What Do I Know?

Greet Spring on MeatOut Day

What are you doing on Meat Out day? I wrote a review of my latest veggie excursion, to World Food Cafe near Covent Garden. Pretty soon I'm gonna have to stop dissing British vegan food, if places like World Food Cafe keep turning up.

And later I may post a recipe for the yummy polenta with butternut squash and black beans I cooked last night.

If you're trying to go meat free, here are some tips I posted last year. They're still fresh, however, so go save a cow and have a happy MeatOut Day!

Soupy

I posted the soup recipe I made last night. I also discovered the reason I blog about food: Sometimes I make something and it's so good I want to tell someone about it. This was one of those times.

That's all I have today.

What a Day

Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving. We had a quiet day. I made focaccia with potatoes, and decided to make a corn soup from the vast quantities of corn in my freezer. It was delicious, and if you consider that corn is a traditional Native American dish, quite the T-day dish. You can find out how here.

I kind of like not having the pressure of a full-blown Thanksgiving meal to prepare.

You all have my sympathy, today, anyway. On Saturday I'm making a non-turkey loaf and bringing it to a friend's Thanksgiving celebration, delayed by two days due to British work schedules.

And top on my list of what I'm thankful for: That I'm not caught up in the terror in Mumbai. My heart goes out to those who are.

Toulouse, Vegetarian Style

If you've ever thought about eating a vegetarian meal in Toulouse, I've written a post for you.

Maybe one day I'll get around to blogging about what else I did in Toulouse. There are not, I've discovered, enough hours in the day. Perhaps when we return to Greenwich Mean Time on Sunday that will be fixed.

Watercress Farm in Sarratt Bottom

Bet you never saw watercress growing!

These are the Sarratt Bottom watercress beds, the last active watercress beds on the Chess River. The warm water from the river (usually 10C or more) is diverted to the beds.

The watercress is available at local farmers' markets.

It's nice to see where my food comes from.

Eat Less Meat, Save the Earth

"People should have one meat-free day a week if they want to make a personal and effective sacrifice that would help tackle climate change, the world's leading authority on global warming has told The Observer."

That was the front page of the Guardian website today. The expert is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But it's one thing to say people should eat less meat; it's quite another to provide resources and education and support on how to do it.

Fortunately, we've got that covered.

There are tens of thousands of vegetarian recipes on the internet, including my food blog, Wednesday Food Blogging. For more inspiration, and a weekly reminder, you can sign up for Meatout Mondays weekly e-newsletter here.

So there's no reason for you not to follow the advice, is there?

Wednesday Foodishness

It being Wednesday and all, I updated my poor neglected food blog. Yesterday. Tuesday. But I'm letting you know now, since I'm out all day and otherwise would have nothing to blog about.*

I wish I could blame it on having a wisdom tooth removed, but my lack of posts over there is due to laziness more than pain, although there might be something more relevant to the fact they're called wisdom teeth.

I am feeling less wise than ever.

*Whenever I travel all day I write in my head a lovely post about Britain's motorways, and the thought-provoking signage I see. Maybe one day.

If It's Wednesday, It Must Be WFB

Today being Wednesday, I posted a couple of things over at Wednesday Food Blogging which you may be interested in, including a rather surprising (for me) restaurant review.

For those of you looking for a veggie burger in England, you may find it helpful.

Wednesday Food Blogging: Wild Mushroom Lasagna with Tomato Confit

From the jaws of disaster, a victory is snatched.

A funny thing happened on the way to a lasagna.

I managed to bring back a couple of porcini mushrooms from Rome. September and October are porcini season, so the markets had crates of huge porcinis. A couple are all you need for a dish, but one didn't quite make the trip intact, and when faced with a sauté pan, the other shrank into more normal mushroom size.

Dried porcinis raced to the rescue, after a quick soak in hot water. Hurdle number one seemed to be solved, at least if I could content myself with only one layer of mushrooms.

I considered a layer of spinach, but no spinach presented itself in my veggie bin, nor in my freezer. (Note to self: a block of frozen spinach is a good thing to keep on hand.)

So this would be a height challenged lasagna. Politically correct and all that.

But then my lasagna noodles were stuck together in the middle when I poured off the cooking water. One big mass of pasta, with floppy sides. (Lasagna noodles are wider and shorter here, about 4 by 6 inches, and not ruffled on the edges.) Now, I don't normally cook my lasagna sheets; I just add more water to the tomato sauce. But this was to be a white sauce lasagna, so I thought it best to cook the lasagna first.

In trying to pull the sheets apart, I ended up with pieces of lasagna. I layered the bigger pieces on the bottom, then pieced together more bits until I had covered the whole thing more or less.

The only thing that worked properly was the bechamel. All hail bechamel!

Surprisingly, for such a problem-prone dish, the result was pretty good. I'd definitely make it again, next time with cremini or portobello mushrooms if porcini aren't in season. Although, the porcini really were good in this. Try to find them if you can. (They're also known as ceps in France.)

If you try this at home, your mileage may vary. Which may be a good thing.

Wednesday Food Blogging: College Food

(Note: I'm away in Rome right now, probably eating something fabulous or else wondering where I'm going to eat next.)

They call it mellow yellow...college food.

My daughter sent me a photo of a meal she cooked with her friend during her Fall Break weekend, which she spent in New Hampshire. Her friend is also vegetarian, and they found some bargains at the local grocery store.

Morningstar Farms fake steak, corn-on-the-cob (a delicacy here in England), pasta and some frozen potatoes. (She didn't send a recipe. I think you just read the instructions on the back and follow, more or less.) (Update: Okay, there was a recipe: "we added the herbs to the potatoes and chipotle sauce to the steak while we were cooking it. it is the tabasco kind.")

Bring back memories anyone?

She really is fortunate, though, having vegan and vegetarian meals available three times a day in the house dining hall (Smith has houses, not dorms). When I was in college I had to settle for french fries and orange juice from the grill in the student union.

I also had to walk 10 miles in the snow* to get to class every day, but that's another story.

*(This is a lie. It rarely snowed in Louisiana, and when it did, we took the cafeteria trays and used them as sleds. That's on account of we were too poor to have real sleds.)