My wife and I are changing to a much more plant-based diet, w/ minimal salt. We figure that herbs and spices will add considerable interest/variety to our meals of (predominantly) rice/grains w/ beans/veggies. But neither of us has much experience w/ spices. We’ve got a pretty basic selection of jars of dry powder/flakes in the cabinet. And we have a basic selection (basil, sage, rosemary, thyme, parsley, oregano) growing on the stoop.
My wife tends to believe you should use one or - at most - 2 spices in any dish. My approach is more to toss in a bit of anything green.
Further complicating things - I generally like hotter foods and feel garlic and onions improve just about any dish, whereas they mess w/ my wife’s digestion. So I tend to garnish my own plate w/ gardiniera (sp?).
We’ve placed a few books on hold at the library, but before I pick them up, I wondered if any of you had any general ideas/experience as to what types of herbs/spices you use in what amounts in various primarily plant-based cooking.
I like spice mixes. Zatarain’s Creole seasoning is my favorite (and goes in almost everything I cook), but there are tons of good ones, especially ethnic ones like Ethiopian berbere, Moroccan ras el hanout, Indian garam masala, and much more. Also fish sauce and soy sauce add great umami flavor.
As for amounts – put in a little, then taste; repeat as necesesary. I love mixing seasonings, even from different cuisines – I made a wonderful lamb curry once which contained all of the ones in my first paragraph, and more.
My wife is a vegetarian and I mostly eat and cook vegetarian at home. My approach to spices is googling the veggies I want to cook, using the recipes I find, and then making a mental note of enjoying or not enjoying that recipe.
Not using too many spices is probably wise if you “wing it” by creating your dishes from scratch, spices can definitely clash with each other and with ingredients, but they can also complement each other.
We have some of the same issues as you do in that my wife likes food that is so spicy I can’t eat it, and spicy food, or excess kale, or too much onion, wreaks havoc on my digestion. But fortunately we both love garlic!
Here are a few of our standard recipes (although we’ve usually tweaked them a little over the last couple of years):
Crusty baked cauliflower and farro
We use this one as a base with a lot of variation, generally skipping the capers, that I don’t like and the ricotta, because we can’t be bothered to have ricotta around.
My recommendation is for each spice, find some dish that features that spice (and only that spice) heavily. Make each of those dishes, and decide what you like. That’ll give you an idea of what each spice tastes like and how to use it.
Then once you’re familiar with them individually, mix and match them however you see fit.
There is merit to both “heavy spice” and “minimal” or even “no” spice. Sometimes I just heat up a vegetable and eat it plain (I like cabbage that way - YMMV). Sometimes I just eat them plain and raw (cucumbers, carrots).
Other times I feel like I’m using everything on the spice shelf.
Some things - like curry - are almost by definition a blend of many spices.
Try both - you’ll figure out what you like.
There’s also merit to each person seasoning their own portion - maybe you like garlic and gardineara. Maybe your wife just wants a light dusting of rosemary. Do what make you (both of you) happy.
But I’m going to second Penzy’s - they’re fantastic.
Depending on what you call a spice or seasoning I can’t think of many dishes that work well with just one. Maybe one dominant flavor, but there are so many good combinations. Now if you leave out salt, garlic, and onion, then you’ve reduced the number of combos, but even when pepper is an ingredient I’ll usually use more than one type, something like fresh ground black pepper, and then some cayenne added for heat, or mild paprika added for color. And many dishes benefit from a lot of different peppers, they’re flavors improve with more variety.
A lot of dried herbs work well but if it’s the dominant flavor in a dish try to get fresh. For most seasoning avoid the powdered form. Ground mustard and peppers work okay, but for the classics like basil, sage, rosemary, thyme, parsley, and oregano mentioned above you want flakes if fresh isn’t available.
A problem for my wife is that I am not an adventurous eater. I’ve said before, that if there were tasty enough people kibble, I’d be happy to eat it 3x7. So I’m happy mixing anything up, and tossing on some salsa or gardineire. (Man, I really oughta learn how to spell that.)
My wife, on the other hand, would favor different combinations and seasonings.
I find dried basil and parsley acceptable in long-simmering wintery dishes, like an Italian-American marinara or a “Sunday gravy.” They don’t have the vibrancy of fresh summer herbs, but they make for warm and comforting sauces in the dead of January. I keep them in the pantry even when my kitchen garden is going full blast.
As for basic herb advice: a bay leaf is good in nearly any damn thing. It adds a depth of flavor that you might not otherwise get in an all-vegetable soup or stew or sauce or pot of beans.
I’ll second dried basil. You want last summer’s crop, and of course, once it’s summer again, you want fresh. But dried basil is much better than no basil, if basil seems like a good idea.
I’d also like to recommend “an introduction to Indian cooking”, by Madhur jaffrey. Not all the dishes are vegetarian, but a lot of them are, most of them are delicious, all of them work, and after we got it, my husband said, “now I believe I could be a vegetarian”.
My best pot-luck dish is a chickpea recipe from that book. The lentil soup is superb and very easy. One of the potato dishes is fabulous, and I’m frequently asked for the recipe.