Vegan Dreams/Vegan Nightmares: A Review of A Grain, A Green, A Bean by Gena Hamshaw

Ready your nooch

Hello, it is me, back from my two-month sabbatical where I dove deep into the nineteenth century political history of Santa Fe and then promptly got sick for a fortnight.

In the meantime, spring cookbook season has been in full swing, and I have a backlog of three new books—thanks to Clarkson Potter and Ten Speed Press—that I am dying to write about.

First is A Grain, A Green, A Bean by longtime vegan food writer and cookbook author Gena Hamshaw, with whom I am pretty familiar (thanks Ten Speed Press for the free book in exchange for an arguably too honest review).

This is because, years and years ago, I was a vegan. In fact, I learned to cook as a vegan, butchering scores of tofu blocks and butternut squash before I even touched a chicken. When I started grad school with nothing but a suitcase in a brand new country, I spent my Fridays on Skype with my mom while I made elaborate vegan meals for one. During that time, to make friends, I showed up to gatherings with vegan cupcakes, a statement that AI would definitely spit out if you typed in “reminisce about food in 2011 without mentioning bacon.”

I say this not to brag, but rather to assert that I have no deep-seated, anti-vegan-cookbook sentiments that might skew my response to this book. In fact, I have quite the opposite: a rosy, nostalgic fondness for the genre, and a familiarity with the cuisine.

My children, on the other hand, have no such tender associations. While I have frequently documented how they largely refuse meat, they are not exactly replacing it with a varied repertoire of plant-based proteins. Actually, “a grain, a green, a bean” might as well be something a heffalump chants at them in their nightmares to chill them to the bone.

Nevertheless, when one takes on the wholly self-directed and self-pressured responsibility to honestly test cookbooks, one must persist.

If you didn’t read the Post-Punk Kitchen Cookbook forums in the aughts, or otherwise pay attention to the vegan cooking scene, you might not be familiar with Gena. She has written about vegan food since 2009 at The Full Helping, and A Grain, A Green, A Bean is her fifth cookbook. Gena is a registered dietitian and nutritionist, and went through all her training while simultaneously developing recipes and writing books, chronicling it all on her website.

A Grain, A Green, A Bean is an attempt to break down vegan eating to perhaps its simplest formula. As the title suggests, every recipe includes a grain in some form (bread, noodle, whole), a green vegetable, and a type of bean.

The chapters are: Bowls & Salads, Beans & Greens on Bread, Stovetop Meals, and Oven to Table Recipes. At the end of the book are some basic component recipes, and a brief dessert section that breaks from the formula, thankfully not attempting to shoehorn beans and greens into cake. The category of grain/green/bean is pretty broad, as Gena shows while she plays with it to make soups, salads, pastas, bowls, sandwiches, and sheet pan meals.

Chocolate Snack Cake, no beans

Gena works to keep the ingredients at their most accessible with regards to avoiding vegan speciality foods. There is no Violife cheese or Beyond Meat required. Still, her category of “bean” does include all forms of soy, including tofu, tempeh, TVP, soy curls, and yuba. If you live with more basic grocery stores, as I do, some of these soy variants or certain grains and greens might also prove a bit harder to find. On top of that, if you’re new to vegan cooking, you might have to stock up on staples like nutritional yeast and heaps of raw cashews. Otherwise, a lot of the ingredients can be sourced pretty easily and affordably.

Welcome to Vegan Week

We began our vegan foray with Green Onion and Black Bean Tortillas. For this dish, I cooked down a huge pile of green onions—a nice, affordable green—mixed it with mashed black beans and fried it up in a tortilla. This was a wonderful take on a vegan quesadilla, because it really mimicked the textural experience of eating cheese without trying to actually imitate cheese. I liked it a lot. And my kids? They ate plain cheese quesadillas and sneered at the beans I put on their plate, thanks for asking!

Green Onion and Black Bean Tortillas

Next we made Pita Chips and Crispy Chickpeas with Broccolini and Green Tahini Sauce. This was kind of a pita chip nacho idea, with chickpeas, homemade pita chips, and broccolini covered in a tahini sauce and garnished with pickled onions. My kids helped me put this one together in hopes that they might try some. And they did try, but they did little more than that. I thought maybe my youngest would eat crispy chickpeas since tiny spherical objects are a big draw, but apparently they weren't seasoned with enough dirt or danger, because they were rejected. (I might try scattering them on the lawn next time, fingers crossed!) This one took time to assemble all components, but nothing was too hard. It was fairly tasty, but I also found it quite light as a meal.

The Broken Vermicelli and Lentil Chickpea Stew with Herbs is Gena’s take on harira. I had a bit of trouble getting excited for a lentil stew, so I made both the cashew sour cream and corn muffins as accompaniments to bolster my spirits. The soup tasted almost like a chili to me, but with noodles. It was a solid recipe if lentil soup is something that gets you excited, and it made a big pot so I could freeze some.

I grew frustrated with the sour cream recipe, unfortunately, because as written it did not have enough volume for my blender to run. I doubled it and it tasted great, but that seemed like an oversight. The muffins were easy and good and my kids ate them.

Nothing prettier than lentil stew

I was hopeful that I could make some of the noodle dishes work in my house, so I made the Cold Kimchi Noodles, Eggy Tofu, and Cucumber as well as the Miso Soy Noodles for the spice-averse crowd. I made the Eggy Tofu—a simply seared tofu coated in nutritional yeast—ahead of time, and the dish came together easily. It was flavorful and filling, and the adults in the room quite liked it. It felt like something you could order from a fast casual place in a city for about $25. Good!

Wow someone whisk that sauce please (Kimchi Noodles)

One creative grain-bean-green combination that intrigued me was the Savory Corn Waffles with Kidney Beans and Kale. This dish was our favorite of the lot and really satisfying. It consisted of kidney beans and kale sautéed in salsa and piled high on corn waffles with pickled jalapeños, avocado, cashew sour cream, and even more salsa. Again, I made the waffles ahead of time, so the entire thing was very fast to get on the table. This dish was quite satisfying and filling, with a nacho vibe, and lots of flavors and textures. I would absolutely repeat this one.

Savory Corn Waffles with Kidney Beans and Kale

The final main dish I made was a very simple grain bowl, the Basmati Rice, Tomato Coconut Lentils, and Collard Greens. I found the cooking method a bit tedious, because Gena writes it so everything cooks in one pot. While this is great for the after-dinner dish load, it really stretches out the time required to put it all together. I chose to stick my collards in the Instant Pot instead to hurry things along. I offered some of the collards to my kid who said “that’s a plant” and pushed it away as though something being a literal plant in the ground had ever been a barrier to consumption before. I, on the other hand, really liked this dish. It was basic, wholesome, and soothing.

Basmati Rice, Tomato Coconut Lentils, and Collard Greens

I could not leave the dessert chapter untested, of course, and so I made both the Chocolate Chunk Cookies and Chocolate Snack Cake. The cookies were fine. They came together easily with no specialty products, using nut butter for fat. They were wholesome cookies and tasted as such. The chocolate snack cake is probably one of the easiest and cheapest cake recipes out there, made with water and no eggs. A wonderful pantry cake for when a cupboard is especially barren, the cake still tasted rich and fluffy. This cake is going in my memory bank as something tasty and within reach no matter how long it’s been since I made the journey into town to shop.

Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Final Thoughts

Overall, the book has some great flavors, though some of the meals might need a little more bulking up for larger appetites. They also might be a bit challenging for picky eaters, though the nature of the recipes often lends itself to being able to separate out components. Anyone who is averse to beans might want to avoid this one for obvious reasons, however.

On the continuum of vegan food recipes, this definitely tacks to the health food end of things, and occasionally felt a bit austere to me. I did have some trouble working up the enthusiasm to make and eat everything, though I generally enjoyed the finished dishes when it came to mealtime.

One of the wonderful things about this book is that it notes how and when to prepare and store all the components of the meals. It’s not a meal prep book per se (check out Gena’s book The Vegan Week, which Ten Speed Press sent me two years ago, if you’re looking for that), but Gena is open about cooking mostly for one on a busy schedule. She is mindful of what that means for make-ahead and leftover food, and I really appreciate that attention to detail. If you do cook for one, or maybe just want to make some vegan meals for yourself in a house where certain family members treat serving lentils as a felony, this book would work really well for you.

I envision putting it to use in my house to prep some healthy adult lunches, both because it’s largely unappealing to my kids right now and because the meals are a bit light. Gena is an experienced and creative recipe developer, though, so if you're looking for a good whole foods, plant-based, accessible, affordable collection of dishes, this is a reliable and thoughtful cookbook.