Ever-Green Vietnamese: Super-Fresh Recipes, Starring Plants from Land and Sea

This collection of vegetable-forward, usually vegetarian and sometimes vegan recipes is written by a Vietnam-born author with a gift for teaching cooks how to prepare flavorful food with confidence.

Motivated by a desire to eat more vegetables, Andrea Nguyen took a close look at the Vietnamese food she had grown up eating. She realized that in America, abundance had meant that meat was almost always available, but that scrappy home cooks in Vietnam often relied on rice and vegetables to create wonderful dishes.

In Ever-Green Vietnamese, Nguyen presents a mix of traditional vegetable-focused recipes as well as those she developed in her own kitchen. To make as many recipes as possible useful to vegans, Nguyen provides a recipe for vegan “fish sauce,” which is key to many Vietnamese flavors. 

This useful condiment is just one of the stars in a highly practical pantry section that also includes sate sauce, a vegan mayonnaise that works wonderfully on banh mi, and even a vegan bologna which she spent three months developing.

With this book you can make:

• Smoky tofu-nori wontons
• Grilled rice-paper “pizzas”
• Baked char siu pulled-jackfruit baos
• Pickled mustard greens soup
• Green mango, beet, and herb salad
• Creamy turmeric eggplant with shiso
• Coconut-cassava cake

There are a modest number of recipes which call for fish, shrimp, meat, or chicken, but you almost have to go looking for them. And as you’re browsing around you’ll find Nguyen enriching her book with general cooking tips (tofu “butchering,” eggplant selection) and forays into food science discovery (“why stir-fry with baking soda”).