Bryant Terry’s Vegetable Mount Rushmore

There are a lot of vegetable cookbooks on the marketplace, crowding the shelves and bargain bins of your favorite indie bookshops. Vegetables, while called “dirt candy” by one wise New York City chef , often have home cooks puzzled. Perpetually in search of shortcuts for turning bunches of kale and celery ribs and a rainbow of tubers and roots into something beyond a salad or a wan, day-old crudité. Vegetable Kingdom , Bryant Terry’s excellent new collection of recipes and stories, tackles the home cook’s struggle with vegetables head-on.

There are adventures to be had with kohlrabi (including a kimchi, a coleslaw, and a charcoal-roasted technique). An exciting recipe called “dirty cauliflower.” “You’ve had ‘ cauliflower rice ’ before and it sucked,” writes the Oakland-based chef and author. “Well, this ain’t that.” See below and judge for yourself. Terry’s 2014 book, Afro-Vegan , reworked the classic dishes of the African diaspora into a vegan framework.

Since 2015, Terry has been the chef in residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. How are you doing, and what have you been cooking?

My family and I are doing well, considering all that is going on in the world. For example, on Sunday night, I made a vegetable stir-fry using many of the dark leafy greens, alliums. Fresh herbs from the box, along with random components I had in our fridge like cremini mushrooms, celery, and carrots.

Straight talk: There are a lot of books about vegetables and cookery with vegetables. First of all, many people have commented that Vegetable Kingdom is one of the most beautiful cookbooks they’ve seen in a while. The recipes are driven by the components, classic dishes, and cookery techniques of the African and Asian diasporas.

I love music and have been spending a lot of time revisiting may collection of jazz on vinyl these days. It’s funny, the playlist for Vegetable Kingdom is a hodgepodge of songs that might have inspired a dish, songs that I might have been playing on repeat while testing a recipe, and songs that tie into memories, history, or some political point I want to make. What’s the vegetable that surprised you the most when you were writing this book?

You are the chef in residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. In my role as chef in residence, I create public programming that celebrates the intersection of food, farming, health, activism, art, culture, and the African Diaspora.

Since 2015, I’ve had intimate conversations with authors from around the world, followed by book signings. I’ve been hearing a lot of people comment on wanting to stay healthy in the midst of this crisis, and I think this book can be a powerful tool in supporting those goals. MORE COOKBOOKS WE THINK YOU’LL LIKE In case you missed it, last week, we caught up with Melissa Clark about her new book, Dinner in French , and about how she’s been cooking her way through the last few weeks.

These are the starting points that Lukas Volger uses to jump into a slew of never-boring meals to get you through the week in his latest book, Start Simple .