Food!

[wavestar]

Following a visit to the excellent Saturday Farmer's Market in New Haven this weekend, I'm formulating more completely a plan to eat more ethically and responsibly that I've been pondering for a while. I would love to buy nothing but free-range, locally raised, shiny happy ethical meat, and I'm fortunate enough to have a source of appropriate lamb

Comments

[dreda]

Lentils, lentils, lentils. Anything can be made into a curry and served over a mixed rice or couscous (Trader Joe's carries some lovely mixed rices and mixed couscouses; try one of theirs and see if you can recreate it from the bulk bin.) Tofu is totally your friend - you can make the extra-firm tofu even firmer by draining it and then pressing it between paper towels under a cast-iron skillet or something. Cut into cubes et voila, protein.

The Moosewood Restaurant makes great cookbooks that are un-scary. The Moosewood Restaurant Cooks At Home is specifically designed for "30 minutes at the end of the day" cooking, and has menu suggestions and everything. Also, any cookbook by Madhur Jaffrey is awesome - mostly Indian, but often generally "warm places" vegetarian cooking. Her World Vegetarian cookbook is HUGE and incredibly easy to use. Just remember that legumes soak up spices and you can almost always double the spices in the recipe without harm

[lyndagb]

> Another way to make your meat go farther is just to use a lot less of it

Actually, yes this is a good point. I appalled my father once by saying that I only needed 1 lb of mince to make a chilli for 5. But really, once you add in the beans and tomatoes, plenty of chopped pepper, chopped carrots, a bit of sweetcorn and peas ... you really don't need much meat, and I would routinely make this and split it into 5 freezer portions.

[wavestar]

See, I firmly believe that carrots, sweetcorn and peas have no place in chili. So that's a bit of a limitation there. A lot of onion, a generous variety of beans and peppers, and lots of tomato go a long way, though.

[wavestar]

Okay, maybe corn. Maybe. But no carrots. And definitely no peas.

[khalinche]

One thing we've found with vegetarian dinners is that they become much more satisfying with even the smallest addition of animal protein, say a sprinkle of grated cheese on a bowl of soup.That's a very good point. Having proteiny and meaty-flavoured things on hand to provide flavouring is a good way to go - Marmite, cheese on soup like Kate says

[pet_student]

We do more or less the same: Lamb, beef and occasional chicken from home, and then mostly fish and vegetables in between.

Pasta with broccoli, chili and mushroom is a life-saver as it's really quick to make. Mixed beans works with anything.

Chick peas with a bit of cream (we have a product sold as creme fraiche, am not sure you have it: like a combination of cream and youghurt) and curry and leftovers (mushrooms, onions, peppers, broccoli, wok mixes, anything, really) with rice is also very quick.

We tend to eat vegetarian (though with eggs and milk, of course) several times a week. Works just fine, once you get into thinking in non-meat tracks. We do eat a lot of fish too, though.