I‘ve always loved Vietnamese Salad rolls (gỏi cuốn), and I’ve been making them off and on for decades, so I don’t know why I haven’t shared them with you guys before. If you haven’t had them, they are cool and refreshing, with a tender but slightly chewy rice paper wrapper surrounding thin rice noodles, lettuce, herbs, and your choice of other ingredients. For today’s version, I used shiso instead of lettuce for a more pronounced and complex herbal flavor.

If this is your first time making salad rolls, allow yourself a fair amount of time to prep all the ingredients and make the rolls. This isn’t a weeknight dinner for a busy family with young kids kind of thing. It will probably take you a few tries to get the hang of rolling them up neatly, but don’t worry, even your failures will still be delicious. This YouTube video is worth watching to see the right moves – you can skip to about 2:00 in to skip the cooking of the meat she’s using. You could also try her more traditional peanut and hoisin dipping sauce instead of the sweet chili version below.

Two of these rolls per person is a good sized appetizer; three and you are up into light lunch territory.

Oh: the kind of rice paper you want is like this. It should say bánh tráng on the package and not be flavored with anything like sesame.

Before we get into Ellen Kanner’s lovely book, a quick note about the James Beard awards. My book didn’t win. While it would have been great, it also would have been a pretty huge surprise as a first time author. To be a finalist was an entirely sufficient thrill. My wife, Sarina, and I had a fantastic trip to New York, enjoyed all of the parties and after-parties and spent time with a host of wonderful people. We ate ridiculously well, including stellar meals at Del Posto, ABC Kitchen, Taïm, Caracas Arepas Bar and Mission Chinese Food, and off the hook drinks at Booker & Dax. Also, if I may brag on a friend for a moment, my old Louisville pal Adam Sachs (@sachsmo) took down 2 Beard awards on the same night and had a baby the next day. How great is that?

Now, on to the book. I’ve never met Ellen, but we’ve chatted back and forth over the years and she wrote a very kind review of Herbivoracious for HuffPo when it came out. I was excited to get my copy of Feeding the Hungry Ghost in the mail, and have been enjoying it ever since. A hungry ghost, in case you aren’t 100% up on your Taoist theology, is a restless soul, still seeking what it missed out on in life. Ellen’s thesis is that we are all in some way hungry ghosts, wanting both for physical nourishment from our food and for the deeper sense of connection to life and each other that food can bring.

The way I described that sounds preachy though, and Ellen is 180 degrees the opposite of preachy. She’s full of stories about friends who use their ovens as shoe storage, Catholic priests getting caught on the beach in compromising positions, and references to David Foster Wallace. She’s utterly exuberant; a sort of joyful warrior that wants to gently nudge you down the path of eating in a way that you probably already know you should.

But what about the food? Well, I can say conclusively that this Moroccan carrot salad rocks. I made it once, didn’t like the picture I took of it, and had already eaten it all before I realized that. So then a few days later I made it again, took the picture you see above, and ate all of it again. Ellen has the gift of simplicity with food. Most of the recipes contain relatively few ingredients, and most of them are easy to find staples. They invite you in; you just know that if you make a bowl of her green gumbo or a slice of farinata, the world is going to seem like a better place.

At Sitka and Spruce and Bar Sajor, Matt Dillon serves quite a few salads and small plates with a base of various ridiculously good nut purees. Though really, puree isn’t quite the right word. They eat more like a sort of nut-based hummus: rich, creamy, slightly fluffy, but packed full of the flavor of roasted nuts.

At ChefSteps, the kitchen recently did some development work with the American Pistachio Growers, and so we’ve had vast quantities of great pistachios around. Which is basically kryptonite for me, if kryptonite was really delicious and made you super happy when you ate it.

I didn’t exactly need my Nancy Drew Junior Sleuth Kit to put those two clues together.

I wrote the recipe below exactly as I did it, but I suspect it would also work in a food processor. I also suspect you could just put all the ingredients in at once, rather than drizzling in the oil and water, and that you could probably use less oil. You could certainly play with the flavor profile. I opted for lemon juice, garlic, cumin, and smoked paprika but it could just as easily be orange juice and zest and, say, ras el hanout. Whatever you do, don’t overpower the flavor of the pistachios – they should be the stars.

This recipe will make more that you need for one bunch of asparagus; it is probably about the smallest amount you can easily make in a blender though. I don’t think you’ll be too sorry having extra around. It would go equally great with raw endive or roasted cauliflower.

I’ve been traveling this week, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to share one of my favorite recipes from the Herbivoracious cookbook. I saw some beautiful maitake mushrooms at Pike Place Market recently, so this should be a good time of year to seek them out and try this soup.

Maitakes, also known as hen-of-the-woods (not to be confused with chicken-of-the-woods, which is completely different!), are a wild mushroom well worth seeking out at farmers’ markets or gourmet grocers. Maitakes are rather expensive, and their dramatic ruffled appearance and rich flavor are unusual, so when I use them, I like to make them the focus of a dish.

If you have never had lapsang souchong tea, you are in for a treat. It is intensely smoky, unlike any other tea I’ve had. That smokiness makes it a perfect broth base to show off the earthiness of roasted maitakes.

You could cut the maitake up into bite-sized pieces, but this dish is more dramatic when the mushroom is served in larger pieces—which also keeps it from getting soggy. Give guests a knife so they can cut the maitake at the last moment.

Risotto is one of my favorite ways to highlight Spring ingredients. This is a version of a recipe I’m serving to a big group for Washington Green Schools this week. Depending on what ends up being fresh, I’ll probably do the puree with nettles instead of watercress, and top it with fava beans and hedgehog mushrooms rather than English peas and asparagus.

Don’t believe the hype that you have to stir risotto continuously. It is entirely adequate to stir it frequently. You’ll get a perfectly creamy result. The key to great risotto is to cook it until the rice is quite tender but not completely falling apart into rice pudding – there should be a hint of resistance when you bite a grain. Then be sure to finish it with plenty of cheese, and enough broth that it is almost pourable – all’onda (wavy), not so thick it stands up by itself.

So… something completely unexpected and exciting happened: the Herbivoracious cookbook was named a finalist for a James Beard Foundation book award, in the Vegetable Focused and Vegetarian category. I’ll be going to the awards ceremony in New York on May 3rd. Honestly, while winning would be a thrill, I’m mostly just delighted to be included, and excited to spend some time with a bunch of terrific cooks and authors.

This refreshing celery and fennel salad is a riff on one that I had at Bastille in Seattle. I was dining with a group that was eating a “whole beast feast”, and Bastille did a very nice job of making vegetarian courses for me. Their celery salad had tiny pumpernickel croutons and baby artichokes. The one I’ve got for you today has fennel instead of the artichokes, and shaved frozen blue cheese for a garnish (a trick I learned from Grant Crilly, but I don’t know where it originates.)

Totally optional: if you happen to have access to a chamber vacuum, compressing the celery and fennel gives it a great texture and translucent appearance. If not, you can definitely skip it. Or if you have time, cut the vegetables and then freeze them the day before you want to serve, then thaw them an hour ahead of time, pat dry with paper towels, and then refrigerate to firm back up. In the freezer, ice crystals will rupture the cell walls, producing an effect somewhat similar to compression.

If you want to add one more component, a few pickled grapes would be really good I think. You could also replace or supplement the pumpernickel with toasted (or lightly candied) walnuts or pecans.