By Joe Yonan Food and Dining Editor December 8 at 7:00 AM

If you had asked me this time last year whether I considered German to be a particularly vegetarian-friendly cuisine, I would have laughed. My opinion wouldnt have been based on any actual travel to Germany, only on some limited experiences in German restaurants (including mounds of smoked sausages ingested in central Texas). But since when does the lack of substantive research get in the way of a knee-jerk reaction?

Anyhow, that was all before I knew the name Tim Mlzer. Hes a chef, author and TV host in Germany whose new book, Green Box, has been taunting me from a position on my desk for almost six months now. Hes not vegetarian, and neither is his Hamburg restaurant, Bullerei, but his passion for cooking vegetables radiates from the books colorful pages. Ive bookmarked almost a dozen recipes to try cabbage with pappardelle squares, lemon salad with ricotta cakes, broccoli cannelloni but the book didnt make the leap from desk to kitchen until I needed a nice, easy soup to soothe me after too many weeks of indulgent holiday meals.

Mlzers approach is to give basic-seeming dishes a wow factor, a punch of flavor from an unexpected source. For the chickpea soup that caught my attention, for instance, he spikes the base with a little jalapeo and deepens it with curry, but the transformative touch is a mound of pan-fried sauerkraut, spiced with coriander and rounded out with a pinch of sugar, that goes on the soup after its pureed.

The liquid seemed a little too far on the thin side in consistency, not flavor until the sauerkraut came into play. After I sank it into the brothy soup and stirred in a dollop of yogurt, it was just what I wanted: hearty, nutty, with a pungent tartness. Easy to sip but with a little something to chew on, too. German vegetarian: Who knew?

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Weeknight Vegetarian: A dose of soup from a vegetable-loving German chef