Cookbook Review: Scrappy Cooking

I have a new favorite cookbook! I've long been a fan of Carleigh Bodrug's Plant You book, but her brand-new book, Scrappy Cooking, has become an instant fave. The book dropped in April, and it's quite a bit thicker than her original book. The focus is on sustainable vegan recipes that help you use up produce and other foods before they go bad. She also includes a number of recipes to utilize the stuff you'd normally throw away, like onion peels and lemon peels.

I've already read the full book cover to cover, like a novel. I enjoy reading recipes, but I also loved all of the tips scattered throughout the book. And I'm always trying to be more environmentally friendly, so this book is just what I needed. I've made a number of recipes so far, starting with this Common Ground Granola. It uses spent coffee grounds, as well as leftover coffee, for an energizing and crunchy chocolate granola. Excellent served over homemade soy yogurt!

The One-Pot Orzo Casserole is fantastic, and it's loaded with chickpeas, sundried tomatoes, spinach, zucchini, and onions in a tomato-y sauce. It's topped the best homemade Tofu Feta I've ever made. That recipe alone is worth the cost of the book.

When Carleigh includes a separate recipe within a recipe — like that feta for the orzo casserole — it's usually optional, so you can save money and time if you want. But it's also used in many recipes through the book, so you don't waste the leftovers. One batch made plenty, so I also made the Buffalo Chickpea Lettuce Cups so I could use the rest of the feta. These little butter lettuce cups are stuffed with baked buffalo chickpeas, cherry tomatoes, onions, tofu feta, and a homemade hummus dressing. You'll have leftover hummus after making the dressing, but it's perfect for snacking on with crackers.

Carleigh even includes instructions for growing your own veggies from scraps. You can apparently grow from lettuce from lettuce stems, so I've currently got the butter lettuce stem in a saucer with water to try that out. We'll see!

One of my favorite recipes so far has been this Second Chance Sheet Pan Fried Rice. You use leftover rice from takeout, which I had a ton of recently after a few orders at Sen Trang. That's baked on a sheet pan with veggies and almonds (but I didn't have many almonds, so I also used cashews) and a tasty sauce. The rice gets all crispy, like it's fried. Such a great use for leftover rice!

Another fave was this Firecracker Tofu with Coconut Rice. The tofu, bell peppers, onions, and bok choy is coated in a sweet-and-savory sauce and served over creamy, sticky coconut rice. I could eat that coconut rice all day!

I've got a few other recipes on the list to make this week and next, including Rock Your Broc Mac & Cheese, Pickled Tennessee Tofu Tenders with Cabbage Slaw, a Beef and Broccoli Stir-fry (made with tempeh), and Golden Immunity Stew with sweet potatoes, lentils, kale, and a very yellow turmeric-y broth. I'm also saving my onion peels to make her onion powder, my garlic peels to make garlic powder, my lemon peels for citrus powder, apple cores to make her apple scrap vinegar, carrot tops for chimichurri, and all my other veg scraps for broth. My freezer currently looks like I'm saving up scraps for a science experiment!