to Cooking Light as a Christmas present, and before it expired, we clipped out and filed a bunch of recipes that we meant to try. Unfortunately, once they were in that overstuffed file, they kind of got lost, and so we never got around to most of them. So, when Brian asked me to look for some new asparagus recipes, I went through the "pasta" section of the accordion file and unearthed one called "Asparagus, Spring Onion, and Mushroom Pasta" from the April 2004 issue.

The recipe suggested using pappardelle, dry white wine, and expensive, exotic mushrooms — "morel, cremini, oyster, or a mixture" — but he went with linguini, cooking sherry, and plain old white button mushrooms, which were what we had. It also called for either spring onions, scallions, or baby leeks; Brian was able to extract only one small leek from our vegetable garden, where it had somehow overwintered successfully from last year, so he scaled down the recipe to roughly half its size for every ingredient except the pasta. This allowed us us to get a full meal out of it with leftovers to spare, and it didn't seem to us like it was short on the veggies.

His adapted version looks like this:

1. Trim and thinly slice 1 small leek. Cut the ends off 1/2 pound of thin asparagus and slice into two-inch pieces. Cut 1/2 pound of mushrooms into bite-size pieces. Chop 1 1/2 teaspoons parsley.
2. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat, add the mushrooms, and cook while stirring for about 5 minutes.
3. Add leek and cook another 1-2 minutes, or until softened.
4. Add asparagus pieces and saute another 2 minutes.
5. Add 2 tablespoons sherry and simmer until liquid evaporates, about 1-2 minutes.
6. Add 1/4 cup vegetable broth and bring to a boil.
7. Add 2 Tbsp. plant-based butter and toss until melted into veggies.
8. Meanwhile, cook 1/2 pound linguine or fettucini in a large pot of boiling salted water until al dente. Drain.
9. Add veggies to drained pasta, with 1 1/2 teaspoons chopped parsley. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Early as it is in the gardening season, this adapted recipe contained an impressive three ingredients from our garden: the asparagus, the leek, and the parsley, which he was able to trim from this year's plants. And, although we obviously haven't tried the dish with the fancy ingredients the original recipe called for, we didn't feel our cheaper version lacked at all for flavor. With mushrooms, leek, sherry, and broth, it had plenty of umami, plus the distinct flavor of the asparagus that's unlike any other vegetable. It's definitely worth putting into our rotation for asparagus season in years to come.

However, it will have some competition from this other new asparagus pasta dish:


Recipe #2: Garlic Lemon Asparagus Pasta

Brian cobbled this one together from his recollections of various other pasta dishes he's made over the years that used some combination of asparagus, garlic, and lemon. Some of these had a cream sauce, so he substituted thickened almond milk. Here's what he ended up with:

1. Zest and squeeze 1 lemon, mince 4 cloves garlic, and break 8-10 ounces of fresh asparagus into 1-inch pieces. Be sure to remove any tough parts from the bottoms of the asparagus stalks.
2. Cook 1/2 pound of penne or other pasta al dente in 8 cups of water with 1 Tbsp salt. Try to time it to finish at the same time or just after everything else is done.
3. Thoroughly mix 1 cup unsweetened almond milk (regular might be okay, but avoid the vanilla stuff), 1 tablespoon flour, 1/2 tablespoon nutritional yeast, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. I put everything in a jar, close the top, then shake vigorously. It also helps to sift, sieve, or sprinkle the flour in so that it doesn’t get lumpy. Set aside.
4. Sauté the garlic in 1 tablespoon olive oil in a skillet over low heat for a few minutes. Try not to let it get brown.
5. Turn the heat up to medium-high and add the asparagus. Sprinkle the lemon juice on top and sauté until the asparagus is bright green. Should only take about two minutes or so.
6. Add the almond milk mixture and stir vigorously. It should thicken quickly. Add the lemon zest, stir briefly to combine, and then remove from heat.
7. When the pasta is cooked and drained, combine it and the asparagus mixture and stir to coat thoroughly. Serve immediately.

As you can see reasonably well from the picture, the resulting pasta had a creamy sauce, and the bright flavor of the lemon complemented the asparagus nicely. We sprinkled it with a little "spaghetti salt," a Parmesan substitute Brian makes by combining a tablespoon of nutritional yeast, half a tablespoon of flour, and a quarter-teaspoon of salt, and grinding it all up together with a mortar and pestle — but it would also be fine with just a touch of ordinary salt and pepper. So this one's another keeper.

Recipe #3: Strawberry and Avocado Salad
From Savory

This one was simply lifted from the April 2020 issue of Savory, the freebie food magazine from Stop&Shop. We made only one significant change to the recipe: it called for 6 cups of arugula, which was more than we could manage to glean at this stage from our just-started spring garden. (Waiting until we had more arugula available wasn't an option because the strawberries we'd picked up at the supermarket wouldn't have lasted that long). So we replaced half the arugula with winter lettuce, which we had a patch of in the garden from last year. All the other ingredients — strawberries, avocado, red onion, scallion, and lemon-mustard-poppy-seed vinaigrette — were just as specified in the recipe.

Of the three new recipes we tried this month, this is probably the one we'd be least likely to make a regular part of our repertoire. It's not that it wasn't tasty; the tangy-sweet strawberries and peppery arugula complemented each other nicely (though it would probably have been better still with all arugula instead of a mixture), and the creamy avocado, crunchy red onion, and tender greens created a nice contrast of textures. It's just that this dish calls for both fresh strawberries and avocado, two fairly expensive produce ingredients we can't grow ourselves. So we're likely to make this one again only if we can find both of those things fairly cheaply at the store at a time when we have plenty of arugula in the garden, or possibly if we're having guests for dinner that we'd like to impress (a situation that isn't likely to come up any time soon, sadly). And if we do make it again, I might be inclined to leave out the poppy seeds in the dressing. They add interesting flavor and crunch, but they also invariably get stuck in your teeth, and to me, the annoyance outweighs the benefits.

So there you have it, folks: not one, not two, but three tasty, vegan recipes that take advantage of the first early produce of the spring garden. Next month, as more of our crops come in, you can probably expect to see recipes or other content featuring such late-spring delicacies as snow peas, lettuce, and basil — and possibly even a few of our new honeyberries, which Brian noticed today were just starting to ripen. (Of course, that meant that he had to get some netting over the bushes in a big hurry before the birds got to them, which was kind of a hassle. In future years, we'll know to do this in early May, so we won't need to rush.)