Four Flavorful Building Blocks of a Protein-Rich Vegetarian Meal Plan

It's my most favorite thing: Modular Meals

Welcome to Part 5 in my 6-week series focusing on protein! If you’d like to catch up, here’s what’s been going on:

• Week 1: Creamy Fresh Pea Sauce for Tofu Bowls

• Week 2: Protein Muffins

• Week 3: Tempeh Burgers

• Week 4: Savory Protein Bars

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For anyone familiar with my work, you may already know that I have a bit of an obsession with “modular” meals. Sometimes I call them “building blocks.” But the idea — which I tried to formalize in Bowl and then in Start Simple, and to some degree in Snacks for Dinner — is informed by the short but formative time I spent working in restaurants.

There, bringing meals together “on the line” is a far cry from from-scratch home cooking. At home, most people fix a recipe all in one go, start to finish, using mostly raw ingredients. For line cooks at a restaurant, it’s more about combining and then finessing a few core “building blocks,” which are things like prepped vegetables, marinated proteins, and pre-made garnishes, dressings, and sauces.

I know that few home cooks have a team of helpers to facilitate their prep work, but this principle of building block / on-the-line cooking is one that has nonetheless been incredibly helpful for me as a home cook.

For one, it’s helped me to view a recipe in the macro — as the interplay of a couple foundational components, rather than a detailed list of individual ingredients. But it’s also help immensely with streamlining weeknight cooking. By keeping a few building blocks on hand, dinner is that much easier.

And lastly, I believe that getting into the building block habit helps home cooks learn to minimize waste, regarding leftovers as standalone components that can repurposed into something different later on.

This week, I wanted to focus on a few of these building blocks, but with special attention on protein-rich ones. Each recipe is pretty easy to make and keeps well for weekday meals and packed lunches, and it also just so happens that combined, they make an excellent bowl (still one of my favorite modes of eating!).

You’ll find my notes below with each recipe, as well as some ideas for how you might put them to use in your own creative meals.