I'll have them cook you something that you'll really love

[venta]

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. 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.

Comments

[taimatsu]

I got this from Sainsburys and love it too! Hurray! The roast cherry tomatoes in there are really delicious.

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.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I agree over the vegetable/vegetarian divide - though I think if someone mentioned a "vegetable" cookbook I'd expect it to be mostly side-dishes. Not because you can't make nice food out of just vegetables, but because people mostly don't :)

[satyrica.livejournal.com]

I see undyingking's point: although not a vegetarian (despite seeming to have a super-power that makes even my most long-standing friends believe I am) I do like to limit the regularity with which i eat meat but whenever i eat out the non-meat choices are so uniformly unappetising that I never go for them, having been involved in a number of events where people dig on vegan food and made plenty of tasty things myself, I know another world is possible!

[venta.livejournal.com]

I may have inadvertently mis-represented undyingking, I think he only said that he'd yet to meet a decent vegetarian version of kedgeree :)

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!

[satyrica.livejournal.com]

Exactly! Even getting any kind of vegetable matter that isn't a sad little pile of lettuce with a meal is a challenge

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Cos I like you, yeah I like you, and I'm feeling so Bohemian like you, And I feel, uh-huh, woo! Doo doo doo doo, dada doo doo doo doo, dada doo doo doo doo, dada dum dada dum dada

[venta.livejournal.com]

Extra kudos for writing all the doo doo bits out :)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Heh, yes indeed, thanks! He did a TV show last year I guess re his vegetarian project, which was pretty good really. (Although it ended with him going back to carnivory with enhanced appreciation thereof, which I'm not sure should quite have been the point.) I shall give this a go at the first opportunity.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, it was just the kedgeree I meant. I have found quite a few places that offer good veggie options, but there are still too many that don't. I get the impression chefs are either thoughtful about it, or else consciously doing it as a token gesture for people of whom they disapprove.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

From the looks of that recipe he's written a book about how to cook the sort of stuff I've been eating for years. I might have to get a copy...

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!)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Assuming chefs don't consider expressing their disapproval to be terribly important, I think it's quite short-sighted of them. Most vegetarians of my acquaintance get so excited about a restaurant that offers them (say) a choice of more than one interesting dish that they drag all their meat-eating friends along with them repeatedly!

[venta.livejournal.com]

My (admittedly quite limited[*]) experience of ordering vegetarian food is that "failing to get the protein in" is not a common failure mode. Most of them do that perfectly well, by having cheese or soy-esque stuff in. The problem is that the food is still extremely mediocre, by not being very interesting or tasty.

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!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

As far as restaurants go I'd agree with the above criticisms but find I have a similar set of problems with meat dishes too. Everything is high fat, low fibre (and usually high sugar too, even for savoury dishes), plus there's the additional hazard of tough, rubbery meat.

(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.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I'd agree that it's not a problem exclusive to veggie food. I think I just tend to think "bah, no veg, I know, I'll order something veggie... oh, it won't help". I think I feel more aggrieved (not really justifigably) when vegetarian food doesn't contain veg!

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

My (admittedly quite limited[*]) experience of ordering vegetarian food is that "failing to get the protein in" is not a common failure mode.

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")

[venta.livejournal.com]

Add 2 tablespoons of ground glass

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 :)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

They show how posh they are by not having veggie food

Mm, this is it. And they also show how posh they are by not including (hardly) any veg with the meat dishes either, venta's complaint above.

I think the general rule might be: avoid restaurants that want to show how posh they are.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I certainly do so. But I suppose it's possible that there's a large rival constituency who are relieved by the thought that veggies aren't really welcome there because what they do is basically Big Slabs of Meat, and more likely to patronize it accordingly, and to spend more than me and my friends.

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.

[venta.livejournal.com]

What a strange thing. This isn't something I've observed (mostly due to hanging out in posh restaurants insufficiently frequently).

I remember going to La Manoir for leathellin's birthday one year, to have the seven-course tasting menu. We had steelcityblues with us, and they provided him with what was apparently an excellent vegetarian version. I remember being vaguely surprised about that, and am disappointed to hear it isn't the norm.

(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.)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I guess there are different types of posh restaurant, so I shouldn't generalize too much. (I have also had the Manoir's veggie tasting menu recommended.) But I think it goes back to the tradition that vegetables were for poor people to live on, rich people ate meat because they could.
(Cf: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2012/mar/28/why-no-vegetables-french-restaurants )

[venta.livejournal.com]

I remember jezzidue describing a similar issue in when travelling in China. As an honoured (and clearly wealthy-by-the-standards-of-rural-China) guest, he was given lots of meat dishes. Apparently he caused some offence when he implied the food was no good by asking for rice - the peasant food which you fill up on when you can't afford "real" food.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard that! -- excellent story.

I can easily imagine jezzidue causing offence by all sorts of other means, but that one would never have occurred to me :-)

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I hear the thing to do in that part of the world is to say you are Buddhist (which would also mean no garlic or onions*).

*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.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, that's interesting. I didn't know a Buddhist diet might prevent onions and garlic. If I'd got such an answer to a question in a chipshop I'd have concluded the answerer was a bit odd, so it's lovely to know these things.

(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 :)

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

...at the Borgia orgy tonight!

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

With you on that one, with a spouse with inherited heart/cholesterol problems, a meal out needs careful planning of meals in days before and after to allow for "indulgence" of meal out.

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

But... but... Jezzidue eats steak sandwiches with more steak instead of the bread!!