Meatless Week: Wrap it up

After cheating deliciously for 1 night, it was back to meatless eating for another 3 nights. One dinner that was just ok, one wonderful Asian style feast, and one night of lovely leftovers. Not bad!



On Thursday I made these green pea fritters. Very simple: green peas, thawed, mashed with an egg, some flour, lots of fresh mint, a little Parmigiano. Oh and there were supposed to be a couple of tablespoons of ricotta in there, but Dennis had eaten all the ricotta for lunch. So I blame it on the case of the missing ricotta, that these fritters were a bit heavy and stodgy (but tasty). Served with one of my favorites, with mushrooms and fried halloumi.



On Friday we had some friends over for an impromptu after work dinner. I made a huge bowl of spicy noodles (noodles tossed in a sauce made with sesame paste, black vinegar, peanutbutter, sesame oil, chili oil, Sechuan pepper and soy sauce), nestled on a bed of pan fried napa cabbage and mushrooms. Roasted 2 heads of broccoli, and dressed those with soy sauce, black vinegar, ginger and garlic. Marinated some tempeh and mushrooms in sweet thick soy sauce and sambal badjak, and served this, fried, in little lettuce cups with lots of fresh coriander. Blueberry pancakes with pecan ice cream for dessert. An extremely delicious and very satisfying dinner where no one missed the meat at all.





We had the left over noodles for dinner the next night, pan fried and topped with a fried egg. And more roasted vegetables: green asparagus this time, doused in Chinese black vinegar and chili oil.





This might be my new favorite dressing for roasted vegetables: the spicy, almost smoky punch of the chili oil, the sweet and sour darkness of the black vinegar.

The verdict: If I had a week of uniterrupted home cooking ahead of me, I could easily do meatless week again. But, going out to dinner or having dinner with friends presents difficulties for the part-time vegetarian. In restaurants, I will often order a vegetarian dish if it appeals to me, but to be honest, most of the time the meat options are just much more tempting. (Not to mention the fact that many restaurants don't even have vegetarian dishes on the menu. When it says "ask your waiter for vegetarian options" you know that you won't be served anything really exciting).

And friends? As an optional vegetarian, can I ask them to prepare a meatfree meal for me? Should I just not say anything and eat whatever they have that has no meat? I don't know.

I'll continue to eat meat when I feel like it, not much, and nothing but free range / organic meat as far as I can help it (that means, when I'm responsible for buying it). I'm not ready (yet) for a life without bacon, meatballs and roast chicken. But this week did make me more conscious of how easy it is to rely on meat for flavor and protein and satisfying dinners, and how cooking with vegetables, grains, pulses and a bit of dairy is a huge creativity challenge.

Meatless Week, Day 3 & 4: Something on your plate

We spent Monday afternoon at a friend's house, celebrating her birthday. When we left at 6:30, we had eaten a lot (lemon meringue pie, chocolate cake, madeleines, hummus, cucumber sandwiches, cheese straws and olives) but were left with the yearning for something to be eaten from a plate, sitting down, at the table. It wasn't until I stopped by the grocery store to get 'something' for dinner, that I realized that there's nothing like an afternoon of drinking cold white wine on a sunny balcony to make you crave...

... bacon.

My normal standby for an evening like this would be pasta carbonara: fast, easy, delicious and satisfying. But since that was out, I could not think of anything else. We wound up eating an utterly boring salad with avocado, tomatoes and some old cornbread that I toasted in the oven. I'll spare you the pictures.

Tonight, something better and a some musings about the vegetarian dinner plate.

I always feel that one of the biggest pitfalls of the vegetarian dinner is the fact that it's so easy to wind up with a one pot meal, a dish that consists of lots of little things chopped up and tossed together. Pilafs, pasta dishes, composed salads and soups - no matter how delicious, they can be boring to eat, mouthfull after mouthfull of the same thing - especially when you're used to a steak or a chicken leg or a meatball on your plate. You want something sizeable, something to cut into, something to take little bites out of.

It does't have anything to do with flavor, just with the psychological effect of how satisfying it is to have that Piece of Something. The piece does not have to be meat. It can be a wedge of quiche or frittata, a slice of lasagna, a lentil burger.

So I tried something like that today. I passed my favorite Turkish supermarket this afternoon and bought a packet of yufka, pastry sheets similar to but a bit thicker than phyllo. And made these eggplant cheese borek.

They're based on a dish I learned to make from a Kurdish co-worker a couple of years ago. That version has nothing but eggplant, ground lamb, onion, garlic, salt and pepper in the filling. Lacking the meat, I experimented a bit with cheeses, herbs and seasonings. I love the flavor of allspice with eggplant, and the mint gives it a slightly Greek feel. You could easily substitute parsley or coriander for the mint, and use some red pepper flakes in the filling, or ground coriander seed (which is also a great match with eggplant). The egg and yoghurt topping makes the crust lovely golden brown and delightfully balanced between crispy and chewy. Do try this!



Eggplant and cheese borek
makes 4, serves 2-3 as a main course

1 eggplant
about 200 grams yufka sheets
1 onion, minced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground allspice
2 tablespoons ricotta
3 tablespoons grated cheese (anything from Parmesan to semi-aged Gouda will do)
2 tablespoons fresh mint, chopped
1 egg
6 tablespoons yoghurt
1 tablespoon cream
1 tablespoon cold water
salt, pepper, olive oil

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Prick the eggplant all over with a fork, wrap it in foil and roast it until it´s soft 8about 40 minutes). take from the oven, let cool a bit and peel.
Fry the onion and garlic in olive oil until soft. Add the allspice, salt and pepper, and the chopped up eggplant. Fry it all together for a couple of minutes. Then let cool a bit, and mix in ricotta, cheese and mint.

Separate the egg. Mix the white with 3 tablespoons of yoghurt, the cream and water. Mix the yolk with the rest of the yoghurt.

Grease a baking dish.

Lay out your yufka sheets. Your goal is to end up with 4 large discs of an approximately 10 inch diameter. Depending on your brand of yufka, you need to cut your sheets or put the smaller pieces yours was already cut in, together. Brush the sheets with the egg white - yoghurt mixture. This will help to glue the pieces of yufka together.

Divide the filling in 4 portions. Put a portion of filling on each 10 inch yufka circle, fold in the sides and roll it up so you end up with a thick sausage like pastry. Put the pastries (borek) in the baking dish.

When all 4 pastries are in the dish, pour the egg yolk-yoghurt mixture over the pastries and bake the whole thing for 30 minutes at 200 C.

Serve with a green salad (I served mine with a salad of roasted green beans in a tahini dressing)

Meatless Week, Day 2: After the Pub

You know that kind of dinner?

The 'we're home from the pub and had a couple of very strong beers now what's in the fridge oh not much damn we're hungry'... and then you get every little bag and jar out on the counter and throw in the last frozen corn tortilla's and with your head slightly spinning you whip up a creamy mustard dressing AND a tomato basil salsa AND you fry up some mushrooms to stuff your quesadilla's AND grind some allspice to make allspice and ancho roasted butternut squash AND at the very last minute fry up some eggs because, you know, you're just so hungry'?

That kind of dinner.

It was good.


Parsley salad, creamy mustard dressing, ancho and allspice roasted butternut squash, fried eggs.



Goats cheese and fried mushroom quesadillas with tomato/basil/lime salsa

The very best thing, was that it was the First Dinner on the Balcony of 2010.


I love our view.

Meatless Week, May 24-31

nettle tops

Hello, I'm back.

It's not that I did not have anything to tell. I have a backlog of recipes (purple potatosoup, another millet pilaf), oh and a trip to the beach to post pictures of, and there's still 5 days of London eating waiting to be blogged about, an underground farmers market and the 150 muffins I baked, not to mention a ton of bacon jam. No shortage of subjects. Just a shortage of time, energy and blogging-inspiration.

So, when I read about Lorna Yee's Meatless Week Challenge over on her blog The Cookbook Chronicles, I decided that a challenge like that was just what I needed to get me committed to regular blogging again. I've been thinking about doing something like this myself. I always say we don't eat a lot of meat, but what I really mean by that is that we don't often eat large steaks or whole chickens or huge roasts. We do eat a lot of 'hidden' meat - bits of bacon in pasta dishes, meatballs, soups based on meat and chicken stocks. Even though I don't eat a pound of meat a day, I do adore the flavor of meat and I don't think I ever went a whole week without a single piece of animal protein. So why would I want to do that, anyway? Besides the obvious environmental reasons and concerns about animal welfare? I simply think that cooking vegetarian food forces you to be more creative in the kitchen. I wrote a little bit about that here.

This week will be that week. Well, not quite. More about that later.. For reasons I'll explain later in the week, I decided to cheat one day during this challenge. To sort of make up for that, I did start meatless Week one day early. So for us, Saturday, May 22 was the first meatless day of the week.

I decided to chronicle not only what I make for dinner but also snacks and lunches, because that's where the little bits of meat most often sneak in.

Saturday, May 22

The ususal yoghurt and granola breakfast.
Lunch: 2 latte´s and a croissant with butter, and later 2 slices of bread with peanut butter.





Dinner:
Creamy nettle soup with cubes of fried potato
Salad of wheat berries, roasted green asparagus, basil, toasted cashews and ricotta