Vegan Recipe of the Month: Garlic Lemon Broccoli Pasta

Over the past several months, I've printed out a wide assortment of vegan and near-vegan recipes from various sites that I wanted to try. In most cases, however, we didn't get around to trying them right away, and so I was accumulating a thicker and thicker stack of them on the kitchen table. Last week, I finally decided to go through the list, set aside a few that we wanted to try soon, and either file away or discard the rest.

One of those that made the cut was this Garlic Lemon Broccoli Pasta from my favorite vegan blog, It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken. Having recently been to H-Mart, we happened to have on hand all the produce required to make it: broccoli, garlic, and a fresh lemon. We didn't have the gluten-free penne the recipe called for, but we could see no problem with using regular penne, and the slivered almonds for the garnish were easy to replace with crushed whole almonds. And it was a quick and easy recipe — just 20 minutes to make. With nothing else planned for that night's dinner, Brian was happy to put this new dish to the test right away.

When I tried my first forkful of this, my first comment was, "Wow, that's really...bright." The dish contains the juice and zest of one entire lemon, so that tart, citrusy flavor was very much to the fore. Brian didn't respond to this comment, because his mouth was too full; to his taste buds, that mouth-puckering lemon flavor was just enough and not at all too much, and he dug into it with abandon. I proceeded more cautiously, and after a while, it started to grow on me too. Once I'd gotten past that first punch of lemon, I was able to appreciate the deeper notes of umami-rich garlic and nutritional yeast, the faint bitterness of the broccoli, and the even fainter bite of the red pepper flakes. (The recipe calls for half a teaspoon, but since I'm a spice wimp, Brian had dialed this back to a scanty pinch.)

This dish has pretty much everything we want in a weeknight dinner. It's tasty, vegan, quick and easy to prepare, and it calls for no unusual ingredients. It will definitely be showing up on our dinner table again, probably on a regular basis. Which, since the whole point of this exercise when I first started it seven years back was to incorporate more veggies into my diet, is a definite win.

Next up: a quinoa bowl featuring roasted eggplant and Brussels sprouts. It also calls for cherry tomatoes, so we should be able to try this one as soon as our Sun Golds start ripening. Watch this space for details.