We'd Eat These Vegetarian Galettes Any Night of the Week

Meet Shelly West, our Readers' Choice Week winner for best vegetarian main dish.
Image may contain Food Dessert Cake Pie Tart Pizza and Plant
Shay Harrington

For this year's Readers' Choice Week, we asked our readers to prove their cooking prowess by sharing their best recipes with us—and boy, did they deliver. Our Test Kitchen selected their favorite submissions in the following categories: weeknight dinner, vegetarian main, chocolate dessert, family recipe, and something spicy. These are the winning recipes—and the story behind the cooks who created them. Today, Shelly Westerhausen shares her recipe for a vegetarian main dish.

Today's Readers' Choice Week recipe for won over our Test Kitchen editors because, well, after a season's worth of brown stews and braises, it's just so darn nice to look at something green! Its creator, 26-year-old Shelly Westerhausen, developed the recipe this past winter when she was sick of stews and other heavy foods.

Westerhausen, an Indiana-based food blogger and longtime vegetarian, blogs at Vegetarian Ventures, where she posts recipes like Vegan Cocoa Waffles with Caramelized Pears and Coconut Thai Tofu Lettuce Wraps.

But Westerhausen's food options weren't always so diverse. Growing up in what she describes as a very "meat-and-potatoes" Indiana suburb, Westerhausen mostly ate frozen fake-chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, and lots of pasta during her first few years as a vegetarian. "My mom's friends were worried about me not eating enough protein," she says.

When she moved to Bloomington for college, Westerhausen discovered a host of novel vegetarian options (Falafel! Goat cheese!) that inspired her to teach herself how to cook, and blog about the process. Westerhausen is working on her first vegetarian cookbook, out spring 2017 from Chronicle Books.