The vegetarian’s bible
Zoe O’Reilly | Staff Writer
I’ve been a vegetarian for 48 days now, minus a few lousy slip-ups. I didn’t realise Percy Pigs contained pork gelatin until I’d reached the halfway mark in the bag. It took some bleeding-heart chickpea zealot to primly inform me that the liberal parmesan scrapings on my cannelloni were made from calf rennet, which I believe has something to do with stomachs. Aside from these rookie mistakes, however, my previously carnivorous lifestyle has been utterly eschewed. For the time being, at least.
This volte-face was not the consequence of a morality crisis, sudden desire to lose weight or desperate need to make a Lenten sacrifice. Actually, I just wanted to see if I could do it, and was quietly chuffed to find that I could.
It wasn’t always easy. One obstacle stemmed from my juvenile hatred of salad, and all its terrible, verdant cousins. There is little as bleak as a fistful of limp rabbit food perched on the plate’s perimeter (or worse again, taking centre stage). No amount of vinaigrette can disguise the overwhelming taste and consistency of wet leaves – the chief fare of the vegetarian, as far as I was concerned.
Then, there was my fear of dying an insidious, anaemic death while shunning a whole menagerie of mineral sources. I’m still vaguely surprised to have made it this far without being hooked up to an iron drip, pallid and runny-nosed.
But happily, my disheartening theories were disproved entirely. The experience has been much more about what I’ve introduced to my diet than what I’ve cut out. There are vegetables on every available surface. I’ve eaten more lentils in recent weeks than I did in the twenty years preceding. I’ve stocked up on any number of weird, aromatic spices, pulses, bulgar wheat and mad seeds.
Yet keeping dishes interesting was pretty daunting at the outset. Thankfully, Lorraine Fitzmaurice released her new cookbook, ‘Blazing Salads 2,’ in splendid coordination with my leafy regimen.
If you’re familiar with the eponymous vegetarian deli on Drury Street, you’ll have a vague notion what Fitzmaurice and her macrobiotic siblings are all about. The deli they run together specialises in fresh, organic takeaway lunches for those who laugh in the face of the plebeian chicken-fillet roll (and, obviously have more than €2 to spend on lunch).
The book means taking the deli home with you and, even if you’re not a vegetarian, will get anybody out of a dinnertime rut. There are exotic pizzas, summery tarts and technicolour stir-fries. There’s a beautiful pastry monstrosity entitled “Vegetable Wellington.” The delicious spinach and ricotta cannelloni also comes highly recommended. The lasagne was inoffensive, if a bit bland, while the hotpots were handy: you can leave them to smoulder gently on the hob for hours without paying them the slightest attention. Another section succeeds in reinvigorating falafel and “the “much-maligned veggie burger,” whose widespread unpopularity is reflective of the glue paste and corn kernels so commonly given that name.
Admittedly, I’ve spent a lot more time at preparation than before – chopping, peeling, swearing loudly when I screw up, but I don’t really mind. It’s been immensely enjoyable, and who knows? Perhaps my life expectancy will be fractionally raised to compensate.
Lunch started out tricky too, for someone who tends to build midday around the sandwich, and the sandwich around the animal. That’s where soup comes in. and I’m not taking about those miserable packet numbers, all salt and miniscule freeze-dried carrot cubes.
Soup is where leftover vegetables go to die, or rather, go to heaven. Scrape them out of their hiding places, sauté in a big pot, add some decent stock, and if you have a hand-blender, you can whizz it up and make it look like Avonmore. It’s the least fussy food going. You can get fancy and add herbs, spices, pasta or whatever, but once you start straying from the conventional path you’re going to want some guidance. That’s where the book comes in handy. There’s a decent recipe for Moroccan minestrone, alongside one for roasted aubergines, a very filling split-pea soup, and a vivid borscht, which I’m told is delicious, though personally I tend to avoid beetroots in such vast quantities.
The blazing salads of the title get a whole chapter to themselves. I was cynical at first, but it has emerged that it’s not salad I detest, it’s soggy iceberg. These are different: vibrant and flavoursome, they span from the excellent ‘carrot and daikon salad with fresh coriander,’ to the homely ‘zingy red slaw.’ Fitzmaurice stands firm in her belief that salad shouldn’t be a penitential afterthought, a trivial garnish to “real food.” Her salads are real food.
Overall, the whole experience has been really positive. I can’t say I’ll never return to meat, but for the time being I’m having fun ensconcing myself in the herbivorous fray. Truthfully, I would have considered myself a pretty unlikely candidate for this sort of thing, so before you banish vegetarian food to the guinea pig’s feed-bowl, I recommend giving it a go. You might surprise yourself.
“Blazing Salads 2” by Lorraine Fitzmaurice
Published by Gill & Macmillan
€19.99
