Vegetable Heavy Recipes?

[CGDG]

I'm currently living in Beijing and I love to cook. I don't often have a lot of time and, quite frankly, I'm not that good. I make good meat dishes, mostly BBQ stuff (ie: burger, ribs, etc.). Most of my cooking in the West involved a large focus on potatoes and meat.

When I cook for friends their usual response is that there are not enough vegetable. Having lived in Beijing as long as I have, I am starting to agree with them. Unfortunately, most of the dishes I cook with vegetables I cannot find what I need here (pastas and the like are difficult to find sometimes and sauces, like holandase (sp?) are impossible to find). The others are all very plain (steam some vegetables and add cheese; plus cheese is expensive).

I'm in desperate need of some taste vegy-heavy recipes. Keep in mind, I have an oven and stove, but no microwave. Cheese is pretty pricy here, so I'd prefer recipes that didn't call for cheese. Otherwise, anything is fair game.

[Serpentine]

Gratins are good. Take a bunch of veggies - usually potato, but you can easily use sweet potato, pumpkin, carrot, kohl rabi, broccoli stalk, and just about any firm vegetable that you can cut into slices - cut them into slices, layer the slices in a casserole dish, pour over some seasoned milk, cream and/or stock (I'd include cheese as well, but if that's too expensive you can leave it out), bake on low-to-moderate until the veggies are tender and there's not too much liquid.

There's also veggie bakes - chop up a bunch of veggies roughly, cover with a creamy mixture or a tomatoey one, season, bake until tender.

Baked veggies - broccoli is surprisingly tasty when baked. You can also do carrots, tomatoes, mushrooms etc in addition to the standard potatoes and pumpkin.

Salads of various kinds...

[CGDG]

Thanks for the suggestions. I need to stay away from salad. Some friends have mentioned that raw veggies in China are a no-no. Veggies with dip, as well, don't tend to go over very well.

[factotum]

If you can't find Hollandaise sauce, why not make it yourself? It mostly consists of eggs and butter, which I would have thought should be available in China.

[Serpentine]

Just to clarify, are you looking mostly for side dishes, or whole meals with lots of veggies?

[Eldan]

Curries? Or stir-fry?

Vegetable stir-fries is easy to make and quite versatile.

[valadil]

Just about any veggie is good roasted in olive oil with salt and pepper. Garlic and butter help too. Pretty much anything is good in a stir fry if you've got onions and bell peppers in it. Now I'm hungry again.

[Ifni]

I am fond of these Ethiopian recipes - they're best with injera, which may be hard to get in your location, but still good without it.
Yeabesha Gomen
Mesir Wot
Kik Alicha

They mostly just rely on interesting spice combinations - the latter two use lentils as a base (with tomatoes for Mesir Wot), the first one uses kale or collard greens (any other bitter green should work fine too).

You may get laughed at for trying to cook (Westernized) Chinese food as a non-Chinese person in Beijing, but this recipe is pretty easy:
Moo Shu Veggies
Here's another one I made recently, which I just mention 'cause I imagine you can probably get good-quality ingredients in Beijing:
Snow Cabbage with Bean Curd Sheets (scroll down)

If you can get rice cakes, here's a Korean veggies-and-rice-cakes dish that worked out pretty well for me:
Royal Court Rice Cakes

Not really a vegetable, but the best way to make crispy tofu imo:
Roasted Tofu

Anyway, that's the result of my first trawl through my bookmarks

If you're looking for side dishes to have with meat... hmm. Asparagus is delicious very lightly cooked, just sautéed a little. I have an amazing recipe for asparagus crepes with a cucumber-and-avocado sauce at home, but I think it'd be almost as good without the crepes. (Although the avocado doesn't really get cooked at all, so the sauce might cause an issue with the "no raw veggies" rule.) Watercress or pea pod stems or spinach sautéed with garlic can be lovely. Mashed potato or sweet potato is comfort food.

[Bhu]

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-cook-an...teps-508172336

http://www.wikihow.com/Stir-Fry

http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/06/w...ng-basics.html

http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-stir...-kitchn-171758

http://www.lochan.org/keith/personal/stirfry.html

The above links should give you some idea on stir frying veggies

http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/too...getables24.htm

That'll give you an idea of carious cooking times for veggies by method so you know when to add them to the wok/pot.

I can look for curries as well if you want

[CGDG]

If you can't find Hollandaise sauce, why not make it yourself? It mostly consists of eggs and butter, which I would have thought should be available in China.

I honestly haven't tried. I'll work on that. Do you know a good recipe for the sauce? I'd like not to blunder it the first time, just cause I don't know what I'm doing.

Just to clarify, are you looking mostly for side dishes, or whole meals with lots of veggies?

Both. Either or is fine. I'm just looking to get as many ideas as I can so I can try them out.

Curries? Or stir-fry?

Vegetable stir-fries is easy to make and quite versatile.

Just about any veggie is good roasted in olive oil with salt and pepper. Garlic and butter help too. Pretty much anything is good in a stir fry if you've got onions and bell peppers in it. Now I'm hungry again.

Stir-fry's don't tend to work, not the way they are immagined in North America and Europe. I've tried a couple simple pork and beef stir-fry's and I'm quite often heavy with the garlic or butter. Regardless of what I add, I'm continuously told they are too bland. They don't have enough of a specific flavour, in the fashion it is common used in China, for it to be accepted by my guests.

Usually it is not oily enough and does not have enough taste. If I try to add salt, it becomes to salty. The issue seems to be that I don't understand how to properly use the multitude of different soy-sauces in China properly. I'm used to one kind of soy-sauce (that being the only type of soy sauce I ever saw in Canada). In China there are a plethora of different soy-sauces with different flavours. Each is supposed to be used in conjuction with a different kind of food and/or another soy-sauce.

Thank you Ifni and Bhu for the recipes. I'll take a gander.

Curry is something I've only tried once in China, with disasterous effects. However, it was because it does not have the "right kind of spicy flavour" (according to one person who ate it). I think I'm going to look for recipes for some other indian dishes, like Saag, and see if that works out better. They did love the buter chicken, though.


EDIT:

[-snip] If you're looking for side dishes to have with meat... hmm. Asparagus is delicious very lightly cooked, just sautéed a little. I have an amazing recipe for asparagus crepes with a cucumber-and-avocado sauce at home, but I think it'd be almost as good without the crepes. (Although the avocado doesn't really get cooked at all, so the sauce might cause an issue with the "no raw veggies" rule.) Watercress or pea pod stems or spinach sautéed with garlic can be lovely. Mashed potato or sweet potato is comfort food.

There are a lot of Korean Restaurants here. I'll leave the rice cakes to them.

Could I trouble you for the asparagus recipe? It sounds delicious. To be fair, I haven't found asaparagus here yet. I will look more intently for it now.

[golentan]

Roman vegetable Stew. Family recipe

Tomatoes (diced, canned or fresh), pasta (I recommend bow ties) Diced Onion, any vegetables you feel like (carrots, Celery, peppers, what have you), broth (beef or vegetable stock), Crushed Garlic, salt and pepper.

Add ingredients, with amounts roughly decreasing as you go down the list, until you run out of room in the pot. Simmer over low heat for an hour or two, adding water to keep the liquid level just covering the top layer of ingredients as you go, don't cook to the point that things fall apart but don't stop until everything is tender. Makes enough food for a month (depending on size of the pot) and is delicious. Works with almost any vegetables.

Edit: Since you mentioned that pasta is hard to find, sub in potatoes. It's also really good with a little tabasco or similar spicy sauces added to taste when serving, and sometimes mozzarella if you can get it.

[enderlord99]

I honestly haven't tried. I'll work on that. Do you know a good recipe for the sauce? I'd like not to blunder it the first time, just cause I don't know what I'm doing.

Melt a stick of butter. Mix it with a half-cup of mayonnaise. Maybe add a little bit of lemon juice, though you don't really need to. There: Hollandaise sauce.

Boiled artichokes with Hollandaise sauce are delicious.

[Ifni]

Asparagus Crepes (taken from the Vegetarian Epicure Book Two, by Anna Thomas):

The basic recipe is for 1.5lbs of asparagus (about 24-30 medium-sized stalks), and 12 crepes. The recipe itself is basically just "cook the asparagus in salted boiling water for 8-10 minutes" (you can instead sauté them for 5 minutes with a little oil, if you prefer), "then put them in the crepes with a bit of cheese, then pour the sauce over the top", so I'll just give you the sauce recipe. (You could pour this directly over the asparagus with no issues.) It's basically a white-sauce base with cucumber, avocado and lemon flavors added - the book notes it goes well with savory crepes, omelets and veggies generally.

Cucumber-Avocado Sauce:

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-2 large cucumbers (about 1 1/4 lbs)
-5 tbsp butter (you can reduce this down to about 2tbsp if you like, and/or use an oil other than butter for sautéing the cucumbers, the cookbook's from the 70s and wasn't trying to be low-fat)
-2 tbsp flour
-1 cup milk, heated
-1 small ripe avocado (about 6 oz)
-1 tsp finely grated lemon rind
-3.5 tbsp lemon juice
-1.5 tbsp minced onion

Peel, seed and finely dice the cucumbers. Saute them in 3 tbsp of the butter, stirring often, for about 20 minutes, until all the excess moisture is evaporated. Melt the remaining butter in a medium-sized saucepan and stir in the flour. Cook the result (called a "roux") for 2-3 minutes over low heat, stirring constantly, and then whisk in the milk. Continue stirring over medium heat until the sauce is thick. Season with salt and pepper.

Remove the sauce from the heat. Scoop the avocado out of its shell and mash or chop it. Add the avocado, cucumber, lemon rind and lemon juice to the sauce and puree (if you need it to be smooth, otherwise don't bother).

Return the sauce to the heat, add the minced onion, and heat it up just short of simmering - do not let it boil, or the flavor of the avocado will be affected.

Here's the same book's recipe for Hollandaise Sauce, but it notes that it's tricky. I've never made this one and indeed it looks pretty finicky to me - you can probably find a simpler one.

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Ingredients:
3 large egg yolks
1-1.5 tbsp lemon juice
Pinch of pepper
1 tbsp butter
7 tbsp melted butter

Instructions:
Put the yolks into the top of a double boiler and beat them, cold, until they are creamy. Beat in 1 tbsp of the lemon juice and a pinch of pepper.

Put the top of the boiler over hot, but not boiling, water. Add the tbsp of unmelted butter and beat the egg yolk - lemon juice mixture steadily with a whisk until the butter has melted and the egg yolks have thickened. Make sure you scrape the egg yolks off the sides and corners of the saucepan frequently. They should stay smooth and creamy as they thicken - if they start to curdle or lump, remove the saucepan from above the hot water and stand it in a shallow bowl of cool water for a moment, as you continue to beat.

Once the yolks have thickened, add a tiny bit of the melted butter and keep whisking over hot water until the butter is absorbed. Repeat. At some point the sauce should thicken and become glossy-smooth - at this point the emulsion you want has formed, but if you overheat it or add the butter too quickly, you'll undo it. Keep adding the butter gradually until it's all in. Season with salt and extra lemon juice if desired.

If the sauce doesn't thicken, or separates, put 1 tbsp of it into a smaller bowl with a tsp of lemon juice, beat until it goes thick and glossy, and then beat in the rest of the sauce a spoonful at a time.

Do you need a crepe recipe? If so I have a few, of varying simplicity.

Also, is getting milk a problem, or is it just cheese? I'm vegetarian and have a pretty large supply of vegan recipes. If you like specific vegetables, I can pull out recipes for those.

EDIT: That Roman vegetable stew looks like my mother's minestrone recipe and should indeed be delicious

Mushroom recipes might work well? It sounds like you should steer clear of dishes with unusual spicing, so my Ethiopian suggestions may not be a good idea, even though I really like them. Sliced mushrooms sautéed with garlic and butter for five minutes make a good side dish, and are great on toast. If cream is ok and available, creamy mushroom sauces go well with a lot of things.

[Kioku]

Something I'd suggest is steamed squash, if you can get crookneck there. If not, most any summer squash *should* do I think. Just steam until tender, add butter and a tiny bit of salt if you like, and wait for the hot squash to melt the butter. Actually, I think this can be applied to a lot of veggies, to just steam then add butter and salt.

Re: stir fry, are you using ginger?

Also, when cooking in oil, I rather like adding crushed garlic to the oil before cooking anything in it, while the oil is heating. It adds excellent flavor that spreads out pretty well through everything else. On the note of oil, what type are you using generally? Olive has its own flavor that strongly impacts things, so if you want to avoid changing the taste so much while keeping healthy, I'd go with a 80-85% canola, 15-20% olive blend. As an added bonus, it has a high smoke point, so you can afford to use more heat if you want to cook something in a way that benefits from that.

[Ifni]

Hmm, how about risotto? A quick search for vegan risotto pulled up this asparagus risotto, and this mushroom risotto: you could easily add other veggies.

[Togath]

More an appetizer than a dish, but this was one that came to my mind;

You'll need peanuts(Precooked, but with minimal/no seasoning. Large ones are better for this dish), and soy sauce(you mentioned having a lot of varieties... So try to choose a rich but plain[no extra flavours in addition to the soy and salt] flavoured one, I suppose).

For preparation, you may have to eyeball things a little. I usually aim for about a third to a quarter of the amount of peanuts(in volume) in soy sauce, but I also usually make this in small batches.

Next the heat... I usually use a microwave, but a pan should work fine.
Once the soy sauce and peanuts are mixed, move them to the heat source. Stir often(/constantly, a pan may need more stirring) until the soy sauce is has been reduced to a coating on the peanuts.
I usually aim for the coating still being a little wet, since it gives a better feel in my opinion, but dry ones are not necessarily bad(though they are saltier).

I usually consume them pretty much as soon as they're cool enough to eat, though they are still decent even if they've cooled down further.

edit: one nice thing about this dish is that you can easily increase/decrease the salt levels, by adding more or less soy sauce(mentioned in case the 1/4of the amount of peanuts ends up too salty. It's a bit of a guess, since I've never asexually measured the amount I use).
Cooked dry soybeans might also work for this dish(if you can find them, not sure how common precooked dry ones are. I can get them at a nearby store... But you can also buy fresh cassava root there, so it may be a quirky store), though I've admittedly not tried them with it.

[Bhu]

Are you in an area where you can grill?

[Closet_Skeleton]

I usually just throw whatever vegetables (carrots, onion, ginger, cellery, pepper, spring onion, crushed garlic) I have in a wok, then add a teaspoon of chili bean sauce, some hoisin sauce and some random soy source. Then I add a beaten egg at the end and serve it on top of rice.

There's also vegetable curry, but its the Japanese not the Chinese who are obsessed with that.

[Havelocke]

If you do have access to a grill I recommend grilled eggplant with olive oil and herbs sprinkled on them. Or sweet potatoes baked with some brown sugar and butter. Do they have spaghetti squash over there? it makes a great replacement for grainy noodles and adds veggies to the mix. It is very good with an herb vinaigrette sauce or even pesto. I have heard that raw veggies in certain countries is dangerous. Rinse everything thoroughly and cook well. Grilling asparagus or even large slices of carrots with butter and herbs can be tasty too. Portobello mushroom caps with a tangy bbq sauce instead of a meat patty is very good, I usually put cheese on them but if cheese is pricey then forego that. Good luck to you and enjoy!

[TheThan]

You could try asking your Chinese friends how to cook Chinese food properly.

Or are your friends interested in trying out western food?

[PallElendro]

Do you like and can you make soup?
Paprikás krumpli

[Knaight]

Do you have decent access to noodles in general? If you do, there's a combination stir-fry noodle dish that works pretty well, involving making a sauce ahead of time:

Spoiler: The Dish.

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The sauce: You need a basis of some sort, that is preferably water based. Soy sauce could work, vinegar is ideal. Toss in spices, dried vegetables, and, if using vinegar, anything that pickles reasonably well. Use at least one hot pepper, and let the entire thing sit for at least a week in a refrigerator. A personal favorite is to take a radish (particularly if you have access to larger ones), some garllic and some hot peppers, cut them finely, then toss them in vinegar along with some anise. If you have good thickening agents, they can also work here.

The noodles: Boil noodles as standard, strain out almost all of the water - leaving just enough that it will probably still boil off. Then add various spices and flavorings to the water, and stir it together while boiling off the last of it (with minimal added heat). You can also boil some veggies into the noodles - if you've got cabbage, it's probably the better use for it.

The vegetables. Cut up vegetables. Get a wok, put some of the sauce in it, add a small touch of oil, and get it steaming. Then, add the vegetables, and cook them up in the wok. It generally works best to add them one at a time. Consistency pretty much determines order here - the harder and less flexible the veggie, the sooner it goes in.

Optional meat: If you're going to use meat, marinate it in something. The same veggie sauce you used can work just fine for a marinade. You can actually use a pseudo-barbecued meat, though going lighter on the barbecue sauce is reccomended. This is also an excellent place for a soy sauce.

Make up the different parts, mix them all together. The amounts can be highly variable, but the noodle volume can't drop too far below the veggie volume.

Rice can be substituted for noodles. It involves no dairy of any sort, which should help with the economic side, and the sauce can be bulk produced ahead of time and is also useful for some simpler meals. For instance, you can add it to rice as part of the water you boil it in.

[Castaras]

You could try doing fajitas with lots of peppers. Brown mince/chunks of beef, add in peppers to brown those, put paprika and some chilli powder on top. Grab some salsa either bought or made yerself, some sour cream and some tortillas. Serve as a do it yourself meal or fill up fajitas before the meal if you want something more prepared.