What Do I Know?

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.)

Wednesday Food Blogging: Lentil Pie with Porcini Mushroom Gravy

Comfort food, this time with umami.

I wanted to make Porcini Gravy with the dried porcini mushrooms my husband brought back from a recent trip to Florence. Plus I had some leftover mashed potatoes in the fridge. And as I spun around the circular shelf in my cabinet, I spied some green lentils. I suddenly envisioned a lentil pie, with mashed potatoes on top and porcini gravy running over the top.

Now, if last month was Chipotle Month here at WDIK?, this month will be porcini month. There are similarities—both chipotles and porcinis take your tastebuds a step beyond the plain old. (To put it another way, chipotle is to jalapeno peppers what dried porcinis are to mushrooms.

Porcinis are in season now in Tuscany, where they grow wild. It’s easy to find them here, at nearly every supermarket, in their dried form. I’ve never seen them fresh, presumably because they don’t travel well. But dried porcinis, as well as being remarkably versatile, have a unique, woodsy flavour that livens up any recipe.

I call this a lentil pie, since it's very similar to shepherd's pie. (The word pie in Britian typically means a savoury pie, not sweet.) It's really more like a casserole, however. I baked it in a small casserole dish, just big enough for two. You can increase the amounts accordingly if you're feeding more than two, or want leftovers. The gravy was plenty for three or four servings, so you don't need to increase that.

I steamed some broccoli to go alongside. The entire meal was surprisingly elegant, yet never veered from the realm of comfort food. And with three different kinds of umami going on, my tastebuds were happy as well. (See how that word umami keeps appearing everywhere?)

Wednesday Food Blogging: Maque Choux

Corn Maque Choux, served over quinoa: Slimmed down, yet still as authentic as zydeco.

I was horrified to pick up this month's Delicious magazine and read Simon Rimmer's recipe for vegetarian gumbo: with sweet potatoes, cabbage, red onions and not a dollop of roux, it resembled no gumbo I've ever had. I'm all down with vegetarian gumbo, of course, but if you're going to veganize a recipe, at least try to keep to its roots. Or call it something else.

So it was with no small amount of caution that I attempted to veganize another Cajun staple, maque choux (pronounced "mock shoe"). You probably haven't heard of it; it never became popular when Cajun food spiraled into trendiness during the nineties. But maque choux is much more likely to be found in Grandma's Cajun kitchen than shrimp etoufee, or K-Paul's mistake-made-good, blackened redfish. It's also naturally vegetarian, and a simple country dish, though sometimes sausage was tossed in when times were flush.

Maque choux is basically corn stew. It's often served over rice, but I decided to serve mine with quinoa, which is much higher in protein. I managed to get my hands on some fresh corn, which as I've complained before, is very dear here. But with the end of summer comes the corn crop, such as it is. And for maque choux, you want the freshest corn you can get, so fresh milk squirts from the kernels when you slice them from the cob.

You also will want to use the Cajun trinity, missing from Rimmer's faux-gumbo: onions (yellow or white), celery, and green bell pepper. I added some chopped tomatoes, since I had them, and of course used soy milk instead of dairy milk and cream. No eggs, either, but I never quite understood what purpose they served.

I don't know if K-Paul would approve—I based my recipe on his, since no one knows their way around a Cajun kitchen better than the big man himself. But with zero cholesterol, and a whole lot less saturated fat, my version is a lot less likely to make our waistlines kitchen-sized.

That's a good thing, cher.

Wednesday Food Blogging: Pintos with Polenta and Cilantro Cream

What I did with leftover pintos.

I love the texture of food almost as much as the taste. This dish, with smooth polenta on the bottom, a melange of pintos in the middle, and cilantro cream on top, provided a series of firmaments for my fork to slide through, a bonanza of textures and tastes. (I am practicing to be a food writer. Wait till I talk about wine!)

The beans themselves, tender, but not too mushy around the edges. The polenta, crisp on the outside, yet surprisingly smooth when faced with a fork. And the cream, drifting down over the top like snow on a rocky hillside. A perfect combination, in my mind.*

I’m finding more of my dishes feature these triple texture whammies. Adding a sauce to the top makes an okay dish even better. When I first made this, I just served the pintos over polenta, with chopped tomato on top for my husband.** But it was lacking something.

So for the next day’s leftovers, I dreamed up the cilantro cream—which took seconds to make, and that seemed to do the trick. Another trick: Since the pintos were already made, the only time-consuming part of this recipe was the polenta. It took 20 minutes to stir, and then normally would need another half hour or more to set.

But I happened to have a bag of ice sitting on the counter. I set the pan on the ice and by the time I’d chopped some onions and heated up the pintos, the polenta was firm enough to slice and fry. (You could also use the pre-made polenta, if you're the cheatin' type.)

From the package of dried beans, I ended up getting three meals for the two of us, plus my husband had them for lunch one day. A triple pintos week, and a very thrifty one too.

*As long as those nasty raw tomatoes are kept out of the mix.

** Truly, some people will eat anything.