Tin Can Stew

This is a bit of a kitchen cheat recipe, but its a great back-up meal if you haven't fresh food in the house. This is a vegetarian stew made out of my can cupboard... mainly non-perishables and a few herbs. Using whole cans, it make a cauldron full and will last two or three people a couple of days. You can add or take away any of the ingredients so its real easy going! Of course if you have fresh veg you can use those instead, but I will stick to the tin-can recipe as an example.


Ingredients:


2 stock cubes
1 can new potatoes
1 can baked beans
1 can button mushrooms
1 can red kidney beans
1 can peas
1 can carrots
a handful of pearl barley
3 cloves garlic, sliced
a healthy pinch of herbs - I like rosemary, thyme and corriander but it doesn't matter


to these if I have them I may also add:
two small onions, cut in half
a handful of frozen mince
a spoonful of gravy granules if it seems too watery


Because of the amount of the ingredients, you'll need to start out with a large and deep saucepan.


Dissolve the stock cubes in a little under 2 pints of boiling water, then add to the pan. Put this over a hot temperature while you add the ingredients. Add all the cans, pouring away about half of the liquid in the can first. Add the barley, mince and garlic before giving it all a good stir. Turn the heat down to a simmer and leave for about half an hour, or whenever it looks cooked - especially if you decide to use fresh veg.


Right at the end stir in your herbs. If it still looks to liquid then stir in some gravey granules and likewise if it has gone too thick (this will depend on things like the quantity of barley and mince used) then add a little more stock.


This is great served with fresh bread and will sit quite happily on the hob til the next day when it just needs reheating.

Spiced Rhubarb Cake

Serves: 6 Preparation time: 30 mins Cooking time: 60 mins

Ingredients



5 oz butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
300g self-raising flour
2 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp ground ginger
100g dark muscovado sugar
200g golden syrup
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 eggs, beaten
300g rhubarb, cut into short lengths
icing sugar, for dusting


Heat oven to 180C/fan 160Cand put the kettle on. Butter and line a deep 20cm square cake tin (or loaf tin as I use).


Sift the flour and spices into a bowl. Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy in the food processor, then beat in the golden syrup.

Dissolve the bicarbonate of soda in 200ml boiling water, then gradually pour through the spout of the processor.


Pulse in the flour, then add the eggs, mixing briefly.


Remove the bowl from the processor, then gently stir in the rhubarb.


Pour the mixture into the tin and bake for 50-60 mins, until the cake feels firm to the touch and springs back when pressed.


Cool in the tin for 5 mins, then turn out and cool on a wire rack. Dust with icing sugar.


Personally I love this with hot custard, but it is just as good with cream or evaporated milk.

Note: because of the fresh rhubarb, only lasts about three days!

Warm Avocado and Soft Cheese - Quick Snack

This is a great quick lunch snack for two people. Slightly unusual, but well worth a go if you're tired of having cold lumps of avocado in a salad!

 Ingredients

2 Avocados
Juice of 1 Lemon
5 ounces (125g) Cream (Curd) Cheese
5 Celery Sticks, chopped quite finely
6 dried Apricots, chopped
A small amount of ground rock salt and black pepper to taste
2 ounces (50g) White Cheshire or Stilton Cheese (any good crumbling cheese will do)


Method

Slice avocados in half lengthwise and remove the stone. Carefully remove the flesh, ensuring you don't break the skins. Rub the inside of the skins with lemon juice.

Mix the avocado flesh with cream cheese, celery and apricots. Season to taste. Place back in the skins. Sprinkle with crumbled pieces of your chosen cheese

Place under a medium-high grill and cook until the cheese has melted and starting to brown on the top.

Serve hot and on a bed of salad to finish the look!

I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. Whilst all the cheese involved doesn't make this a diet food, its a wonderful yummy treat for when you've been good and don't want to give in to chocolate!!

Recipe: Imam bayildi (Fainting Imam) * Sweetly Spiced Aubergine *

There are many recipes out there for this dish and this is as it should be because its a fabulous meal! But none of the other variations I've tried have been as good as this one - the first and best one I ever came across. I can't remember where I first found it - I've had it since I took cookery class at school. Being vegetarian I always caused my tutor some problems - not 'fitting in' with the rest of the class. That, however, was my blessing as I was allowed to browse the recipe books having a go at anything I liked! Although I never much liked aubergines (egg plants to my American friends) I was intrigued by the story of this one. The legend that the Imam fainted with delight when it was brought before him. In fact there are many variations of the legend, but whatever the truth it doesn't change the fact that this dish IS worth a mild swoon at the very least!
Ingredients


6 tablespoons of Olive Oil
2 Onions, very finely chopped
4 small Aubergines/Egg Plants - cut into lengthwise halves
Juice of half a Lemon
4 tinned Plum Tomatoes, finely chopped
2 ounces Sultanas
2 teaspoons Ground Mixed Spice
2 teaspoons Sugar
2 Garlic Cloves, crushed or very finely chopped
2 Bay Leaves
Parsley to Garnish

Method

Gently cook the onion in 2 tablespoons of the olive oil until soft and just coloured.

While keeping an eye on that, carefully scoop out most of the flesh from the aubergines. Leave enough flesh in the shell to ensure that you don't accidentally break the skin. The mixture will be served in these, so think about the condition of the fruit while you are scooping! Cut the flesh into small pieces and sprinkle with lemon juice.

Brush inside the aubergine shells with olive oil, arrange in a baking tin and cook in a pre-heated oven at 200 degrees centigrade.

Add the chopped aubergine to the onions with the tomatoes, saultanas, mixed spice, sugar, garlic and bay leaves. Cook (covered) over a medium heat for 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until it has the consistency of chutney.

It is at this point you realise where the legend may have come from! The smell while it is simmering is divine!

Remove the shells from the oven when cooked and fill with the mixture. Garnish with the parsley. Traditionally this dish is to be served cold, but I enjoy it just as much - if not more - while still warm.

This dish is so very easy to make, but the great bit is that it smells and looks so much more complicated! Happy cooking!

Going Vegetarian - Part Two. The 30 day Experiment.

In the last blog I covered some of the things one considers when going vegetarian. This time I'm going to look at the food itself and beginning to make yourself veggie meal.

Ofcourse, its entirely possible just to make the food you’re used to eating and just leaving out the meat. Unfortunately, this is where the reputation for vegetarian meals being bland and boring largely comes from.

From the outside it is possible to see that it is usually here where you sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of those converting to the lifestyle. For those who really want to succeed and move forward you will find the new challenges exciting and easy to accommodate because you are living with the enthusiasm for it. Sadly, for those who have perhaps made the choice for the wrong reasons or under duress it is at this point it becomes obvious. Those folks will be unwilling to change their habits and thus use the subsequent dullness of dishes as an excuse to revert back to their old ways. It is not a bad thing. Some folks are simply not suited to it and as much as I like the idyllic notion of a world of vegetarians, I would much rather everyone be happy.

When people ask me if they should be vegetarian then I tell them they can only try. Say you will do it for a month. It is not as if you can never go back if you find its not for you! No, give it a month. That way you will fast approach the point where you find out if you are really ready for it. It is a win/win in many way. For if you get to the end of the month and are desperate to visit your local butcher then at least you can do it safe in the knowledge that you’ve given it a go and need ponder on it no longer.

As I have said, if you go into it with enthusiasm you will enjoy the change and will probably not even realise your month was up ages ago and have been living the vegetarian life for some time now! But at least in the early days you ate with confidence knowing it was ‘only for a month’. If you are making the change as a family rather than as an individual it will also help find out which family members will cope with it best and if necessary it will offer time for discussion over future eating arrangements should it be that not all want to keep it up. It might be a good time to involve older children in cookery, so if they decide to stick with it, and perhaps the parents don’t, then they are capable of making the best of their own food. It will also help mum or dad ease the kitchen workload! Perhaps once or twice a week the whole family can sit down to a vegetarian meal without labelling it as such. It is bad enough having a giant ‘V’ next to your meals in restaurants, let alone being singled out at home too! It is never easy contending with half a dozen different diets if you’re a large family, but it is important that everyone has the freedom to make their own decisions.

Although ‘health’ is frequently brought up in any discussion on vegetarianism, I intend to avoid the subject. It is all rather controversial for me, and as with so many things whether something is healthy or not seems to change week by week depending on what else is in the news. Health is a whole lifestyle phenomenon and can’t be created with a few well prepared meals. I will say that in my 29 years I have been unaffected by nothing more than the occasional winter cold, so for me I like it because it doesn’t harm me. That is the best one can hope for in life as far as I’m concerned. People often say to me ‘oh! You’re a vegetarian! I didn’t know you were health conscious?’ Well, I’m not. Not by a long way. Yes, I enjoy fresh fruits and raw vegetables, but I also am a one man army against low fat diary goods and the vulgar packaging that details how fat or otherwise you’ll be after eating the contents. I’m a bit Victorian when it comes to packaging actually. I am a firm believer that children should be taught to cook when young and be educated into knowing what will harm them and what will heal them. The human animal has survived many thousands of years without calorie counting packaging and it only serves to give the lazy a way offload their responsibility of tutoring their dependants. But, that is a rant I shall not bore you with now – it has nothing to do with vegetarianism!

I also believe that the saying ‘everything in moderation’ is a fair one. For those genuinely afflicted with things that mean their diets are restricted then fair enough, but most of us we get to choose what we eat and how much we consume. I never use low fat anything, but I also don’t make huge mountains of food to be consumed all day long. It is about balance and more importantly the quality of the food you want to consume. When I say quality, I don’t mean ‘expensive’. You can get by quite nicely if you’re prepared to put aside a certain amount of time for the preparation and avoid filling up the cupboards with snacks ‘just in case’ you don’t get time to cook. We all know that if the easy food it sitting in the cupboard we’ll not bother looking for the time to cook and crank up our food bills at the same time. It is also best point out that I have a fairly active lifestyle. To those who know me, you can stop giggling now! It’s well known that I dislike sport and have never stepped foot in a gym, but I rarely spend evenings or days in front of the tv and I do spend a lot of time working out of doors in the garden. Whilst it is not fast paced exercise it works for me and I leave it up to you to find your own balance. The majority of the recipes I speak of in my future articles may seem quite rich in butter, sugar, cream and lots of other things we’re told are bad. Indeed, some of them are bad. But this is where self control comes in and I cannot help in that respect.

 This article and the recipes I speak of are about me and my life as a vegetarian. I am rather good at moderation and as such do not fret over calories and ‘balance’. If you eat too much of one thing then the result will be negative, so I leave it to you to employ the common sense and live happily ever after. You must remember that going vegetarian will deny you certain fats, proteins and vitamins which are required to maintain a healthy balance. This is why a little research will benefit you in the long run if you’re going to move past the 30 day experiment. You will need to find a way to include the proteins and vitamins lost preferably through other food stuff, but failing that you can always take an interest in vitamin supplements. I am not fond of pill popping, so I combine the benefits of natural foods with a herbal approach. I also take different herbal remedies to boost my immune system and aid my general health.

I hope that has given you some, vegetarian, food for thought! Next post I hope to move on to sharing some actual recipes!

Going Vegetarian - Part One

Although there are a few who go vegetarian to ‘make a point’, this blog isn't aimed at them. This is more for those who want to enjoy life, assimilate into it a different diet and get on with everything else this world has to offer. I wanted to write a short article busting some myths about this dietary choice. As it happens in my case it wasn’t such a choice to make. My parents had made the choice before i was born and when I was of an age to try a non-veggie meal the idea didn’t appeal to me. In that respect I am lucky as I have not had any of the emotional upset that I know some of my friends have stirred in making the decision to go meat free. From conversations I’ve had it is somewhat easier if you are not particularly fond of fresh meat and feel it may be somewhat healthier to switch to meat substitutes and ease it out of your routine. It is far worse if you actually enjoy a meat filled diet, but make the decision for ethical reasons as you are then battling against your own desire for something and much harder to fulfil with anything close to enjoyment. Regardless of your reasons for making this particular choice it doesn’t have to be an unpleasant sacrifice and with a little adventure in your soul you can enjoy a wonderfully diverse diet.

First of all I should tell you what vegetarian means in my world, as there seem to be many interpretations of it! I don’t eat any meat, but I do eat diary. People often then ask me ‘so do you eat fish?’ to which the answer is NO! I’m a vegetarian! To those people who say ‘I’m a vegetarian, but I eat fish, oh and sometimes chicken’ I say you are not a vegetarian, you are just a fussy meat eater. So then they say, so what about eggs or milk? Farming still happens to produce them!’ To which I say – ‘I know, I’m a vegetarian – NOT at vegan!’ To anyone wanting to go vegetarian I will warn you... Changing your diet is the easy bit! Getting through to the knuckle headed argumentals that will haunt you is the bit which will test your nerve. There is something in the human psyche which leads people leading a life different from your own to feel the need to justify their choice by ‘catching you out’ and bringing you down to their level. However ‘modern’ and ‘liberated’ people claim today’s world is, it is sadly only a small percentage who will genuinely look at a situation and think ‘fair enough, if they’re happy...’ Most people will question you, gloat over what you’ll be ‘missing out’ on, tell you its ‘just a phase’ and generally reduce your well thought out and positive life choice to something resembling a school-girl’s passing fancy. But it makes them feel better! And because weare modern and liberated souls, we let it go; leave them to their medieval opinions and remind ourselves that in a past life they were probably witch-finders – and we all know what reasonable and well-balance folks they were! Healthy debates are fine, but don’t get drawn into the kind of conversations that lead to raised voices and personal comments – some people will never accept that it is a good lifestyle. I will freely admit that there are ‘baddies’ on the vegetarian side. They annoy me to. The ones that most people associate us with, the ones who try to ‘convert’ everyone they meet. I am not interested in converting people. I am happy to discuss the dietary benefits and social disadvantages of the lifestyle, but that is where the debate should be left. If your argument is reasoned and non-invasive then those interested will ask you more. Bullying your friends into joining you will only confirm their suspicions that you’ve joined some peculiar ‘cult’ full of people making you see the error of your foody ways. Be happy in your choice and others will be pleased for you; let the criticism go over your head and prove your point in the best way possible – throw a dinner party! Though I find it best not to advertise it as a ‘vegetarian’ dinner party, that only serves to put off the meat eaters who, until shown otherwise, will believe they’ ll have an evening of lentil soup and low fat yoghurt. I am not trying to deny the fact that I’m vegetarian – I just like the easy life. Sometimes subtlety and a garnish of sneakery is the best way to bring people together. The point of the evening is not to get everyone round and convert them all to raging veggies, it is to get a group of friends around to have a good time and not even notice that the delicious food on their plates actually doesn’t contain meat! However, it is perhaps best to leave parties until you’ve practised and experimented with your cookery skills. If you are an experienced cook, then you are probably already aware how to create the best of different diets. However, for the majority of busy, working people changing your way of eating can present new challenges. If you are not going to depend on the delights of ready made meals and the wonderous works of Linda McCartney, then you will need to bring your basic cookery skills up to scratch.

In the next part I'll chat about starting to make vegetarian meals....