Food & drink

Here’s a month’s worth of quick, easy vegan dinner recipes — ready to be served in 30 minutes or sometimes a bit less! You’ll find pasta and noodles, bountiful bowls, grain and bean classics, tofu and seitan dishes, big sandwiches, tortilla specialties.

Whether you want a quick dinner for weeknights or casual weekend fare, you’ll find lots of ideas and inspiration here. Within each of these recipes, you’ll find simple ways to complete the meal. Let’s dive right in …
Pasta and noodle dishes

Spicy Peanut Noodles with Zucchini & Tomatoes: Here’s a super easy and tasty take on spicy peanut noodles. Use bottled peanut satay sauce or make your own. Though it’s a perfect summer dish, you can enjoy it year round.

Stir-Fried Noodles with Tofu & Green Veggies: Stir-fried soba noodles with tofu, broccoli, green peas, mushrooms, and snow peas make a quick, light dinner. Super-easy and tasty, all you need to complete this meal is a platter of raw veggies. For a fun addition, serve vegetable spring rolls from your supermarket or natural foods store freezer.

What exactly makes an heirloom tomato, well, heirloom? Is it the tiger-like stripes? The vivid array of stoplight colors? How about the various lumps, bumps and bulges? Or is it something about the taste, maybe? I’m not about to let another tomato season go by without finally learning the answer, so let’s investigate.
Ancestry
Heirloom varieties can be the ancestors of plants from over 100 years ago — Photo courtesy of Getty Images / Wildroze
Heirloom tomatoes – called heritage tomatoes in the U.K. – are open-pollinated, non-hybrid cultivars of the nightshade genus. Cultivars are varieties or strains of plants that may be selected and pruned from generation to generation for their desirable traits, but are not in any way purposefully crossbred or grafted with other tomato varieties.
In this sense, heirloom tomatoes are purer strains of the fruit, less fussed with by the global agricultural revolution that diluted so much of the world’s biodiversity.
To truly be considered an heirloom tomato, the original plant that gave birth to generations of seeds must be traceable back to at least 1951, though many of the heirloom varieties we enjoy today are more than 100 years old. Heirloom cultivars typically carry both a common name, like Snow White Cherries, along with a scientific cultivar name.