Crunchy! It's Lucky Peach's Tempura Green Beans Recipe

Just because Lucky Peach magazine is famous for meat-laden recipes like porky ramen, fried chicken and piles of shellfish doesn't mean they can't publish an awesome vegetable-based cookbook with treats like tempura green beans. This fresh, fiber-rich, plant-based collection of "Turbocharged Recipes for Vegetables With Guts" is so good you'll forget you were ever craving that lap cheong or roast duck.

My first jobs in food media were as an event planning intern and a publicist, and the clubhouse of the people I worked for was the Red Cat, Jimmy Bradley's restaurant in Chelsea, where this dish has been a stalwart of the bar menu for more than a decade and a half. It has all the visceral appeal of something I would have ordered at T.G.I. Friday's (which was my favorite sit-down restaurant as a teen) and the sophistication—or at least a price tag—that made it acceptable in Manhattan. I include it here because it was one of the first restaurant vegetable dishes I thought was awesome, even if now I can see more clearly that it was just playing to my inner fat boy/deer that likes a salt lick. But that's okay — not all vegetables need to be the sort of thing you'd split with your yogini.

Reprinted with permission from Lucky Peach Presents Power Vegetables!