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How to make the perfect... Vegetarian
I've been working my way through the Guardian's misleadingly-titled supplement (retrieved from out of the recycling -- nothing to do with attaining vegetarian virtue, but a compilation of their regular 'How to make the perfect ' cooking columns!)
I think I've now tried all the recipes with the exception of those centring around ingredients that I dislike (mushrooms) and/or can't get (courgettes/aubergines in January... whoever wrote that "this dish works as well on a bleak British winter evening as it does on a balmy Naples night" was obviously relying on veg from the other side of the globe!)
I'm afraid I don't think I'd try any of those again. The vegetable tagine was fine (it might have been better if I'd actually possessed preserved lemon and harissa), and I might *possibly* bother to keep that one for future reference, but it wasn't as tasty as Jack Monroe's Not-a-Tagine, and the ingredients are harder to come by.
Deep-fried tofu 'fish' is an obvious non-starter on too many levels.
Aubergine parmagiana (minus the red wine and Italian speciality cheeses) might be feasible in season ("Ideally, of course, it would be midsummer and the markets would be bursting", writes the columnist, but they're not!), but I've never had much luck with fried aubergine anyway.
Courgette fritters ditto, and the prospect of grating and wringing out vegetables is not inviting. Easier to stick to onion fritters.
I did cook the Mung dal, and ended up eating the full six ounces of beans in one session, but it was (like most of the recipes in this supplement) a great deal of time and effort for a rather uninspiring result -- I don't mind slow/complex cooking if the end product is memorable, but this really wasn't.
Likewise, the Aloo gobi recipe produced a presentable dry curry, but not an especially flavoursome one, while pre-frying both potatoes and cauliflower was very slow, consumed a vast quantity of oil, and felt like rather a waste. I'd rather have had the sautéed potatoes from the initial stages as a side dish! So I'll stick to my normal wet curry method and Abel & Cole's plebian (and much shorter) "cauliflower and tomato curry" recipe :-p
Spanakopita requires filo pastry and feta cheese.
The vegetarian chilli I don't think I tried (if I did, I missed out the coffee and the charring of the chillies!), but again I don't have a number of the ingredients, including the speciality chillies. And I already have an excellent chilli recipe.
Pasta ai funghi is an obvious non-starter for someone with a mushroom phobia :-p
And her frying-pan pizza recipe I'd actually already tried, with disappointing results...
I think I've now tried all the recipes with the exception of those centring around ingredients that I dislike (mushrooms) and/or can't get (courgettes/aubergines in January... whoever wrote that "this dish works as well on a bleak British winter evening as it does on a balmy Naples night" was obviously relying on veg from the other side of the globe!)
I'm afraid I don't think I'd try any of those again. The vegetable tagine was fine (it might have been better if I'd actually possessed preserved lemon and harissa), and I might *possibly* bother to keep that one for future reference, but it wasn't as tasty as Jack Monroe's Not-a-Tagine, and the ingredients are harder to come by.
Deep-fried tofu 'fish' is an obvious non-starter on too many levels.
Aubergine parmagiana (minus the red wine and Italian speciality cheeses) might be feasible in season ("Ideally, of course, it would be midsummer and the markets would be bursting", writes the columnist, but they're not!), but I've never had much luck with fried aubergine anyway.
Courgette fritters ditto, and the prospect of grating and wringing out vegetables is not inviting. Easier to stick to onion fritters.
I did cook the Mung dal, and ended up eating the full six ounces of beans in one session, but it was (like most of the recipes in this supplement) a great deal of time and effort for a rather uninspiring result -- I don't mind slow/complex cooking if the end product is memorable, but this really wasn't.
Likewise, the Aloo gobi recipe produced a presentable dry curry, but not an especially flavoursome one, while pre-frying both potatoes and cauliflower was very slow, consumed a vast quantity of oil, and felt like rather a waste. I'd rather have had the sautéed potatoes from the initial stages as a side dish! So I'll stick to my normal wet curry method and Abel & Cole's plebian (and much shorter) "cauliflower and tomato curry" recipe :-p
Spanakopita requires filo pastry and feta cheese.
The vegetarian chilli I don't think I tried (if I did, I missed out the coffee and the charring of the chillies!), but again I don't have a number of the ingredients, including the speciality chillies. And I already have an excellent chilli recipe.
Pasta ai funghi is an obvious non-starter for someone with a mushroom phobia :-p
And her frying-pan pizza recipe I'd actually already tried, with disappointing results...