Feb 22 2008
Vegetarian Tests
Meals that suit vegetarians, don’t contain mushrooms and which we haven’t cooked already; it was tough from the start!
- Mozzarella with Crazy Gremolata
- Lentil and Walnut Salad
- Butternut and Sweet Potato Soup
- Flourless Chocolate Brownie and,
- Hot Chocolate Sauce
So. Best friend (vegetarian) and best friend’s boyfriend (fussy) coming for tea. I went into work half an hour late, having spent a goodly while over breakfast pouring over the entire book looking for vegetarian recipes. There weren’t many! We’d cooked at least half of them already, another third were soups (I didn’t want to do soup because I wanted a side salad, which hardly goes with soup), others were too distinctly summery or christmassy… which didn’t leave very many. I was, then, delighted, when I spotted Pappardelle with Escarole, a sort of Italian pasta with wilted greens and chillies and herbs affair. It sounded fairly nice, would go well with my planned starter of mozzarella, and not be so filling that we wouldn’t have room for our brownies and ice cream.
No we will not be on the internet!!
Only I couldn’t get my ingredients. I had to compromise on pasta, going for tagliatelle rather than pappardelle, because the only pappardelle that Waitrose had in stock was fifteen pounds per kilogram. Fifteen; I kid you not. And most of it was broken because the packaging was fancy but inadequate. It was a compromise I was happy to make.
Less easy to compromise on was the total lack of suitable lettuce. Waitrose could not sell me a head of escarole, nor any of the suggested alternatives. The various bags of salad on offer all seemed to be too sweet- I suppose you probably don’t sell many bags of salad labelled as ‘bitter’ but I did think I’d at least be able to get endive. Wikipedia, you’ll notice, barely differentiates between them.
At this point I had to admit defeat on the sophisticated Italian pasta and resort to plan B, which was one of the soups from the Instant Calmer chapter. I’d been carrying around a note of the ingredients for some time, as I thought it’d be a good easy tea on a night Dougal wasn’t going to be in- he’s not a fan of either butternut squash or sweet potato. The starter and side salad, rapidly morphed into ‘two little salads on the side’ and I crossed my fingers that the pudding would be really really good.
The side salads were both very tasty and were pretty quick and easy to construct. I was surprised, actually, by how well the Lentil and Walnut salad went down; I’d worried it might be a bit wholesome. Similarly, the mozzarella was lovely, surprisingly easy to eat, given all the raw chilli on it. I did however, feel a little tired at having another of the endless variations on ’season with olive oil and lemon juice’.
The soup was less of a success. I felt like I was cooking it forever-I served tea over an hour later than planned. It seemed to use an awful lot of stock (I’d bought one carton of posh fresh vegetable stock, but ended up having to use two stock cubes too, so I probably needn’t have bothered). It required blending; we went against advice and used our food processor (we don’t have a blender!) and it didn’t come out anything like as smooth as in the book. That said, we have a really small blender (about 1L capacity) so maybe I was being impatient and not blending enough. We also didn’t have buttermilk to garnish it with; I used creme fraiche but it didn’t have the same artistic effect.
It tasted okay, but it wouldn’t have won any awards, not one. We didn’t finish it and I’ll let you into a secret and tell you that D and I chucked the leftovers away, something we rarely do (you’ll find out why in a subsequent soupy post).
Pudding, however, improved matters entirely. The flourless chocolate brownies were fudgy and warm and gooey although they probably would have benefited from cooking in a tinfoil tray rather than my usual brownie tin. The sauce was gorgeous- much better than the one for the Chocolate Pear Pudding- and survived to the following day without losing its capacity to melt to a lovely free flowing sauce again. The best bit is that we are still, a week later, eating the brownies (but then we have also had Dougal’s fabulous Sticky Chocolate Gingerbread to eat).
So, not our most successful dinner for friends so far, a few disappointments along the way, but a great pudding, to be repeated.
