Here are nineteen vegan dinners that get their flavor from chili, ginger, lemongrass and lime instead of from long, slow cooking. We’ve put them in order from fastest to slowest, because on a warm evening the time matters more than anything else.
Most of them are noodles, rice or a curry of some kind, and most are on the table inside half an hour.
Nine of these are our own. A few of the others are a lot heavier than they look in the photo, so we’ve put the calorie numbers right next to them rather than letting you find out after dinner.
1. Easy Vegan Red Curry Pasta
Spaghetti in a red curry and coconut milk sauce with ginger, garlic and lime. Fifteen minutes, serves four, and at 109 calories a portion it’s the lightest thing on this page by a long way, as well as the fastest.
If you’re not sure where to start, start here.
Get the recipe from Green Heart Love.
2. Quick and Easy Vegan Stir Fry Noodles
This one’s ours. Stir-frying is the hardest thing to do without oil, and the way we get around it is a splash of water in a properly hot pan. It serves three.
The one thing we’d insist on is getting the pan hot before anything goes in. If it isn’t, the vegetables steam instead of frying and you’ll end up with something soft and gray.
3. Vegan Burrito Bowl
Black beans, refried beans, chipotle and vegan chorizo in a bowl. It’s assembled more than it’s cooked, which is why it only takes twenty minutes for four.
It does come in at 861 calories a bowl, though, and it leans on store-bought vegan chorizo and cheese to get there. We’d treat it as an occasional dinner rather than a regular weeknight one.
Get the recipe from Cinnamon Snail.
4. Spicy Gochujang Noodles
Udon with shiitake, two colors of pepper, scallions and Thai basil in a gochujang sauce. Twenty minutes for two.
One thing to know before you start: as written, the recipe works out at around 1,789 calories a serving, and that’s the biggest number on this page by some distance. Split it three or four ways instead of two and it becomes a perfectly reasonable dinner, and the flavor doesn’t change at all.
Get the recipe from Green Heart Love.
5. Vegan Thai Basil Fried Rice
Bird’s eye chili, garlic and shallots get pounded down first, and then tamarind and vegan fish sauce take care of the sour and salty end of things. Twenty-five minutes, serves two, 444 calories a portion.
Use day-old rice if you possibly can. It fries far better than fresh, which goes soft and clumps in the pan.
Get the recipe from Oh My Veg.
6. Vegan Tom Yum Noodle Soup
Lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, ginger and Thai chili in a clear broth. It’s sour, hot and thin, and that combination is exactly what you want on an evening when it’s too warm to face anything creamy. Thirty minutes, serves four, 341 calories.
Don’t skip the lime leaves. Without them it’s a nice enough soup, but it doesn’t taste like tom yum.
Get the recipe from Nuts and Twigs.
7. Easy One-Pot Curry Laksa
A Malaysian coconut curry noodle soup with king oyster mushrooms, eggplant and curry leaves. Thirty minutes, serves four.
The recipe calls for a cup of canola oil to fry the eggplant, and that’s where most of the 826 calories a bowl come from. We’d roast the eggplant on parchment instead. You lose very little in the way of flavor and you lose most of the oil.
Get the recipe from Cinnamon Snail.
8. Vegan Green Goddess Chickpeas
Leeks and zucchini cooked down soft with a can of chickpeas, cumin and paprika. One pan, and hardly any chopping to speak of. Serves two at 440 calories.
The leeks are what make it taste like more work than it was.
Get the recipe from Avocado Skillet.
9. Vegan Sticky Cashew Chickpeas
Chickpeas and cashews with broccoli, edamame and peppers in a sticky sauce, with scallions scattered over at the end. Serves three at 536 calories.
It’s a takeout-style dinner that you can make from a can of chickpeas and a bag of frozen edamame, which is the kind of thing we like to have up our sleeve.
Get the recipe from Avocado Skillet.
10. Vegan Summer Rolls with Harissa Peanut Sauce
Marinated tempeh, carrot, pepper, cucumber and cilantro rolled up in rice paper, with harissa stirred into the peanut sauce. Forty minutes, and it makes eight rolls at 248 calories each.
Nothing gets cooked except the tempeh, so the kitchen stays cool. In July, that’s most of the appeal.
Get the recipe from Addicted to Dates.
11. Easy Vegan Sushi for Beginners
Sushi rice with cucumber, avocado and mango. The mango is what makes it, and it’s also the ingredient most people leave out, so please don’t. Forty-five minutes for four rolls.
You’ll need a bamboo mat. The first roll will probably be a bit loose, and by the third one you’ll have the hang of it.
Get the recipe from Piping Pot Curry.
12. Roasted Peppers Quinoa Salad with Chickpeas
Our own recipe: roasted peppers and chickpeas folded through quinoa with a garlic tahini dressing. It’s done in under twenty minutes.
It eats just as well cold as it does warm, and that’s something most of this list can’t claim, so it’s a good one to make extra of and take to work the next day.
13. Sweet Potato Lentil Curry
Sweet potato and lentils in one pot, forty-five minutes, serves five. Another of ours, and one we come back to a lot.
The lentils thicken the curry on their own as they break down, so you don’t need coconut milk at all unless you feel like adding some.
14. Red Lentils Peanut Butter Casserole
Red lentils and peanut butter sound wrong together until you’ve eaten it, and then it makes complete sense. This is one of ours, and it’s the highest-protein recipe we publish, at twenty-four grams a serving.
Thirty minutes, serves six.
15. Creamy Kale Potato Soup
The last of our own recipes in the main list, and we’ve included it for the evening in the middle of summer that turns cold and wet on you. It happens every year.
Potato blended into the broth is what makes it creamy, so there’s no cream in it at all.
Where the heat comes from
If there’s one thing to take from this list, it’s that gochujang, harissa, red curry paste, tamarind and lime do more for a weeknight dinner than any amount of slow cooking ever will. They’re loud, they’re fast, and none of them needs the oven on.
Buy one jar of each and keep them in the fridge door, and most of this list stops needing a special shopping trip.
And, always, seek health consciously.
Four more of ours in the same key
The dishes above lean on Thai, Korean and Vietnamese cooking, because that’s where this kind of heat comes from, and we wouldn’t pretend to have written those. But these four are ours, and we think they belong on the same list.
16. Easy Creamy Coconut Lentil Curry
Thirty minutes, serves three, 543 calories a portion. Lentils, canned tomatoes, garlic and curry powder, and the coconut takes care of the rest. It’s better the next day than it was the first, which makes it the most useful thing on this page for an ordinary weeknight when you’d rather not cook. Get our recipe.
17. Creamy Vegan Chickpea Curry with Buckwheat
Three cups of cooked chickpeas with potatoes and tomatoes, served over buckwheat instead of rice. We like the buckwheat here because it has a bit more to it than rice does. Forty minutes, serves four, 543 calories. Get our recipe.
18. Healthy Vegetable Tofu Stir Fry, Oil-Free
Tofu, pepper, zucchini, mushrooms and scallions in a very hot, dry pan. A splash of water stands in for the oil, and once you’ve done it a couple of times you’ll find that’s the whole trick to stir-frying without any. Get our recipe.
19. Curry Veggies with Lentil Puree
Zucchini, eggplant, carrot and tomato over a lentil puree. This is the slowest thing here at about an hour, and it’s the one we make when the vegetable drawer needs clearing out, because it takes whatever’s left in there. Serves three at 446 calories. Get our recipe.
