Hi and welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes. A significant share of the emails I get from you all are about vegetarian recipes: You love them, you want more of them. Me too. As a meat-eater who is trying to cook meatless more often, I am in need of reasonable strategies and fresh ideas. And so here is my hero Julia Moskin, with a new story about what omnivores get wrong about vegetarian cooking. A little preview: You cannot only make pasta! (Julia’s favorite weeknight vegetarian dish on NYT Cooking: this cheesy, white bean mozzarella bake, featured below.)
I’m so delighted to report that we have more delicious, speedy vegetarian and vegan recipes on NYT Cooking than ever before. A record four of the five recipes this week are vegetarian, and I could have done an entirely different lineup many times over. For meat-eaters, there is a crowd pleaser of a chicken dish, too, and there’s no reason you couldn’t add a bit of bacon or sausage to the white beans or pasta.
You too can be a reader who sends me emails and gets results! It’s dearemily@nytimes.com, and I love to hear from you.
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Here are five dishes for the week:
1. Cheesy White Bean-Tomato Bake
Make this NYT Cooking favorite exactly as written, or play around with it to your heart’s content: It’s flexible. Kale, spinach, red-pepper flakes, pasta, smoked paprika or anchovies (if you eat seafood) would all be excellent additions. I’d definitely serve it with garlic bread, though. You only live once, am I right?
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2. Spiced Seared Eggplant With Pearl Couscous
I’m really feeling eggplant this fall, but I’ve had a hard time finding great recipes that are fast enough to make after work — that’s why I’m particularly excited about this one. It’s from the writer Adeena Sussman’s new Israeli cookbook, “Sababa,” which made our list of the best new cookbooks of fall 2019. Melissa Clark was the first one on staff here to cook it, and she raved about the combination of deeply spiced soft eggplant and chewy couscous. A must make.
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