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I'll have them cook you something that you'll really love
Recently a colleague of mine recommended a cookery book. A vegetarian one.
He's often very damning of vegetarian food - not because he disapproves of it on principle, but since it's often just a bit rubbish in execution. He's omnivorous, but he is the main cook in his housenold and his partner is vegan. He frequently condemns vegetarian/vegan food that he's eaten out as "nowhere near as good as I make". He is similarly scathing about most recipe books.
So, when he got excited about a vegetarian cookery book, I listened. "It's by that bloke", he said. "TV chef, but looks like a normal person. Three names."
Anthony Worrall Thomspon, I hazarded.
Maybe. Was he the one that caught shop-lifting? No, not him.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, suggested someone else. Prepostorous, I said. Not only does he definitely not look like a normal person, the last thing he'd do is a vegetarian cookery book.
Which just shows how much I know. HFW has cut all his hair off and looks very normal indeed, and has embraced vegetables. Possibly literally, from the enthusiasm with which he writes about them.
River Cottage Veg Every Day turns out to be full of recipes which are exactly what I want from vegetarian food. That is, they involve lots of actual vegetables, and don't involve massive quantities of fake meat and cheese. In the intro, HFW writes that too often vegetarian cookery starts out thinking "how shall we replace the meat?" and that that's the wrong approach. So his recipes are - largely - dishes in themselves rather than "normal" dishes with something substituted.
Ironically, I'm about to cite a counter-example:
One of my favourite dishes from the book, thus far, is "Vegeree", a vegetarian version of kedgeree.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
becky requested the recipe, and I think undyingking might like it too (since he complained a while back that such a thing wasn't possible).
This recipe is, of course, © Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, or the River Cottage, or someone. If you like it, go and buy the book - it's full of yummy things :)
Serves 4
3 medium onions
1 large aubergine (about 350g)
2 medium courgettes (about 250g), halved lengthways if large
3 tbsp sunflower oil
1 tbsp good curry powder
300g basmati rice
4 large eggs, at room temperature
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Preheat the oven to 190°C/Gas Mark 5. Slice the onions from root to tip into eighths, keeping them together at the root end. Quarter the aubergine lengthways, then cut each quarter into 1cm thick slices. Cut the courgette into 1cm thick slices.
Toss all the veg together in a large roasting tray. Pour over the sunflower oil, sprinle with the curry powder and add some salt and pepper Toss together again. Roast for 40 minutes, stirring 2 or 3 times.
Meanwhile, cook the rice. Rinse well in several changes of water, then put into a saucepan, add salt, and pour on enough water to cover by 2cm. Bring to the boil, stir once, then simmer until the water is nearly all absorbed (there should be deep steam holes in the surface). Cover the pan with a damp tea towel and a tight-fitting lid and turn the heat as low as possible. Cook for 10 minutes. Then turn off the heat and leave the rice for a further 5 minutes. Remove the lid and use a fork to separate the rice grains.
To cook the eggs, bring a pan of water to the boil, add the eggs and boil for 7 minutes. Run under cold water to stop the cooking and leave until cool. Shell, peel and halve the eggs.
Toss the cooked rice with the roasted spiced vegetables. Taste and add more salt and pepper if you think it is needed. Serve topped with the hard boiled eggs and a grinding of black pepper.
--
I've typed that up verbatim, though obviously two of the paragraphs could be summarised as "cook rice, hardboil eggs" :) Leftovers stored in the fridge and microwaved the next day are just as good, if not better.
As may be evident from the above, all the recipes are in modern-fangled measurements only. Bah.
He's often very damning of vegetarian food - not because he disapproves of it on principle, but since it's often just a bit rubbish in execution. He's omnivorous, but he is the main cook in his housenold and his partner is vegan. He frequently condemns vegetarian/vegan food that he's eaten out as "nowhere near as good as I make". He is similarly scathing about most recipe books.
So, when he got excited about a vegetarian cookery book, I listened. "It's by that bloke", he said. "TV chef, but looks like a normal person. Three names."
Anthony Worrall Thomspon, I hazarded.
Maybe. Was he the one that caught shop-lifting? No, not him.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, suggested someone else. Prepostorous, I said. Not only does he definitely not look like a normal person, the last thing he'd do is a vegetarian cookery book.
Which just shows how much I know. HFW has cut all his hair off and looks very normal indeed, and has embraced vegetables. Possibly literally, from the enthusiasm with which he writes about them.
River Cottage Veg Every Day turns out to be full of recipes which are exactly what I want from vegetarian food. That is, they involve lots of actual vegetables, and don't involve massive quantities of fake meat and cheese. In the intro, HFW writes that too often vegetarian cookery starts out thinking "how shall we replace the meat?" and that that's the wrong approach. So his recipes are - largely - dishes in themselves rather than "normal" dishes with something substituted.
Ironically, I'm about to cite a counter-example:
One of my favourite dishes from the book, thus far, is "Vegeree", a vegetarian version of kedgeree.
becky requested the recipe, and I think undyingking might like it too (since he complained a while back that such a thing wasn't possible).This recipe is, of course, © Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, or the River Cottage, or someone. If you like it, go and buy the book - it's full of yummy things :)
Serves 4
3 medium onions
1 large aubergine (about 350g)
2 medium courgettes (about 250g), halved lengthways if large
3 tbsp sunflower oil
1 tbsp good curry powder
300g basmati rice
4 large eggs, at room temperature
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Preheat the oven to 190°C/Gas Mark 5. Slice the onions from root to tip into eighths, keeping them together at the root end. Quarter the aubergine lengthways, then cut each quarter into 1cm thick slices. Cut the courgette into 1cm thick slices.
Toss all the veg together in a large roasting tray. Pour over the sunflower oil, sprinle with the curry powder and add some salt and pepper Toss together again. Roast for 40 minutes, stirring 2 or 3 times.
Meanwhile, cook the rice. Rinse well in several changes of water, then put into a saucepan, add salt, and pour on enough water to cover by 2cm. Bring to the boil, stir once, then simmer until the water is nearly all absorbed (there should be deep steam holes in the surface). Cover the pan with a damp tea towel and a tight-fitting lid and turn the heat as low as possible. Cook for 10 minutes. Then turn off the heat and leave the rice for a further 5 minutes. Remove the lid and use a fork to separate the rice grains.
To cook the eggs, bring a pan of water to the boil, add the eggs and boil for 7 minutes. Run under cold water to stop the cooking and leave until cool. Shell, peel and halve the eggs.
Toss the cooked rice with the roasted spiced vegetables. Taste and add more salt and pepper if you think it is needed. Serve topped with the hard boiled eggs and a grinding of black pepper.
--
I've typed that up verbatim, though obviously two of the paragraphs could be summarised as "cook rice, hardboil eggs" :) Leftovers stored in the fridge and microwaved the next day are just as good, if not better.
As may be evident from the above, all the recipes are in modern-fangled measurements only. Bah.
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I don't think it's a vegetarian cookery book really so much as a vegetable cookery book. I think HFW says as much in the intro.
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However, what you describe is almost exactly my experience (down to the super-power). In particular, when cooking I eat a lot of vegetables (in meaty or non-meaty dishes) and when away for the weekend I find myself searching hopelessly through menus for anything that will offer more than a token spoonful of peas on the side!
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OTOH perhaps many chefs are indeed all too ready to make bad commercial decisions for the sake of their culinary artistic vision, if they really are the shouty egomaniacs that TV leads us to believe.
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The "What should I replace the meat with?" question gets some unfair bad press, I think. It's really more a matter of how to get protein into vegetarian meals. It's not at all difficult, but failing to do so is a pretty good way to make mediocre veggie food. (And even more so for vegan, where it does become slightly harder.)
(PS. Love that tune!)
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Most of those dishes also seem to be quite high-fat, low-fibre, which upsets my digestion in ways that I won't inflict on you this early in the morning ;)
But yes, I think the book is exactly about the sort of food I cook and would like to be able to order.
[*] limited because if it looks dull, I won't order it!
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(Not sure why I'm being quite this grumpy about it all, since it's been a while since I ate out anywhere, never mind somewhere with bad food.)
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Things have got better over 20 years, but it's still a major problem when travelling or when you are trying to get non-dairy vegetarian food. Or if you eat at many posh places. They show how posh they are by not having veggie food, or by having a token goat's cheese dish for every course.
Thanks for the recipe btw, it looks very nice. (I have not tried it yet, but I am very sure I would like it on the basis that it has no steps or ingredients that would put me off. You know the type of thing "Add X Y and Z rotten ingredients" or "Add 2 tablespoons of ground glass" or "Add cyanide")
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Yeah, that kind of things puts me off too.
And makes me start to sing... isn't it sickening, we've run out of strychnine, the gravy will have to have ground glass for thickening
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xJrEU2pss if you want to share my earworm :)
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Mm, this is it. And they also show how posh they are by not including (hardly) any veg with the meat dishes either,
I think the general rule might be: avoid restaurants that want to show how posh they are.
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I remember going to La Manoir for
(In fairness, I have a feeling that they might have been warned in advance that one of the party was going to want the vegetarian option.)
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(Cf: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2012/mar/28/why-no-vegetables-french-restaurants )
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I can easily imagine
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*I have (rarely) encountered such an assumption over here - at one chippy I know of, on asking if the veggie burger was cooked with the meat, they said "no, but it has onions and garlic in".
In Peru, it was a bit of a faux pas to say I don't eat meat. About equivalent to saying "I don't eat caviare" in terms of presumptuousness.
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(In reference to the above comment, Jezzidue wasn't trying to get vegetarian food in China, he was just trying to get some food that wasn't made entirely of meat, to go with his meat :)
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