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| Red onion and goat's cheese pastries from The Greatest Ever Vegetarian Cookbook, ed. Nicola Graimes. Hurray for ready-rolled puff pastry - the perfect way to turn nothing into something yummy! |
The most delicious thing we had to eat this week was a mushroom gratin. It was an alternative to a recipe I've been cooking forever and I wondered momentarily why we've never made it before until I remembered that our daughters have always declared that mushrooms are disgusting so we've steered away from them unless just cooking 'grown-up food'. Now that they are grown up too and throwing themselves into being vegetarians, it's time they started liking mushrooms (and aubergines and all the other vegetables with textures that make children squirm). I had a love-hate relationship with mushrooms myself as a child. Sometimes they seemed delicious and at other times just too much. (I must have been very annoying to feed.)
Anyway, this recipe (from The Big Food and Drink Cookbook by Michael Barry, Jilly Goolden & Peter Bazalgette) was just the pommes dauphinoise recipe I always use with a layer of mushrooms added in the middle. There is something deeply, satisfyingly meaty about the flavour of mushrooms. I admit that the texture can be a problem if they're not cooked just right, but when it is right, they add a dimension to vegetarian food that is quite different from the purely 'vegetable' or the grains and pulses.
And - wow! - it was divine! Cream and potatoes and mushrooms, how can you better that? I wonder that I hadn't thought of it myself. I wonder what else mushrooms might transform.
You can find the complete menu from week eleven here.
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.
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