I didn’t set out to veganize Cook’s Illustrated’s ‘Sichuan Stir-Fried Pork in Garlic Sauce’ — it just sort of happened. It’s not that I have anything against vegans, and if you are vegan and ever come to our house for dinner I would enjoy the challenge of preparing a strictly plant-based meal. Personally though, I’ve never found the arguments behind veganism convincing—so absent a guest with a vegan diet at the table, I don’t bother limiting my ingredient list based on any prescribed set of rules. Sometimes, though, such limits arise outside of my meal plan.

Temporarily out of stock

The first ingredient in the Cook’s recipe is chicken broth and although I’m sure it’s routinely passed off as such by unscrupulous restaurateurs chicken broth is definitely not vegan. I’ve got nothing against it at all—as long as it’s homemade. A few years ago I realized that by saving the bones from every piece of chicken we eat in a bag in the freezer I could make stock that was pretty good and very cheap. When enough bones and sundry chicken parts have accumulated, I cover the lot with water in the crock pot, and in eight short hours it’s ready for action. Naturally, that discovery morphed into the idea that it was immoral to ever buy store-bought stock again. I’m not without my food restrictions—they just don’t have to do with avoiding eating or enslaving animals. And so it was that while we were doing the week’s shopping I refused to buy broth-in-a-box, even though I knew the supply of carefully frozen cubes of stock in the freezer was dwindling. As it turns out I cut it too close, and Martha used up the last of our home-made stock making a delicious vegetable soup a couple of days prior. At some point in the week I was aware of the issue and intended to fire up the slow cooker at the right time to replenish the stock supply, but as of the morning I had forgotten and by the time I got home to make dinner it was already too late. So I turned to the poor man’s vegan-friendly chicken stock: good old H₂O.

Also called for in the recipe was fish sauce, which is usually made with ground up anchovies or other tiny fish. I don’t particularly like fish sauce, and I especially don’t like the way it tends to sit in the fridge unused for many months, taking up valuable shelf real-estate. And it isn’t free either. So I had consciously planned to skip the fish sauce all along, for my own special anti-fish sauce reasons.

The meaning of putrid

With water substituted for chicken broth and no fish sauce swimming in that water, my stir-fry sauce was vegan. But there remained the more obvious question of the pork. Even among those who eat meat, pork is the subject of special dietary restrictions, being notably forbidden to Jews and Muslims who observe their faiths’ dietary laws. This can be mystifying to those of us with no such restrictions, since pork is quite possibly the most delicious of all the meats, especially in its bacon and jamón forms. I say all this to make it clear that I am normally a pork enthusiast and would go to great lengths to incorporate this glorious meat into my cooking, and would never intentionally omit it.

Excited as I was for an opportunity to consume that forbidden beast, any excitement rapidly faded as I pulled the cellophane-wrapped package of pork—purchased at the co-op only days before—and noticed strong bands of discoloration running down the darkened meat. Here’s a pro-tip: if you notice the color of your pork is way off, just throw it out. Do it right now. Because I’m an idiot, I decided to give the pork a good smell, just to make sure. The word putrid gets thrown about pretty casually these days, but I believe it can really only be properly understood as referring to the special stench of rotting meat. Martha, for her part, declined a whiff.

As I was walking the meat down the stairs and directly out to the dumpster behind our building, since a stink like that would pretty quickly sneak out of our tiny trash can and make our tiny apartment unlivable, I thought wistfully of the farmers market season, when food can be bought that’s fresh enough to sit in the refrigerator for a few days without rotting. Only a couple of months to go!

Having disposed of the pork, the last obstacle between this recipe and full-fledged veganism was gone. I was saved by a half head of napa cabbage (the universally acknowledged pig of the vegetable kingdom) that was sitting in the crisper drawer in the wake of the aforementioned vegetable soup. It turned out well, and while I can’t say no animals were harmed in the making of this stir-fry, it is comforting to know that no animals had to be.

Vegan mushroom and cabbage stir-fry with garlic sauce

Sauce

• 1/2 c water
• 2 T sugar
• 2 T soy sauce
• 2 t balsamic vinegar
• 2 t sherry vinegar
• 1 T toasted sesame oil
• 1 T sherry
• 2 t ketchup
• 2 t cornstarch

Stir-Fry

• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 5 scallions, white parts minced, green parts sliced thin
• 2 T sriracha
• 4 T vegetable oil
• 6 oz mushrooms (I used white button mushrooms; shiitakes would be better)
• 4 celery ribs, cut on a bias into 1/4 inch slices
• 1/2 small head napa cabbage, sliced thin.

Whisk together sauce ingredients; set aside.

Combine garlic, scallions, and sriracha in a small bowl; set aside.

Heat 1 T oil in 12″ non-stick skillet until almost smoking. Add celery and mushrooms and cook until softened and starting to singe on the edges. Transfer cooked vegetables to large bowl.

Heat another 1 T oil in the skillet until almost smoking. Add cabbage and cook until wilted and browned in places. Add to bowl with vegetables.

Heat remaining 2 T of oil in the skillet over medium-low heat. Add garlic-scallion mixture and cook until fragrant — about 30 seconds — stirring frequently. Whisk sauce to recombine and add to skillet. Bring to a boil to thicken and add vegetables. Stir to combine. Serve hot with rice.

To paraphrase Sara Bareilles, I’m not gonna write you a ratatouille recipe. (I promise that will be the last Sara Bareilles reference — ever — on this blog.) I’ve done it before, and with farmers markets overflowing with more zucchini and eggplant than a blogger knows what to do with, you can be sure you’ll be seeing a big crop of ratatouille posts on your favorite food blogs in the next week or so. I figure once Disney takes on a topic, there’s really nothing more I can add.

Not that the attention ratatouille garners is undeserved; packed with vegetables at the height of summer ripeness, it is one of the best testaments available to the joy of eating seasonally. In fact there may be no better way to enjoy zucchini, eggplant, bell peppers, onions and tomatoes all at the same time. But the real lesson of ratatouille lies not in the adherence to those core ingredients but in the happy combination of peak season produce, with nothing that’s not in season. Just about any combination will do, as long as the vegetables are fresh and ripe.

Luckily, this is the time of summer when the overabundance in farmers markets helps keep my kitchen stocked with nothing but fresh, ripe vegetables. The motivation for this summer stew was two large eggplants, but as I stooped down to remove these from the crisper drawer I kept seeing additional prospects for a seasonal stew: half a head of cabbage, a green pepper, five small leeks, tomatoes (the latter not, of course, stored in the refrigerator).

The great thing about a stew is you can be pretty lax about procedure since it’s all getting cooked together anyway. I cubed and salted my eggplant, since conventional wisdom suggests doing so will remove some kind of bitterness. I then sauteed sliced leeks and green bell pepper in a large amount of olive oil until the leeks were starting to brown deeply. I added the eggplant cubes and let them brown a bit too. Next went in the half head of cabbage, thinly sliced, a large sprig of thyme, and about ten roma tomatoes that I had pureed (and salted and sugared to make up for really lackluster flavor — you don’t win ‘em all at the farmers market). I added water to just about cover everything and let the pot stew away for a half an hour while I cooked some white rice. Right before serving the dish, I sprinkled it with fragrant basil shreds.

I was happy with the way this turned out, but I hope I don’t have you headed to the store in search of two eggplants, a half head of cabbage, a green pepper, five leeks and ten roma tomatoes because the point of all this was that if the ingredients for your summertime stew are fresh and in season, you won’t go wrong — it’s the spirit, not the letter, 0f a ratatouille recipe.

Cookbooks have a life cycle: when a book is new, it’s exciting, it might get cover to cover, torn bits of paper sprouting up like so many shoots in the spring marking promising recipes. Then comes experimentation: making each of those recipes, seeing which work and which don’t. And finally — tragically — the third age of cookbookdom; sad years spent languishing on the shelf, ignored but for the one or two recipes that keep the book from being sent off to the big cookbook library in the sky.

Some cookbooks can avoid this fate — maybe a copy of the Joy of Cooking that gets referenced for everything (I prefer Cook’s Illustrated’s New Best Recipe) — but most are destined to become so much shelf decoration.

Take Curried Favors: Family Recipes from South India by Maya Kaimal MacMillan. When I received this book as a gift, I was into Indian food in a big way. The book was a perfect gateway into the cuisine: easy, apparently authentic recipes that produced great food. In the first months I had this book I cooked widely from it, even preparing the multi-course dinner menus suggested in the back. We had such good times, Curried Favors and I. But, eventually, my enthusiasm for Indian food was crowded out by other cuisines and Curried Favors joined the other disgraced books of yesteryear on the shelf, pulled down only when I had a craving for that one recipe; in this case cholé — a curry of chickpeas and tomatoes.

Cholé is a household favorite for Martha and me, made so many times we don’t really need to look at the recipe anymore. But for whatever reason last week I got the urge to double check the recipe — maybe just to be sure I had the spice mixture right. What page was cholé on? The paper scrap bookmark had long since fallen out. To the index! C… ch.. hey, cabbage! In all my excitement for the familiar flavors of cholé I hadn’t forgotten that we had half a cabbage sitting in the crisper drawer, on its way to being thrown out, rotten in two weeks unless fate intervened.

And as fate would have it I found myself turning not to Cholé on page 93 but to Cabbage Thoren on page 73. Scanning the list of ingredients — coconut, a green chile, garlic, cumin, coriander, cayenne, turmeric, salt, mustard seeds, dried red peppers, bay leaves, rice, the aforementioned cabbage — we had everything on hand: it was meant to be.

I had never made Cabbage Thoren before that night — in spite of having the recipe in my possession more than eight years — and it’s a shame, because it was very good. And it got me thinking, maybe it’s time to start exploring Curried Favors again. Paging through to the elaborate suggested menus at the back, I started to plan another Indian feast.

This month is replete with bloggers’ suggestions for food resolutions. Here’s mine: find a cookbook you own that you have more or less forgotten, dust it off, and see what new things it has in store.

And sometimes you don’t. An idea for dinner, that is. It sounds odd, coming when the fields of the midwest are at their most bountiful, producing innumerable varieties of colorful, ripe produce. Mother Nature is providing to her fullest.

But Mother Nature threw us a curveball this week, in the form of 90ºF+ day after 90ºF+ day. Consequently, the Magic Chef, usually my ally in turning the weekly farmers market haul into various kinds of delicious, has become my bitter enemy and I avoid turning him on at all costs. Indeed, I absolutely refuse to give the Magic Chef the time of day. But there are still the vegetables sitting in the crisper drawer, begging for some transformation that I feel powerless to effect as Martha and I stew in our air-conditioningless apartment.

While the Magic Chef has betrayed me with his apartment-heating ways, a steadfast friend — one that stands by me in hot and cold — stepped to the fore: my Benrinner Mandoline. Even though I spend a lot of time cooking, I am really not much of a kitchen gadget person — you’ll rarely see me endorsing gear on this blog. That said, everybody should have a mandoline. Its uses are many, not least among them when you’re completely out of ideas for dinner you can pull out all your vegetables and just start slicing. Shredded purple cabbage? Beautiful! Fine julienne of carrots? Not if I don’t get to do radishes too! Green peppers? Well, I don’t really like them raw, but slice them thin enough and who can tell the difference? As my salad bowl began to fill, an idea started to form in my mind.

A purple cabbage, a half onion, a green pepper, several carrots, a couple of radishes and an ear of corn later I decided this was going to be a vaguely Asian salad, so I set about putting together a dressing of garlic, ginger, peanut sauce (in fact left over ají de mani from last week), soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and olive oil. Six tomatoes withering in the heat on the counter made a natural vessel for the salad, just as their pulp was a nice addition to the vegetable roster. To top it off, I happened to have some five-spice pork aspic sitting in the fridge from bánh mì — the kind of thing you save because you should but have no idea what you’re going to do with.

And that’s the great thing about no ideas — sometimes they turn into something else.

The light chill today was a reminder that fall — my favorite cooking season — is upon us. Fall brings many hearty possibilities ruled out by summer’s heat; suddenly it is possible, even desirable, to have the oven on for a few hours. Enter the braise—meat and vegetables stewed in rich liquid until tender.

This particular recipe was inspired by the small cabbages that Martha insisted we buy at the farmers’ market. When I saw them, my mind wandered to the bowl of crab apples sitting at home and the thick-cut pork chops I keep wanting to buy at Clancey’s. And so a braise was born.

Braised Pork, Apples and Cabbage

Some of the visual appeal of this dish is from the small (5″ diameter) cabbages that we found at the farmers’ market. If only large cabbages are available, use one, roughly chopped, and omit the browning step for the cabbage. Four regularly-sized, tart apples can be substituted for the crab apples; cut them into eighths, rather than quarters.

• 2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
• 2# bone-in pork roast
• Salt and pepper
• 1 large onion, sliced
• 2 fennel stalks or a small bulb, roughly chopped
• 1 quart pork stock (recipe below), cider or water
• 4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
• 3 small heads cabbage
• 8 crab apples (about 2″ in diameter)
• 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

Preheat oven to 300°F.

Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large Dutch oven (one that has an oven-proof lid) over medium-high heat. Thoroughly coat the pork roast with salt and pepper. Place the pork in the Dutch oven and brown on all sides, a few minutes per side. Remove the pork to a plate and drain all but 1 tablespoon of fat. Return pot to medium heat and add the onions and fennel. Cook until onions are soft and starting to brown. Add garlic cloves, pork roast, and enough pork stock/cider/water to come most of the way up the side of the roast. Bring to a boil, cover and place in oven. Cook for one hour.

Meanwhile, cut the cabbages into quarters. Cut the apples into quarters and slice out their cores. Heat remaining one tablespoon of olive oil in a 12″ skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add apple slices, cut side down. Cook until deep golden brown, about 4 minutes. Nudge the apples to the other cut side and cook until brown. Transfer apples to a plate. Place cabbage in skillet, one cut side down, and cook until starting to blacken on the edges. Flip the cabbage to the other cut side and repeat. Transfer cabbage to a plate.

After one hour of cooking, remove Dutch oven from oven. Taste the liquid and add salt and pepper as desired. Add cabbage, apples and vinegar and stir to combine. Arrange the pot so the liquid mostly covers everything. Return to oven and cook for another one hour, or until the pork is tender, but not necessarily falling off the bone.

Strain the liquid into a stockpot or large skillet. Return the solids to Dutch oven and cover to keep warm. Bring braising liquid to a rolling boil and continue cooking until reduced by half (or, until you’re tired of waiting). Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Arrange apples, cabbage, onions and fennel in a wide, shallow serving bowl. Slice or pull pork and arrange in center of vegetables. Pour reduced braising liquid over top of everything. Serve with hearty bread for sopping up the juice.

Quick Pork Broth:

Just in case you don’t have pork stock sitting around in the freezer (you might want to check in the back), here’s a quick way to get a flavorful broth that will work well as a braising liquid for pork.

• ¼# Ground pork
• Half an onion, roughly chopped (or onion scraps)
• 1 small carrot, roughly chopped

Combine all ingredients in a 2 quart saucepan. Add 4 ½ cups of water. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a bare simmer and allow to cook, partially covered, for one hour. Strain off the solids and discard.