VEGGIE-LITE A bowlful of veg

It was a funny week this week. I was away in Edinburgh for a couple of days and then out on Thursday which meant leftovers and other people cooking a fair bit. On Wednesday I asked Livia to make some soup and she opted to make lentil. I suppose I must have used a recipe for lentil soup once upon a time, as it’s not something my mother made, but I can’t imagine ever not knowing. Knowing isn’t the same thing as being able to tell anyone else though. 

"You’ll need an onion… and a carrot or two… or however many there are in the fridge. And some celery if there is some. Actually anything that’s left over in the fridge can go it. Fry all that in a bit of oil. A slosh of oil. Then add the lentils. Maybe a handful. I just kind of tip the container. And a bit of vegetable stock. I don’t know how much. More than a pint, less than a litre, I think. Then let it cook. Oh, but don’t forget to add salt and pepper. If it’s too think or too thin you can just add a bit more water or some more lentils. And when it’s done you can whizz it up or leave it lumpy, it’s up to you."

She’s pretty good in the kitchen though, Livia. It was a very fine soup.

On Sunday we ate a bowlful of vegetables in a way I’d never have thought of eating them. Anna Jones’ recipe (in The Modern Cook’s Year) for ‘early spring stew with baked ricotta’ had me ROASTING lettuce and baking a ricotta sprinkled with lemon zest. I trust her now. I couldn’t imagine what this would be like when I read the recipe but I knew it would be tasty. And sure enough, wilted lettuce soaked in lemony juices, a vegetable broth with bright green peas and beans from the freezer, baby potatoes roasted next to the ricotta and the ricotta itself, crumbling, almost chalky and coating everything turns out to be a perfect combination. Mmm mmm.

Doesn’t it look good!

It did take a bit of assembling, but nothing too strenuous particularly on a Sunday when there are extra pairs of hands around. Certainly easier than putting together a roast dinner!

I’m finding that I trust Anna Jones to come up with something delicious. I could see myself giving everything in her book a go. I love the focus on what’s available at different times of year and what you might feel like eating. I like the fact that the dishes start with the vegetables at the centre. They never seem to be a version of a meat dish nor do they seem to be adapted from an extant recipe or gathered from the cuisine of another country. I may be wrong, not having been in the vegetarian game for long, but to me Anna Jones seems to be genuinely inventing a new type of cooking.

 Here's the entire menu for Week 7.

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Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.

Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.

VEGGIE-LITE Week 8 menu

Tuesday
Caponata*
Veg Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Wednesday
Onion soup


Thursday
Pasta and tomato sauce


Friday
Cauliflower cheese and baked potatoes


Saturday
improv (kids)
Carbonnades
The Cookery Year Readers' Digest
Clearly a meaty stew is a rule breaker - explanation in next week's blog.

Sunday
Roasting tray dinner
The Modern Cook’s Year Anna Jones

Monday
leftovers, of course

*new recipes

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Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.

Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.

VEGGIE-LITE Week 7 menu

Tuesday
Squash and chickpea stew (leftovers)

Wednesday
Lentil soup
(Livia made this - I had to give her a recipe which is tricky when it's one of those things that you make by grabbing a handful of this and that."

Thursday
Eggs
I'm going out, so I'll be having scrambled eggs on toast (mmmm) and Robert is making baked eggs for the two of them.

Friday
Baby carrot and broad bean risotto*
Veg Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Saturday
Leek and goat's cheese quiche

Sunday
Early spring stew*
The Modern Cook’s Year Anna Jones

Monday
leftovers, of course

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Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.

Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.

VEGGIE-LITE Trying tofu

The most delicious things we ate last week were the lentil and walnut burgers in the picture from The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen. They were more mushroom than anything else and had the deep richness you get from mushrooms combined with substance from the lentils. The walnuts could have been more in evidence and we ended up with a mixture that was slightly soggy for burger (there’s no egg in the recipe to hold it together). But definitely one to do again, perhaps with tweaks.

Once again, the burgers pictured above aren’t my main topic this week. This week, I bring you… tofu!

VEGGIE-LITE In search of a one-pot rice dish

Firstly, the image above isn't the one I'm going to talk about. It's just that it looked so good I thought you really ought to see it. It's lasagne with pesto from Mollie Katzen's The Enchanted Broccoli Forest spinach, walnuts, pesto and loads of ricotta. It was fabulous and has definitely earned its place amongst our regular dishes.

What I really want to talk about is one-pot rice dishes.. I don’t mean risotto, I mean the type of thing you throw in a pot and leave to bubble away on the cooker or pop in the oven. There are a couple of Delia Smith recipes we do again and again – Basque chicken which has olives and oranges and chorizo from her Summer Cooking and its Winter Cooking equivalent, Moroccan baked chicken – plus the store-cupboard standby I call ‘emergency dinner’ which is brown rice, borlotti or some other beans, frozen spinach, bacon or chorizo plus anything else that is lying around. Obviously the trouble with any of these is that meat is a key ingredient. What could I do to make vegetarian alternative to these? The obvious answer is just to miss out the meat. 

So that, this week, is what I did. I made Delia Smith’s Moroccan baked chicken without the chicken. So, brown rice, olives, onions, lemon juice, chickpeas, seasonings. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But you know what? It tasted like something was missing. And not just the chicken – I think it was missing the rich fattiness that comes with the chicken.

Is this a thing you can replicate without meat? Maybe more olives would do it. Or something like aubergine. I’ve looked through the books I have and can’t find a recipe that does exactly what I want it to do. But there are other ones that do something slightly different that may fit the bill. I think this may be one of those areas where instead of trying to replicate a meat-dish experience I should be embracing the veggie possibilities. Watch this space…

 Here's the entire menu for Week 5.

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Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.

Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.

VEGGIE-LITE Week 6 menu

We're easing up on all recipes being new now, so new ones are marked *

Tuesday
Cauliflower rice with eggs and green chutney*
The Modern Cook’s Year Anna Jones

Wednesday
Tomato, thyme and goat's cheese tart
Veg Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Thursday
Stir-fry with tofu
making it up as we go along...

Friday
Aubergine parmigiana*
Veg Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
(I feel like this is something they're always talking about on American TV shows...)

Saturday
North African quash and chickpea stew
Veg Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Sunday
Lentil and walnut burgers*
Moosewood Cookbook Mollie Katzen

Monday
Leftovers or baked potatoes or eggs
As usual!

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Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.

Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.

VEGGIE-LITE Effort rewarded

Thursday I made Cauliflower Cheese Pie from The Moosewood Cookbook. Have you come across Moosewood and its companion The Enchanted Broccoli Forest? Mine are the 1990s revised editions with – so the recipes keep telling me, less cheese and fewer eggs than the originals. But they’re solidly seventies – just look at these pages, handwritten and illustrated by the author, Mollie Katzen!

There is a touch of seventies worthiness here, and occasionally it veers a little bit too close to nut roast, but generally these are a winner for a new vegetarian. There are foods that spring from cuisines all over the world, good explanations of how to do things (diagrams sometimes!) and plenty of suggestions for variations. I always find the American way of measuring in cups and sticks of butter and Fahrenheit temperatures a little frustrating, but you get used to it.

So, Cauliflower Cheese Pie. My eyes bumped on the title of the recipe as I flicked through the book. I imagined a pastry case containing cauliflower cheese – you know, boiled cauliflower, cheese sauce, grilled in the oven and for us mostly served next to a baked potato. Bit odd. But that isn’t what the recipe involved at all. The pie crust (I’d call it a tart because the crust is on the bottom only) is made of grated raw potato and onion. This is pressed into the pie dish, baked in the oven for forty minutes, then you brush it with oil and bake for another ten. Think rösti. 

You fry onion and herbs, put in small cauliflower florets and cook with a lid on until the cauliflower is done. Then you put a layer of cheese in the crust, followed by the cauliflower mixture and then more cheese and some beaten egg – not as much as you’d use in a quiche, just enough to hold the pie together. Bake again and – well look!

It was delicious and surprising. The cheese and the cauliflower plain, creamy; the potato crust crispy at the edges, melt-in the mouth elsewhere. It’s not a perfect dish. To our tastebuds it needed something to lift the flavour a little. I thought some English mustard powder in the cauliflower mixture, or perhaps some horseradish in the potato. But the thing is, the reason I’ve picked it out of all the other things we had to eat last week is that cooking it, eating it brought home the benefits of this whole notion of trying to shake up the things we eat. It does require effort to look up new recipes and be imaginative with the things we usually eat. But when you come across a new idea like this, or two here – a new type of crust and a way to eat cauliflower apart from ordinary cauliflower cheese or putting it in a curry – it seems to me to be so worth that extra effort.

So hurray for Mollie Katzen! Those books have been on my shelves for a long, long time and they have more than earned their place. Although I cannot ever, ever agree that carob is a reasonable substitute for chocolate (sorry, Mollie).

Happy eating!

Here's the entire menu for week 4.

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Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.

Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.