Here are some chances to see me in person -- and get a signed copy of "Cool Beans"!

You remember the last terrible veggie burger you ate. I know you do. It was either so dry and crumbly that no amount of condiment could save it (or save you), or so wet and mushy that the patty started to squeeze out of the bun when you ate it (yum?). As the food and dining editor of The Washington Post, and a longtime vegetarian, I’ve tasted hundreds of veggie burgers in restaurants. I can count on one hand the number of truly great ones. This includes those high-tech, modern patties by Impo

“We’re just here for the beans.” That’s what we told the waiter at Máximo Bistrot in Mexico City, where my husband, Carl, and I were honeymooning. More specifically, the beans we had heard so much about, the ones chef Eduardo Garcia calls his “very, very old fashioned” soup. These beans, which he gets from the state of Hidalgo, are named cacahuate because they resemble peanuts when raw. (As I discovered later, they’re the same variety as cranberry or borlotti.)

At the risk of sounding, well, obvious, sometimes the only thing I want is mac and cheese (or, with my apostrophes appropriately in place, “mac ’n’ cheese”). You know how those cravings hit: You get a glimpse of a recipe or a dish and you can’t get the idea out of your head until it’s in your stomach. What will it take to get from there to here? That’s how I felt when I saw a recipe for a vivid green version of the dish in Jamie Oliver’s new cookbook.

Pasta with mushrooms: It was the default (and sometimes only!) vegetarian dish in restaurants for probably far too long. We’ve come a long way — now it’s entirely possible to eat out without ever feeling the need to declare a dietary restriction if all you’re doing is avoiding meat and seafood. That’s how many options there are on most modern, urban menus. Exactly none of that progress means that pasta with mushrooms has lost its appeal. If anything, the dish now seems almost nostalgic. At Fel

If there’s one thing better than a baked potato, it’s a twice-baked potato. You know the drill: You scoop out the cooked flesh, mix it with some cheesy-fatty goodness, spoon it back into the shells and bake again until it’s bubbling hot and browned, maybe even crispy on top. Retro, and good. This recipe, from BuzzFeed’s Goodful brand, takes the idea in a different direction, with sweet potatoes treated to ingredients popular in Middle Eastern cooking.

If you’ve had just one or maybe two minestrones in your life, you might be excused for thinking that they’re always the same — summer vegetables, say, with tomatoes and beans and tiny pasta. But the beauty of this Italian soup is that it is many things to many people, and it varies widely by season and geography. Some versions include rice instead of pasta, peas instead of (or in addition to) beans. In Liguria, they add that region’s beloved pesto. No matter where it’s made, the soup is inspired

Black-eyed peas are a Southern staple, especially on New Year’s Day, when cooks combine them with rice for Hoppin’ John. Eat them for good luck, if you’re into that sort of thing. These little legumes are staples in plenty of other cultures’ diets, too, all year round. I love Nigerian-style stewed black-eyed peas (often served with fried plantains), the lobia masala of north India and the African-Caribbean black-eyed-pea fritters called accra (also known as akara or accara).

I’m sure it’s my Texas upbringing, but I never trust a chili recipe that doesn’t pack some heat. Generally, I’m not as much of a purist about the dish as I once was; moving to a plant-based diet will do that to you, especially when it comes to something as meat-heavy as a traditional chile con carne. Still, the dish needs to live up to its name: What’s chili without chiles?

Even nowadays, some people think tofu is good for only a few select treatments. I love crispy cubes of roasted tofu as much as the next vegetarian. But that’s not the only way to cook it, nor the only set of qualities I’m going for. I also like crumbling it into a pan, spicing it up and serving it to those who don’t consume eggs, blending it into a salad dressing or even eating it cold with crunchy toppings.

No nut butter — even the best store-bought — can beat one you make from freshly toasted nuts. Cookbook author Amy Chaplin proves you don’t need special equipment to make it, either: just a food processor and enough time. Chaplin’s original recipe doesn’t include maple syrup, but we like its touch of sweetness. You can also experiment with any other of your favorite nuts, seeds, spices and additional flavorings: hazelnuts with cinnamon and cocoa, almonds and sunflower seeds with coconut, and so m

This week, when Thanksgiving planning might be giving you culinary tunnel vision, it can be easy to lose track of all the other meals you need to be eating. That’s where a dish like this one comes in handy: It’s got just a few ingredients, many of them pantry staples. It’s hearty enough for dinner, light enough for lunch, flexible enough for eaters of various dietary persuasions. (Just turn it into a side for carnivores or add an egg for the non-vegan vegetarians.)

Free-form tarts, such as the Italian crostata and the French galette, are some of the easiest filled-pastry dishes to master, because, well, there’s so little to actually master: No need to be careful not to stretch the dough as you put it in a pie dish or tart pan and risk shrinkage. No need for any decorative edge work. No need, even, to trim the pastry to fit anything. Just roll it out to a rough circle, fill as desired, and lift the pastry up and over, crimping just enough to hold everything

Carrots love spice. And they can handle a good dose of it: One of my favorite treatments is to sprinkle them with an assortment of warming, perhaps smoky, sometimes even hot spices before roasting, and then drizzle them with a little honey for sweetness and citrus for balancing tartness. Delicious. Those same carrots take well to blending, too. Just last week, I had an oversupply, so after a few days of eating them in bowls and alongside mains, I remembered just how much I loved the carrot humm

Fruit adds something special to savory dishes: a generous dose of seasonality. We can get so many fruits year-round, but when they’re at their in-season peak, there’s nothing like, say, citrus to spark a winter salad, grilled peaches to make a barbecue sauce sing of summer or pears to turn a bowl of pasta into something positively fall-ish. The sweetness of pears is nuanced and subtle, much more so than any hit of sugar, maple or honey.

Every fall, the sight of winter squashes in all their glory — stacked in bins at the supermarket, arranged in piles at the farmers market — brings me a shiver of joy almost as invigorating as the realization that I can finally turn on the oven at any time of day without worrying it’ll overheat the house. Roasting is my preferred way to cook so many vegetables, and these babies are no exception. My favorite varieties are the drier, firmer ones such as kabocha, acorn and red kuri, partly because

Two things stop me from making pot pies for other than special occasions: 1) The pastry, which takes time to make, roll, cut and shape. 2) The pastry, whose buttery goodness can make it seem a little too indulgent for any old weeknight. [Scale and get a printer-friendly version of the recipe here.] It’s a shame, because the nostalgic pull of a pot pie is so strong. My favorite way around the obstacles is to use something else entirely for the top, the way author Laura Wright does in this recip

Lasagna is like pizza: Even when it’s bad, it’s good. With pizza, the saying goes, it’s still melted cheese on warm bread. With lasagna, sub in warm noodles for the bread, and you’ve got the same idea. What could be wrong with such bubbly goodness? That doesn’t mean there aren’t better and worse lasagnas, of course. You can make your own pasta dough, labor over the sauce and fillings, and use the best possible cheese for something positively sublime on the one hand, or reach into the freezer fo

Dried mushrooms are a cook’s friend. They can hang out in your pantry, undisturbed, for an eternity, and then when you’re ready to bring them out to play, they do so with such power and energy the only downside is you feel guilty for not inviting them to the party earlier. [Scale and get a printer-friendly version of the recipe here] For a plant-based cook, their appeal is even stronger, because they add the kind of depth and umami to your cooking that you may have thought was possible only th

There aren’t too many ways I don’t like eggplant, if it’s cooked right. And that often involves an ungodly amount of olive oil, since eggplant soaks up the stuff as if there were an impending shortage. The reputation of eggplant as an oil hog has even resulted in the name of a classic Turkish dish, imam bayildi, which translates to “the imam fainted.”