Abundant: Vegan Jamaican Recipes You’ll Want to Repeat

This week’s cookbook is Plentiful: Vegan Jamaican Recipes to Repeat by chef and musician Denai Moore. To try recipes from this book, check out the cheesy “beef” patty, sweet and sticky jerk carrots with feta, and potato salad with ackee curry mayonnaise.

When chef and musician Denai Moore went vegan in 2016, she immediately started testing pâté recipes. She grew up in Kingston, Jamaica and one of her favorite snacks was a carton of her milk with warm patties and cold chocolate. Creating a flaky and highly flavorful pastry was most important to her, but she considers it still a work in progress.

“I remember making the first version of the recipe, and it was very rewarding because it was so meaty. And being able to recreate that salty and umami flavor really started that pursuit. I have this endless quest to say, “Okay, let’s do it this way next time.” I think that’s what food means to me. It’s really fun,” Moore says with a laugh.

Blending electronic, folk, R&B, soul, and other influences, Moore’s music resists categorization. From the genre-blurring tracks on her latest third album, Modern Dread, to the pages of her debut cookbook, Plentiful: Vegan Jamaican Recipes to Repeat (Hardie Grant, 2023), Her approach is equally individualistic.

Although food and music may seem different, there is a lot of overlap between these two creative outlets. Moore says they bring people together. And she’s a good companion who specializes in both. For example, anonymous singer-songwriter Kelis trained at Le Cordon Bleu, wrote a cookbook in 2015, and now tends a farm in Temecula, California. Fellow vegan chef and cookbook author Hannah Choi has a master’s degree in piano performance, and Toronto-based author Ruth Ma Tam is a baker and professional harpist.

“People come together for the arts. The food, the music, this is the cultural part of what we create. But it’s also just the stories we tell,” Moore says. “Food is all about stories, and it’s up to you to decide whether or not that story is true. Sometimes there can be a lot of pressure to represent everyone, but at the end of the day, it’s about telling your own story. I think that’s all I can do.”

Moore was drawn to a career in the food industry because of the sense of community it creates. Dee’s Her Table Pop-Up and Supper in 2017 Long before she started her club, she frequently hosted dinners and was looking for opportunities to cook for people. “For me, it was like telling someone I love you, which was a lot of fun. And cooking for someone is like my love language.”

The recipes in Plentiful are meant to be shared, with chapters devoted to “Special Occasion Cooking” and “Corporate Meals.” But Moore also offers recipes for eating alone. “Everything for me,” including plantain and brown lentils with hot pistachio and corn nut dressing, callalou pesto pasta, and dark chocolate mousse.

During the pandemic, Moore says her music has become more insular. And after years of hosting pop-ups and supper clubs, she’s able to cook for herself again. She used the opportunity to expand her repertoire, explore new methods such as making vegan croissants, and gain a new respect for bakers and pastry chefs.

Although many people cook meals alone, and single-person households are the most common in Canada, most cookbooks clearly don’t have recipes that work for you. This disconnect inspired Moore to write the chapter “Romanticizing Cooking Alone.”

“We probably spend most of the day feeding ourselves. That might be something that a lot of food writers don’t necessarily think about. And I want to make a recipe or I want to eat something. I know you’ve ever found yourself in a scenario where you think, “Oh, is it just me?” I feel like I don’t have to worry about it. When you cook for yourself, you tend to rush or don’t make time for it. ”

In the midst of the pandemic, Moore says cooking for herself has become a source of joy. Right now, even though she’s having a busy week, try to tap into that girlfriend’s emotion. At her home in the seaside town of Margate in southeast England, most of her meals are eaten in her garden. By including a chapter on cooking for one in her book, she wanted to encourage others to make time for this kind of fun as well.

“It was also very emotional[writing this chapter]mainly because cooking for yourself is like a survival instinct. It’s one of those things. You cook for yourself. You feed yourself. There’s something very nurturing about that, but that relationship is dependent on mood or stress or how we go about our lives. It may change depending on the situation.”

Moore moved to England with his family 20 years ago when he was nine years old. For Plentiful, she didn’t intend to include “all the great Jamaican hits.” Instead, she pays homage to the most cherished dishes of her childhood, like the tender corn porridge her grandmother used to make and the Saturday soup made with spinners, at its heart. We wanted to celebrate vegetables.

“It’s very vegetable-centric. I don’t have a lot of recipes that use a lot of fake meat or anything like that. I think vegetables are really exciting, so this is very intentional,” Moore says.

Jerk is a unique Jamaican cooking style based on an earthy blend of allspice and Scotch bonnet. It’s typically used as a marinade or rub for chicken or pork, but Moore creates new associations with Plentyful. Jerk seasoning adds punch to roasted carrots, fresh wet green jerks enhance grilled eggplant or tofu, and jerk butter melts into mashed potatoes, roasted corn, or hard-dough bread slices.

Moore says there are many misconceptions about Jamaican food. In Plentiful, she shows how refreshing the Caribbean island nation’s vegan flavors can be. After all, herbs and spices are plants, she stresses. “So it never loses its flavor.”

Food is all about stories, and it’s up to you to decide whether those stories are true or not.

When Moore stopped eating meat and dairy, she thought she might have to give up some of the dishes she had been eating since childhood. But by becoming vegan, she looked for ways to incorporate the flavors of her childhood and took her in a new direction.

“Plentiful” combines sorrel, a hibiscus drink, with Scotch bonnet and allspice berries in a hoisin glaze, and ackee and palm heart “salt fish,” a twist on Jamaica’s national dish. Masu. Ackee, a relative of longan and lychee, is britched into silky curry mayonnaise for her “dream” potato salad, and also replaces emulsified eggs for carbonara sauce.

“The food I was cooking at Dee’s Table and Supper Club essentially came from very authentic places. Flavor-wise, it was very Jamaican. But this story is very much about me. I feel like only I can tell the story of Dee’s Table. I can’t tell the story of Jamaica. I can’t tell everyone’s story and what they grew up eating. , I think that’s also really exciting. I don’t feel like there are any rules because I just make what excites me the most. And I just want to make food that is me and me. ”