with Andy, conjured up a rather rich meal:
Simple vegetable soup with potato & parmesan prominent. Not too much cheese to be overwhelming, though--about 1/2 cup for six servings of soup or so. Garlic and onion in butter first, then potatoes, carrots, leek, boil long enough to mush potatoes, afterwards broccoli and at the last minute, turnip leaves, at the last last minute the parmesan. Salt and pepper to taste.
Andy's contribution: wheat gluten fajitas. Sliced seitan (seasoned wheat gluten stir fry) sauteed with yellow bell pepper and onions, chili powder, salt and pepper to taste, with wheat tortillas and cheese but I preferred it just over brown rice.
Dessert: yams, preboiled as Jasun once advised, then baked with some pats of butter and slices of Braeburn apple (bakes well!) in a thin layer of apple juice.
Comments: no overarching theme here, more like cooking off the cuff with available ingredients! Yummy, though heavy. For the vegetarian challenge, relying too much on consipicuously faked meat (the seasoned gluten) would be cheating I think but OK sometimes. The only moral here is that a meatless meal can still be hearty, especially when taking advantage of vegetarian fat sources: cheese and butter are obvious; coconut milk is reliable; fancy-do delights are avocado, and nuts as Jasun mentioned. Plus plenty of great hearty not-fatty ingredients (all the kinds of beans come to mind) but that's no reason to omit fat :)
Comments to Jasun: I'm a fan of your vegetarian quest! You sound so hard on yourself; maybe perfectionism has its purpose, but please don't give it up! I look forward to the concoctions to come...
2 comments:
note: by "mush" potatoes, i don't mean you seriously mash them, just mush around lazily with a ladle when they just start to disintegrate, so you get a thick, lumpy soup in the end. The look is humble, ala greasy spoon, but not greasy.
Your vegetable soup sounds quite tasty, and I see that you both thicken and flavor the soup with the potatoes! Very nice.
I must say, I admire your "cooking off the cuff" methodology. Much like knowing how to cook with leftovers, improvisation strikes me as the mark of a skilled cook. I can't tell if I have the same skill anymore, in that we never have leftovers from dinner for testing this skill!
As for my own posts, I admit I am something of a perfectionist, which makes it hard-going as I learn new means of cooking without meat. Oh well. If it were easy-going it wouldn't be worth doing.
Post a Comment