Meatless Monday - Tomato and Squash Summer Salad

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It's getting hot... well at least it is where I live! And it's not even summer yet, but it's getting mighty close. This time of year I'm pretty against slaving over a hot stove, preferring instead to create gorgeous, fresh, summer salads with lots of veggies. We had this as a side salad, but I'd be inclined to add a little haloumi and eat it as is for a main meal. And it's so customisable... add whatever you like!

Ingredients
1-2 tbs butter
2 cloves garlic
5-6 yellow squash, cut into wedges
2 ripe red tomatoes, cut into wedges
salt
lemon juice
fresh basil

Directions:

1. Heat butter in a large frying pan over medium heat until soft.

2. Add squash and garlic and saute gently until the squash is crisp-tender. You don't really want much browning on them and you definitely don't want burned garlic... URG.

3. Take off the heat, add tomatoes, salt and lemon juice. Top with basil and serve.

Linky bitz...

♥ The linky will be up at 9am every Monday morning, and will stay up until the following Sunday.
♥ Grab the Meatless Monday button and put it in your post, and even on your sidebar if you're feeling generous.
♥ Visit at least one other blogger and leave some love. This is so much more cool if we're in it together!

Where it says "Name", you might like to add the name of your dish instead or as well.

Meatless Monday - Secret Weapon Potato Salad

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I'm not kidding when I say this is possibly the weirdest, but the easiest potato salad of all time.

I've made really rather elaborate potato salads before, with the dressing made from fifteen different ingredients I had to measure and mix myself. And they ARE good... but so is this one!

And the secret weapon? Coleslaw dressing. Yep, I'm mixing my metaphors, confusing my side dishes and generally breaking the laws of nature. But it's all for a good cause - a fast, easy and delicious potato salad that will make people think you spent hours slaving over it. Excellent.

I won't give measurements, it's all to taste, and easily made to however many servings you want.

Ingredients:
red/Desiree potatoes
green onion, sliced
chopped parsley
hot english mustard
coleslaw dressing

Directions:

1. Dice potatoes and cook in boiling salted water until just tender - you don't want them breaking up too much.

2. Add coleslaw dressing, mustard, parsley and green onions and mix. You can add eggs too, I just didn't bother this day. But it's a great addition! Serve chilled or at room temperature.

  
♥ The linky will be up at 9am every Monday morning, and will stay up until the following Sunday.
♥ Grab the Meatless Monday button and put it in your post, and even on your sidebar if you're feeling generous.
♥ Visit at least one other blogger and leave some love. This is so much more cool if we're in it together!

Veggie Meal Plan

I was watching an American breakfast news program this week, and they did a segment on the White House chefs losing a significant amount of weight with some healthy changes, despite working on pastries and sugary dainties at work. Then they cut to a picture of a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies straight out of the oven. Once I stopped drooling over the size of the oven, I realised it had been too long since I made those cookies. That's why they're in our lunchboxes this week!

If you ain't never had one, or they don't sound like your thang, check out this recipe and my long road to acceptance.

♥ crispy fillets with potatoes and a rocket-avocado salad ♥

♥ veggie burgers with oven fries ♥

♥ chipotle mexican veggie bowl ♥

♥ stuffed and roasted peppers ♥

♥ fried gnocchi with cherry-tomato cream sauce ♥

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♥ oatmeal-raisin cookies ♥

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♥ butternut squash and apple puree ♥

♥ banana pudding ♥ 

Meatless Monday - Mexican Pizza

For more info about my Meatless Mondays linkup, go here, or the Meatless Mondays tab at the top of the page. Link up with your own - I love seeing what people are eating!

This week is an easy dish that I like to grab when I'm starving. Mexican seems to work really well for fast food! I usually make a burrito or a quesadilla, but this dish was born from me getting thoroughly sick of both of them and wanting something a little different. You can absolutely use a proper pizza base, or make your own dough, but I just used a tortilla and ate it with a knife and fork, because it tends to go a bit soft. It can also be made for as many people as you want, I won't give measurements :)

Ingredients
1 tortilla per person
refried beans
salsa
sour cream
guacamole
fresh tomato
sliced green onion
coriander/cilantro
any hot sauce you wish - I used Tabasco and the sauce my chipotles came in.

Directions
1. Preheat oven or grill/broiler.

2. Spread refried beans on tortilla and top with salsa. You can also mix the two if you like. Sprinkle cheese over and bake/broil until cheese is golden and tortilla is crisp.

3. Top with sour cream, guacamole, tomato, onion and coriander/cilantro. Sprinkle over hot sauce.

Pretty easy, huh?

Usual spiel:

♥ The linky will be up at 9am every Monday morning, and will stay up until the following Sunday.

♥ Grab the Meatless Monday button and put it in your post, and even on your sidebar if you're feeling generous.

♥ Visit at least one other blogger and leave some love. This is so much more cool if we're in it together!

Check out last week's link for inspiration.

Meal Plan

Happy Sunday, y'all! Another meal plan for this week.

I had a look at a couple of cookbooks I have that I haven't looked at in a while for inspiration. Oh and if you scroll down and click on my Eat Your Books button, it will take you to a list of my cookbooks. Categorised online. Yeah I'm that much of a freak.

Anyway.

This week we're being real men and eating quiche. It's so creamy, cheesy and delectable I've no idea why people are so averse to it. I dare you to try mine.

♥ leek and cheese quiche with salad ♥

♥ ratatouille pasta bake ♥

♥ thai zucchini stir fry and rice ♥

♥ caramelised onion and pumpkin tart with oven fries and asparagus ♥

♥ teriyaki eggplant steaks with wasabi mash ♥

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♥ chocolate cream cheese brownies ♥

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♥ lentil, carrot and corn curry ♥

♥ orange and pear puree ♥

Excuse the excellent iPhone photo from my early blog days. Life sure was tough before my Canon arrived!

Meanwhile... is it true that men don't like quiche? Do YOU like quiche? What the hell is wrong with quiche?!

Meal Plan

I'm trying something different this week, by attempting a healthy mac and cheese. It is meant to be entirely fat-free but I just cannot do fat-free cheese. I'm not even going to try. However, I always use low-fat soy milk in everything, and this mac and cheese also has artichokes as part of its sauce. I'm definitely willing to try that! Will let you know how I go.

The veggie curry is actually Adam Liaw's Fish Head Curry that he told me is awesome vegetarianised. Can't hurt to experiment :)

This week I'm also adding whatever I'm making in the kitchen to have on hand for Veggie Baby.

♥ ravioli with veggie-tomato sauce and toasted sourdough ♥

♥ crispy fillets with apricot sauce, rice and broccoli ♥

♥ healthy mac and cheese, salad ♥

♥ veggie curry and rice ♥

♥ sundried tomato, spinach and feta strudel with roasted potatoes and peas ♥

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♥ glazed apple cinnamon scrolls ♥

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♥ pumpkin, broccoli and sweetcorn puree ♥

♥ apple and kiwi puree ♥

You can find the apple scroll recipe here and the strudel recipe here.

Enjoy!

Veggie Meal Plan

Ever wanted to know what vegetarians usually eat? Seriously, some people ask "what do you eat, then?" once they find out I don't eat any meat.

From now on, I'm just gonna direct them to these!

I always have meal plans every week, whether I sit down and do them properly or scribble them on a sheet of paper somewhere. I like to choose a cookbook, magazine, website, iPhone app or whatever else, and choose up to five dinners I want to try. Sometimes I just get ideas, rather than five specific recipes. I also add whatever I know I've got in the fridge I want to use up. I choose five because sometimes Veggie Dad grabs something on the way home from football training, or we're not home on a weekend night or whatever. Five seems to work for us.

I also choose one sweet extra to make on a Sunday for Veggie Dad's lunchbox. It's always a bit of fun to have a homemade goodie in there than the usual muesli bar-chips-cheese and crackers combo.

Veggie Meal Plan

b Veggie potpie and colcannon  b

b Gnocchi and tomato cream sauce with parmesan and onion bread  b

b Schnitzel with baked sweet potato and coleslaw  b

b Veggie sausage, cheesy cauliflower and steamed veggies  b

b Burritos and salad  b

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b Brioche buns   b

Do you meal plan? What are your favourite places to get ideas?

Why I Hate Vegetarians.

And before you go all "how dare you generalise! We're not all like that!", be assured I know we're not all like that. I am one. But I'm also well aware that vegetarianism and vegetarian food gets a pretty bad rap, and sometimes with very good reason.

Let me back up a ways.

I have recently been re-reading the columns of my very favourite food writer (and one of my favourite writers full stop), A. A. Gill. This man could make Gordon Ramsay cry with his acid tongue and withering reviews. Never have I read such stunning descriptions of either how delicious or how disgusting something is. The man is a maestro of the metaphor, the samurai of the simile. I hate how well he writes, because it makes me never want to pick up a pen again, for I know I'll never be as good.

I read with great trepidation his column on vegetarianism. Sometimes I can get a little defensive when someone belittles us (but bacon is so delicious!), but I rarely say anything in our favour. Live and let live, I say. I know how annoying vegetarians can be, and I know how gross tofu sounds. And is. So I was nodding along as I read, amazed at how perfectly he captured the feeling of most carnivores to us poor lentil-lovers.

"Vegetarian cooking is, it need hardly be repeated, unremittingly vile." Um, yes - it can be. Ever picked up a pre-2000 veggie cookbook? They're full of baby-poo-coloured sludge and boiled armpit hair. true story. Thankfully, we've come a long way.

"'Ah...' I can hear the frail, ululating voice of a wan and flaccid woman, lying exhausted on a sticky chaise longue. 'You just haven't had any good vegetarian food. You should try my mixed-pulse cheesy bake.'" It's true! They do try to convert you with their "special" dish. Which, to a meat-eater is missing a massive slab of flesh to make it palatable. Even I blanch at the chickpea curry offered at work as the veg alternative to the other meaty lunches. Who in their right mind wants to eat a chickpea curry? Lentil pasta bake? Not I, said the fly.

When visiting a vegetarian restaurant on Christmas ("it would be mercilessly free from conspicuous fun and gratuitous enjoyment"), Mr Gill described the smell as the "round, mushy, slightly acidic odour of sanctimonious worthiness". There are some vegetarians that do think they're one up on the general populace because they forgo eating a tortured animal's fear-ridden flesh. The rest of us nibble at a bit of cheese guiltily and know we're no better than anyone else. "Vegetarians aren't big on presentation, everything looks as if they've got a bulimic hippo as a food taster." - *ahem* chickpea curry *ahem*.

"My Moroccan potato casserole was a textbook dish. You might like to make it at home to insult the neighbours."

"I noticed that vegetarians are all marked by their extremities. They have double helpings of freeform set-aside hair, which they arrange in exuberant abstract patterns, and their shoes are cunningly cobbled so that, if need be, an extra pair of feet may be inserted. They also all sniff fruitily." I have seen people like this. And yes they were eating a toasted mung bean burger with sprouts.

But for all our foodie faults, vegetarians are pretty cool. We eat what we want and if you don't like it you can bite us. Or perhaps you can try some of my veggie Mexican lasagna, you'll love it. *sniff*.

The inimitable Audrey Gordon guest posts!

I'm all sorts of excited that celebrity chef Audrey Gordon has taken the time to share with us her thoughts on vegetarian food today. Considered one of the world’s ultimate food authorities, Audrey began her career as lifestyles editor of Implausible Homes magazine. Voted ‘Britain’s Sternest Chef’ for three consecutive years, she has devoted a lifetime to telling would-be cooks what they’re doing wrong.  In her lavishly over-sized new book, Audrey Gordon’s Tuscan Summer, she takes us on gastronomic tour of Tuscany, sharing her experiences, recipes and thoughts on the inadequacies of Italy’s motorway system. I am sure she'll make me feel suitably guilty for interrupting her very important work for someone that doesn't even confit anything.

I’ll be perfectly honest, as a restaurateur I always tended to be somewhat wary of vegetarians. And it wasn’t just their dress sense or inability to tip. Vegetarians were always the sort of diners who would insist on coming into the kitchen and examining your stock. Or who would refuse to order dessert because the bavarois might contain animal-derived gelatine. And then demand extra bread.


But over the years I’ve come to appreciate the pleasure of vegetarian food and I am now having regular meat free days. My first one was on August 5th last year, and I’m planning another some time in July. Next year.

My recent cookbook Audrey Gordon’s Tuscan Summer contains several vegetarian recipes, including Fava Bean Soup, a wonderfully exotic Rucola Salad and my very popular Vegetarian Surprise (the ‘surprise’ being that it actually contains veal. Sssh!)
My thoughts on salads…

I like my salads to be conversational. I want the lettuce to really bond with the tomato, not just merely sit alongside it. They should be snuggling flirtatiously, saying, ‘Let’s make a go of this.’ Meanwhile, the Spanish onion must be curled seductively around the olives, exchanging flavours like smouldering glances across a smoke-filled room. You simply can’t expect to just toss everything into a bowl and hope the ingredients somehow get along. Lower the lights, put on some Enya and be prepared to use plenty of good quality oil…

Unfortunately I neglected to play Enya when I tried a recipe from this book, the roast vegetable salad. How remiss of me. Perhaps that's why the potato refused to converse with the pine nuts. Sigh.

Audrey Gordon’s Tuscan Summer by Audrey Gordon (with a little help from Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch) is available now ($34.95, Hardie Grant Books)

Not just a load of old lentils

Greetings! Now i’m just as scared of tofu and tempeh and all the creepy-sounding, overly-healthy vegetarian foodstuffs as any regular person, which is why I created this site. Here you will find unfreaky food and recipes for vegetables that don’t immediately make you want to cry. Vegetarian food doesn’t have to be boring or hippy-flavoured unless you want it to be. If you do, i’m afraid Veggie Mama just ain’t for you!

I’m also considering growing a veggie baby in the near future, so sometimes the posts will focus on that. Given that these recipes won’t actually impregnate you, go ahead and eat them even if you’re a dude, or just not that into pregnancy right now. They will be delicious and nutritious and occasionally taste just like fake chicken.