The Veggie

Anyone with a flier to hand out or a petition to sign can tell you that approaching people on the street is an exercise in rejection therapy. So when Tanya went to Washington Square Park earlier this summer with a cartoonish microphone, a single question and a dream, she was prepared for a humiliating afternoon. Turns out there’s a trick to getting New Yorkers (and some tourists) to eagerly engage you in conversation: Ask them what makes a Great Sandwich. The answers are the subject of our latest Veggie video, a sandwich smackdown (snackdown?) featuring eight vegetarian Hall of Famers made by Tanya and then ranked by a panel of experts. They are all winners, in our minds and stomachs, but who doesn’t love a playoff-style bracket, a little healthy competition and a quest for the Ultimate Vegetarian Sandwich?

For the latest episode of our Veggie Hotline series, Tanya Sichynsky uses three new recipes, a Venn diagram and a can-do attitude to show you how to plan your meals more thoughtfully. Her strategy? Plenty of ingredient overlap and substitution opportunities. Her goals? Minimize waste, maximize budget and guarantee deliciousness.

For the latest episode of our Veggie Hotline series with Tanya Sichynsky, we channeled the joys and challenges of a community-supported agriculture box. To guide you in making smarter substitutions and cooking more intuitively, we made our own mock CSA box in the kitchen studio, filling it with springtime produce that has stumped readers in the past. Produce like Swiss chard. Everyone is simply drowning in chard. Whether the crops actually arrive on your doorstep from a local farm or simply pique your interest at the grocery store matters not.

Tanya Sichynsky, the author of the Veggie newsletter, is obsessed with snacks. In her ideal world, “my snacking is a little more thoughtful, a little more satiating and a lot more homemade.” She joins us in the studio kitchen to share 7 snack recipes that are relatively quick and healthy, vegetarian and make-ahead friendly. For the snacker with kids at home, she recommends Melissa Clark’s lunchbox harvest muffins, filled with plenty of good-for-you ingredients. For the snacker who forgot to eat lunch, she suggests Kay Chun’s no-cook recipe of tomato-marinated greens and beans toast. For the snacker who’s entertaining guests,Tanya pairs Yossy Arefi’s herby cottage cheese dip with Lidey Heuck’s easy crudités. For the snacker who’s going to the gym, she offers Eric Kim’s protein-packed egg bites with spinach and cottage cheese. For the snacker who just wants dessert, she recommends Naz Deravian’s supereasy chocolate chia pudding. And for the snacker about to watch “Vanderpump Rules” (a.k.a Tanya), make a bowl of Jessica Koslow’s “cheesy” vegan popcorn tossed with nutritional yeast and dried rosemary.

If you’re trying to reinvigorate your relationship with vegetables this year, don’t wait until lunch or dinner — start with the most important meal of the day. Tanya Sichynsky, the author of The Veggie newsletter, has outlined a week’s worth of vegetable-dense breakfasts that lean on high-protein vegetarian staples like beans or tofu.

Tanya, a food editor and author of The Veggie newsletter, has challenged herself to make a Thanksgiving spread that features tofu in every dish — even potatoes, even dessert — in roughly four hours. She shows us that tofu deserves prime real estate on your holiday table, even where you may least expect it. The recipes Tanya adapts in this episode are linked below.