Blackened Cabbage with Kelp Brown Butter

Reliable cabbage is cooked in the punchy sauce and then combined with store-bought baked tofu and roasted cashews for a salad that can also be eaten with rice.

This sauce is slightly magical. The texture cloaks pasta much like a traditional meat sauce does, and the flavors are deep and rich, but it’s actually vegan!

This is what I call a fridge-eater recipe. The key here is getting a nice sear on the sausage and cooking the tomato down until it coats the sausage and vegetables well.

A bed of charred cabbage speckled with chopped giardiniera makes the perfect landing place of sweet Italian sausages and plenty of basil.

Cabbage is the unsung hero of the winter kitchen—available anywhere, long-lasting in the fridge, and super-affordable. It’s also an excellent partner for pasta.

Oyster mushrooms are a strong all-rounder in the kitchen, seeming to straddle both plant and meat worlds in what they look and taste like when cooked. Here they’re coated in a marinade my mother used to use when cooking Chinese food at home—honey, soy, garlic and ginger—and roasted until golden, crisp, and juicy.

Salmoriglio is a Mediterranean sauce with herbs, garlic, and olive oil. In this version, kelp is used as the base of the sauce.

You can consider this recipe a template for creating a gooey, cheesy instant ramen dish with an appetizing golden crust in the oven.