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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThe Benefits and Pitfalls of In-Flight Vegetarian Dining \n\n The vegetable era has arrived. No longer are carrots, beets, and cauliflower mere accessories, fated to sit humbly alongside whatever noble proteins are being honored by the chef. At Dirt Candy, a vegetable restaurant in New York, Amanda Cohen tempts unbelievers with an irresistible starter, much as the wicked witch captivated Hansel and Gretel with that gingerbread house.\n\n Almost all customers begin their meal with jalape&amp;amp;#xF1;o hush puppies\u2014hot, crunchy, spicy, and sweet on the inside. A side of maple butter adds to the bliss. When I last ate there, the hush puppies were soon surpassed by re-imagined onion pancakes, soft and puffy; fried cabbage jalape on a kohlrabi-noodle salad; and most astonishing of all, parsnip pillows on grilled watermelon radish. The parsnips in fact constituted new-style gnocchi, more alluring than the traditional Italian kind.\n\n &amp;quot;What you\u2019re eating,&amp;quot; Cohen said to me after that meal, &amp;quot;are not luxury ingredients. My vegetables come in bags. This is not Per Se, where every vegetable is beautiful and comes from someplace else. The carrots I serve here are just carrots.&amp;quot;\n\n But of course, they are not. We are entering a time of equalopportunity eating\u2014vegetables have achieved parity with meat and fish, inconceivable throughout most of my lifetime. They have taken their place at the center of the plate.\n\n Until recently, few chefs had come close to unlocking the genetic code for transforming vegetables into satisfying main courses. Those who tried were considered freakish, like the alchemists who tried to change lead into gold. Finally, Cohen and other chefs have created the soul-satisfying entr\u00E9e that is not a half pound of beef. &amp;quot;Vegetables,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;are the Wild West of cooking.&amp;quot;\n\n\n\n My generation possessed deeply personal thoughts about vegetables. We disliked them, each of us in our own way. It\u2019s not that we didn\u2019t eat them. We consumed multiple servings of McDonald\u2019s fries.\n\n I grew up not caring if I ever saw another salad. Only twice do I recall an uncooked vegetable astounding me. One was organic asparagus served at the restaurant Sean\u2019s Panaroma in Australia, the other a Mokum carrot plucked from the earth at Blue Hill at Stone Barns.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Five Dishes That Will Make You Forget About Beef\n\n 1. Salt-Roasted Golden Beets, Vedge, Philadelphia\n\n Beets below, beets above. The beets go on....\n\n 2. Watercress Soup, Joe Beef, Montreal\n\n Soup prepared with ham broth topped with toast, aioli, and saut\u00E9ed escargots.\n\n 3. Eggplant Parmigiana, Lincoln, Manhattan; and Leo\u2019s Latticini, Queens\n\n At Lincoln, Chef Jonathan Benno\u2019s version is almost home cooking. At Leo\u2019s Latticini, Marie DeBenedittis prepares hers non-gooey but still cheesy.\n\n 4. Agnolotti, Spago, Los Angeles\n\n Wolfgang Puck\u2019s ravioli-like packets are stuffed with chestnut puree and mascarpone cheese.\n\n 5. Black-Cabbage Galette, Dovetail, Manhattan\n\n John Fraser\u2019s galette is brilliantly buttery, and his cabbage straight from paradise.\n\n When all right-thinking people insisted that vegetables be organic or heirloom, I remained unmoved. I have until recently characterized the eating of vegetables as a chore. I had little affection, merely a distant regard, for anything green other than mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.\n\n Vegetable-based idealism was invented by Alice Waters in the \u201970s, which means that almost a half century passed before vegetables ascended to the pinnacle where they are now. If the process was slow, her acolytes were many. Most prominent was Dan Barber, who worked at Chez Panisse, her Berkeley restaurant, and has matched her as a vegetable idealist\u2014he\u2019s the man who grew that Mokum carrot. Her pedestal is so broad it accommodates all manner of chefs. Ren\u00E9 Redzepi of Noma, known for foraging, is among her admirers. So is David Chang of Momofuku Ss&amp;amp;#xE4;m Bar, identified with pork.\n\n To me Waters\u2019s greatest legacy is not her idealism and unrelenting proselytizing for organic vegetables. More worthwhile is her dedication to all plant life, including the ugly sort. In the front ranks of those that rose from lowliness and obscurity were Brussels sprouts.\n\n I recall them served cut up, seasoned with a splash of sherry vinegar, and fried crisp at Vetri in Philadelphia. They made the tectonic plates of my animal-protein palate shift. I ate them whole, with palm sugar and tamarind paste, at Little Serow in Washington, D.C. Then I encountered the Brussels-sprout taco with almond mole at Empell&amp;amp;#xF3;n Cocina in New York, and I knew that the future of Brussels sprouts was safely in the hands of the hipsters. After all, they\u2019re the people who influence how we eat these days.\n\n Kale has made the greatest comeback of all vegetables. One winter day it appeared in a salad at Battersby in Brooklyn, crisped up and placed atop veggies dressed with fish sauce, garlic, and chiles. An entire borough was transfid. Last year kale started making inroads in Paris, where the exceptionally vegetable-friendly Alain Passard of the Michelin three-star Restaurant Arp&amp;amp;#xE8;ge said, &amp;quot;It has a personality, a character, a power. It unlocks creativity. It touches on all the senses.&amp;quot;\n\n Great as the products used in vegetable preparations might be, I believe that the triumph of vegetables is more about great cooking: An heirloom beet prepared by somebody like me is going to taste worse than a canned beet cooked by somebody who knows what he\u2019s doing. That said, wonderful products are preferable to mediocre ones, and it is obvious that chefs are now passionate about sourcing better vegetables. They are doing more with them than anyone from past generations thought possible, a triumph of imagination, not newfangled cooking processes.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Vegetables used to be prepared by dumping them in a pot of boiling water. Then came grilling. A quarter century ago, black streaks from outdoor charring elicited sighs from awed guests. Now vegetables regularly show up raw, roasted, pickled, marinated, caramelized, blackened (ashtonishing!), steamed, smoked, and most fun of all, smoke-steamed. At Eleven Madison Park in New York, chef Daniel Humm put carrot tartare on his menu instead of commonplace beef tartare. And what could be more astounding than this: The butchering of vegetables has become an art form.\n\n\n\n If you are a natural-born Californian, like chef Thomas Keller, farm-to-table has always been part of your life. This is a difficult concept for East Coast urbanites, those of us who grew up eating A&amp;amp;P frozen green beans, to grasp.\n\n As soon as he became the chief cook\u2014chef would be too grand a word\u2014at a restaurant called La Rive in Catskill, New York, Keller started growing vegetables. &amp;quot;Although most of them were eaten by the deer, we were trying,&amp;quot; he says. When he purchased The French Laundry twenty years ago, it came with six tiny vegetable plots. He has remained steadfast in his admiration of vegetables, although now his are sourced from a three-acre plot across the road. The land is tended by four full-time gardeners. He also receives vegetables from local farmers who bring them to the back door of the restaurant. &amp;quot;People stop by with bags of something,&amp;quot; he says. Here\u2019s a tip for those thinking of knocking: His favorite vegetable has always been beets.\n\n Keller had a vegetable\u2014not quite vegetarian\u2014menu at The French Laundry from the start, with 15 percent of customers ordering from it. &amp;quot;That might not sound like much, but a lot of emphasis goes into it,&amp;quot; he says. When I mention the challenges of preparing vegetables, he puts it this way: &amp;quot;Cooking them is fairly easy, although it is labor-intensive. Organizing the cooking for them to come out at the same time is difficult.&amp;quot;\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n All that we on the East Coast now love about vegetables has been known to those at the other end of the country for decades. The meticulous sourcing, the thought going into the cooking, and the appreciation shown by customers\u2014that\u2019s all relatively novel around here. Keller reminded me of something so obvious that I was ashamed to admit I hadn\u2019t considered it: At a time when we are returning to traditional thinking about food as a treat that varies with the seasons, vegetables have an infinite number of them. &amp;quot;There\u2019s an old saying that there are four seasons, but that\u2019s not true of vegetables,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Each vegetable has its own season. Peas are three weeks. Fava beans are four. Asparagus is very short. Vegetables are week to week.&amp;quot;\n\n Without sourcing exquisite vegetables, chefs are learning that care in preparation makes the difference. Just as every protein does not have to be the white meat of a blue-footed Bresse chicken or the fillet of prime Black Angus beef, every vegetable does not have to be gently lifted from the cradle of the earth and rushed to the back door of a three-star restaurant. Just as an abundance of pleasure can come from lesser cuts of meat, joy can be found in everyday vegetables.\n\n Absolute proof of this is the re-emergence of cauliflower, previously known to me only as smelly stuff. It was always the only vegetable\u2014perhaps the only food\u2014I despised. Now I find myself transfid by how good it can be.\n\n At Keller\u2019s Per Se, I ate an unreasonably satisfying cauliflower velout\u00E9, creamy and pure, thick and luxurious and scented with black truffles, the ultimate triumph of any meatless meal. The real surprise was that I liked the velout\u00E9 so much. The reek of cauliflower, its undercurrent of corruption, was gone.\n\n\n\n I hope from all I\u2019ve said that nobody thinks I\u2019m becoming a vegetarian. What a foolish notion that is, to insist only on food with nutritional value. I\u2019m not a farm-to-table guy. I\u2019m a store-to-kitchen guy. There is nothing spiritual about my transformation. I do not look into a bowl of verdant spring-pea soup and see renewal. I look into a bowl of pea soup and hope to see flecks of meat from a ham bone.\n\n Dovetail in Manhattan best emplifies this relatively new trend: vegetables as the main element in a serving that includes meat. The restaurant offers a meatless-Monday menu and a mostly-meatless-Monday menu. It\u2019s time for a confession: I like vegetables a whole lot more if they come with a little meat. Some of the best dishes I\u2019ve eaten recently were those with both elements, the vegetables dominating. (This seems to be the best way to eat, which I only wish I had discovered. Others beat me to it.) I have become a committed vegetable eater.\n\n It\u2019s not easy to convince people of this. When I tell a waiter that I wish to eat vegetables, he assumes I am a vegetarian. Nobody thinks that I might simply be in the mood for them. Such a combination\u2014less meat, more produce\u2014does no harm to the palate. In fact, it does considerable good. When I eat that way, I discover an added benefit: I crave fewer desserts. However, I did have rosemary-eggplant tiramisu at Dirt Candy and sticky-toffee-parsnip cake at Dovetail that were brilliant examples of culinary sleight of hand.\n\n The four-course Monday tasting menus at Dovetail allow the diner to transport himself between meatless options and not-entirely-meatless options. I admit my two favorite dishes there were entirely meatless. One was the gnudi, which were melting packets of horseradish-accented cheesy pleasure seemingly devoid of corporeal structure, so light they seemed pinned to the plate by their beet-reduction sauce. The other was a black-cabbage galette. Never before have I had creamy, sensuous cabbage. I doubt that I will experience it again.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Dinner at Blue Hill is the most effortless of all vegetable-and-meat experiences. Everything from the plant kingdom seems to grow at this restaurant-and-farm complex in Westchester, and each vegetable is so startlingly sweet, I have wondered if Dan Barber injects sugar into the soil. My meal at the Manhattan branch of Blue Hill included a vegetable-focused, slightly meaty entr\u00E9e of Forono beets with bordelaise sauce, which is decidedly not vegetarian, inasmuch as one of its ingredients is bone marrow. These deeply flavored beets, about as large as sausages, were unknown to me as well as to Google. When I first Googled &amp;quot;Forono beets,&amp;quot; the response was &amp;quot;Did you mean: Corona beer?&amp;quot;\n\n The dish that encapsulates what I have learned about vegetables is called Garden, and it comes from The Elm, in Brooklyn. It\u2019s in a dark blue Staub cocotte and is intended for two. The serving pot sits in the middle of the table, an exquisite example of vegetables taking center stage, and it contains anywhere from thirty to sixty herbs and vegetables, depending on the season. I came in winter, and I found mushrooms, carrots, turnips, shallots, potatoes, and cauliflower, to name a few, each one individually cooked before being assembled within the pot.\n\n At the top were thinly sliced raw and pickled vegetables. The middle level consisted of glazed and buttered vegetables, and on the bottom were roasted vegetables I couldn\u2019t stop eating. When I got to this substructure, I started spearing every chunk, twirling it in the lingering liquid. I was surprised that vegetable juices could be so enticing. I later learned that the bottom layer of vegetables had been bathed in ham butter. What I couldn\u2019t resist was an impromptu ham-butter-veggie sauce.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n The Garden epitomized all that I now find irresistible about vegetables\u2014their proud place as the centerpiece of a meal and their pairing with a modest quantity of meat. It also demonstrated why vegetable cooking is so difficult. The items were individually prepped before going into the pot, some of them pickled long before the restaurant opened for business.\n\n When I ate that dish, I thought back to what vegetables were like for most of my life. In my childhood, my mother bought bin-battered carrots from a grocery store, cut them into rings, and then boiled them until the orange started to fade. Later, I was among those who faithfully followed the instructions of Julia Child, who taught us to braise them until they were limp, then take the mess we had made and over-sauce it. I\u2019m not sure of everything that lies ahead, but I do know that vegetables will be the next wonder of the dining world."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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