In Our Kitchen

The Chubby Vegetarian blog is all about inventive new vegetable recipes and wild, one-off experiments. Our first cookbook, The Southern Vegetarian: 100 Down-Home Recipes for the Modern Table, gathered all the Southern dishes that we make over and over again. Our love of cooking vegetables has taken us from our Memphis, Tennessee home to the James Beard House. We're proud to have been featured on The Food Network, in the The New York Times, in The Local Palate, by Woman's Day, and in The Washington Post…

…And most recently, on TheKitchn.com today! 

We so hope you love cooking with us. Look around some and let us know what works for you -- hopefully, you’ll land on lots of new ideas you hadn't thought of before and find some intriguing vegetable recipes to try. Below is our take on why we do what we do in the land of BBQ and how we learned to cook in a healthy way that's appealing to everyone. 

Oh, vegetables: you want to eat more of them because they make you feel great, or you need to eat more of them to displace some of the more dubious items on your plate. Either way, the question remains about how to take the natural, whole foods we all should be eating and transform them into something you and your family will crave. 

Our answer is simple: treat vegetables like a piece of meat -- really! We rub a pastrami cure onto beets and slice them for reubens, we BBQ spaghetti squash and slather it in a wonderfully spicy and rich Southern sauce, smoky lentils are tucked into tacos, and king oyster mushrooms are seared and served like little scallops.

On the blog as well as in our book, it’s not about replicating meat; it’s about moving vegetables from side dish to the center of the plate. It’s not about limitations or what’s missing; it’s about seeing the possibilities inherent in each beautiful vegetable and realizing its potential. Most of all it's about making delicious food that happens to be vegetarian.

For us, eating was not always about health. In 2008, when we started this blog, we were a combined 100 pounds heavier and now we know, a bit deluded about what we were actually eating. I mean, one of us is a strict vegetarian and has been for about 25 years,  and the other eats veg most of the time and has for ages…how bad could it have been? 

After making all the mistakes and going through our own health struggles, we became brave and driven enough to try something different. We both got with the program: running, biking, yoga, and eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and nuts and whole grains. We’re not satisfied with picking at a boring old salad everyday -- we were set on to making ‘healthy’ a little stealthy, appealing, and even more delicious than our old way of eating. 

We wouldn’t dream of life without hot dogs, tacos, or even steaks, so we figure out better ways to prepare them, or as we say in the South, to fix ‘em. All in all, what we strive to do through TCV and our book The Southern Vegetarian has turned out to be a mission for helping ourselves and others, and it's a passion that changed our lives for the better. Let’s eat well and enjoy it, let’s be strong and full of energy, and let’s get in the kitchen and cook something awesome, and then let's pull up a chair and all share a meal together. 

-- Justin & Amy