On the Road to Vegetarian Cooking

No problem! In the first place, many of the components of your vegetarian diet are already waiting in your cupboard – pasta, rice, beans, potatoes – and your refrigerator – eggs, cheese, fresh fruits, and vegetables. Your local grocery store is an excellent place to stock your kitchen for meatless meals.

In response to the new consciousness about health and diet, more and more grocery stores now carry tofu and other “health food” products. But you may have to go further afield for several of the ingredients cited in this book: to a natural foods store, or an Oriental market if there’s one in your neighbourhood. If you think that a trip to a natural foods store will be a perilous excursion into alien territory, think again. The people who work in natural food stores tend to be very interested in health and diet. I think you’ll generally find that these people are friendly, knowledgeable, and ready to be helpful with any questions you have about products you don’t recognize, or techniques for using those products. Indeed, for many people, the friendly atmosphere and sense of community that they find at their local natural foods store makes shopping a treat to be anticipated, rather than a chore to be endured.

The most important trick to shopping, wherever you do it, is READING. Read labels. Look for brands with the least processing, the fewest additives and preservatives, no added salt or sugar. Keep in mind that you and your family will consume everything listed on that label. Become aware of what you eat, and consciously choose what will go into your body.

Two truths to remember while you’re shopping:

1) YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT.

2) GOOD INGREDIENTS MAKE GOOD FOOD.

Obviously the ideal diet would comprise whole grains, dried beans, and fresh produce, organically grown to avoid pesticides. But this may not be possible: such products may not be available where you live, and the time you have for meal preparation may be limited. So make what changes you can, when you can. It will probably be easier to accomplish a series of small changes in your diet over a period of time – unless you are one of those people who chooses to go cold turkey (or should we say cold tofu?) on bad eating habits. The goal, however you make it happen, is to replace overprocessed, oversweetened, high-cholesterol food with fresh vegetables, beans, and grains which are loaded with nutrition rather than additives. Here are some suggestions for stocking your vegetarian kitchen.

Canned beans (kidney, pinto, chick peas, black-eyed peas, lentils) for emergencies

Lowfat milk and yogurt, cottage cheese, ricotta, and other cheeses (try to avoid coloured cheeses which contain dyes)

Produce: you may wish to purchase fruits and vegetables where you can obtain organic produce. It’s sometimes more expensive, but it may be worth the extra expense to avoid the chemical pesticides on non-organic produce. And if enough people buy organic produce, the prices will come down as more farmers grow organic to meet the demand.

Bulk Items: While a little less convenient than pre-packaged food, bulk shopping is cheaper and lets you decide how much you buy of any item. Experiment with a trial quantity of couscous or cumin seeds, for example, rather than buying what might turn out to be a lifetime supply.

Spices and dried herbs – buy small amounts of several different kinds. Remember to label the unfamiliar ones at the store, so that once you get home you’ll have some idea what you bought.

Good quality oils (sunflower or canola, sesame, toasted sesame, peanut, corn, olive, walnut)

Tofu (often also available at your local grocery store in the dairy or produce section)

Vegetarian soup bases, frozen entrées, tofu burgers or hot dogs, breakfast cereals, dried mixes

Before heading out to the grocery store, read through the sections in this book on staples, convenience foods, and seasonings, and leaf through the recipes. Pick one or two recipes with unfamiliar ingredients. Why not take this book with you on your first few trips to the natural foods store? You’ll be able to look up any items you’re not sure how to use, and to check that you have all the ingredients for any recipes that you decide to try.

And while you’re moving in the right direction – making food choices because of their impact on your internal environment – keep in mind the external environment. You make a big difference when you change your consumption habits. Choose products with a minimum of excess packaging. Choose products that come in recyclable containers instead of disposable. Tell the store owner or manager that you prefer to buy environmentally-friendly products, and encourage her or him to carry a wide range of products that are minimally packaged, free from chemical additives, and not harmful to the earth. Shop with your own cloth or string shopping bags, or bring back and reuse the store’s plastic bags.

Take a look under your kitchen sink. How many of your cleaning supplies are marked with the symbol for poison? How many warn you to avoid contact with this product, to avoid breathing it in, or spilling it on your skin? Consider that the earth is a closed-cycle environment, and that what goes down the drain or into the garbage or up into the ozone, must come back to us in the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. Maybe it’s time to switch to less harmful cleansers, baking soda for scrubbing, and vinegar to cut grease. Your local environmental organization will have further information on safe cleansers; there’s also a bibliography at the back of this book.

These may seem small steps, or even major hassles. But each habit of consumption that you change from thoughtless to conscious, from harmful to healthy, is another step on the road to a saner, more balanced, healthier life, for you and for the planet…and another way to feel good about yourself.

All of us have our favourite kitchen tools, usually based on the traditions within which we grew up. An irreplaceable tool to one cook may be only a useless gadget to another. Not that you need to buy a lot of specialized tools to be a vegetarian cook. But there are some basic kitchen tools that make life easier for the vegetarian cook.

I have a friend who compares cooking to computers: think of cookbooks as the software, and pots, knives, and utensils as the hardware. Your output is only as efficient as your software and hardware allow. Here’s the list of hardware I’d recommend.

I consider good quality knives, kept sharp, to be the most fundamental and necessary tools of a cook. Face it: you’ll be cutting up a lot of vegetables when you prepare vegetarian meals. Your work can be made both safer and simpler if you use sharp, sturdy knives.

Good quality knives are well-balanced, feel stable in your grip, are of a length that is easy for you to work with, and will maintain a sharp edge. They can be expensive, but with proper care they’ll last a lifetime. Knives should be treated with respect, as you would treat any other high-quality tool. Do not use them as blunt instruments, hammers or crowbars. Knives should be washed immediately after use, dried and stored in a rack. Have them professionally sharpened periodically, or learn how to sharpen them properly yourself. Purchase a steel (the sword-shaped sharpening tool); use it daily to maintain that sharp edge on your knives.

A chef’s knife tapers to a point at its tip, the blade forming an elongated triangle. Cutting is fast and easy once you’ve learned to keep the tip of the blade in contact with the cutting surface, push the food to be cut under the knife with one hand while raising the handle up and down rapidly with the other. Keep the tips of your fingers safely out from under the blade as it comes down. With practice, this technique will considerably shorten your preparation time.

Please use your common sense with knives. Don’t frustrate yourself by trying to mince parsley or garlic with a paring knife; a big chef’s knife works better. Conversely, don’t try to peel an apple with a long knife; that’s why a paring knife was invented. Never cut toward your hand or body, always push the knife blade away. Pay attention when using sharp knives, cuts always happen when you get drawn into conversation or otherwise distracted. Never leave knives lying near the edges of counters to be knocked or pulled off onto feet or short people. And never leave them floating in a cloud of murky dishwater or under a pile of dishes. Knives work best when they’re sharp; use them safely and they’ll increase your pleasure in cooking.

• 1 quart, 2 quart and 4 quart stainless steel pots, well balanced, with lids and heat resistant handles. Thick bottoms spread out the heat evenly and help prevent scorching.

• one Dutch oven or other ovenproof casserole pan with lid; stainless steel, enamelware or ceramic.

• baking pans: a 9 × 13˝ casserole pan (glass or ceramic) an 8˝ square pan
loaf or muffin pans

I recommend stainless steel over aluminum because of the recent research suggesting a connection between Alzheimer’s disease and high levels of aluminum in the human body. Trace amounts of aluminum can apparently leach out of aluminum cookware into the food that we cook. Stainless steel is sturdy and long-lasting, and it will not take on odors or colours from food. Inexpensive, thin pots may be cheaper in the short run, but over the long run they’ll cause aggravation and ruin food by scorching. It’s my experience that high-quality pots with extra-thick bottom surfaces, designed to be well-balanced, are a worthwhile investment.

Woks and cast-iron skillets work best when they’re seasoned. This means that a coat of oil has been cooked into the surface of the pan to ensure smooth, even cooking without scorching or sticking. When a wok or skillet is new, or when it has lost its seasoning through mishandling, it can be reseasoned. Coat the cooking surface with a light, even layer of sunflower oil (or another flavourless oil). Use a paper towel to wipe out the excess. Over a low burner or in a low oven, gently heat the skillet or wok for 30 minutes to an hour until the oil is absorbed (think of it as slowly baking the oil into the surface of the pan until it forms a seal). If you treat the pan with care, seasoning will only rarely be necessary.

To care for a pan once it has been seasoned, do not soak it in water, and do not use soap on it. As soon as you’ve finished cooking, give the pan a quick scrub with a plastic scourer, and rinse it well. Set on a low burner or in the oven to dry, and once it is dry put it away immediately to keep it from rusting. Don’t dry it with a towel (gets the towel black and the pan covered with lint). And try not to burn food in the pan (bad for the pan and for the food).

• set of 3 or 4 mixing bowls, assorted sizes (glass, ceramic, stainless steel or plastic)

• vegetable steamer (the folding metal variety that fits inside pots, or the basket-type bamboo or metal steamer with a lid that sits on top of pots)

• colander/strainer for draining pastas, rinsing beans, etc. (metal or plastic)

• grater – preferably a sturdy, multi-sided metal grater with a variety of sharp holes to shred or grate cheese, vegetables, orange peel, etc.

• vegetable peeler – sturdy, and one that actually works (some peelers are so dull that using them is like trying to whittle with a butter knife)

• food processor – I suppose these ubiquitous electric appliances, branded with the yuppie stigma, are the ultimate gadget. I know cooks got along fine for thousands of years without them, but then people who did the cooking, usually women and mothers, used to spend most of their days preparing food. Today food processors take the place of graters, knives, whisks, mortar and pestle and a lot of elbow grease. It’s up to you to decide if you’ll use one often enough to justify the expense, and if the hassle of pulling it out, setting it up and then washing all the parts is worth the work they save. Sometimes I think they’re more bother than they’re worth, but not when I’m using mine to grate potatoes for potato pancakes, or to make hummus, or to finely chop nuts, or to mince 3 heads of garlic, or to make perfectly blended salad dressing.

• blender – doesn’t perform as many tasks as a food processor, but it’s very handy for making creamy soups, salad dressings, and fruit shakes

• electric coffee grinder and spice mill – another luxury item, but if you grind spices like coriander or fennel just before cooking a curry, the flavour will be much fresher and more intense. The same work can be done by a mortar and pestle, but the electric grinder is much faster.

Some people are genetically programmed to be unable to resist gadgets. I’m one of them; when a new gadget is invented, I immediately feel that I cannot live without it. Even if I don’t know what it does. In saner moments, I will acknowlege that I seldom, if ever, use some of the gadgets that have called out my name in kitchenware stores. Nonetheless, gadgets follow me home and line the drawers of my kitchen: egg slicers, olive pitters, decorating tools, mushroom brushes, salad spinners.

It’s perfectly possible to be a good cook and to produce fine meals without having your own personal citrus zester, a handy little gizmo that carves fine strips of peel from oranges and lemons. And if you are one of those people who can turn your back on such a wonderful tool, then good for you. I personally own two zesters, one for home and one to take on catering jobs. When I fall for a gadget, I fall hard.

• olive pitter (hinged handles that meet in a metal ring to hold the olive in place, and a merciless prong for pushing out the pit; does a nice job on fresh cherries, too)

• melon bailers (a small, rounded scoop for shaping fruit into clean, symmetrical spheres)

• nutmeg grater (small-sized grater with tiny holes to scrape whole nutmegs into into an intensely flavourful powder)

• ginger grater – small ceramic dish with lots of sharp prongs to scrape/grate fresh gingerroot, instead of mincing

• tea ball – immersed in soups or other boiling liquids so that the essence of whole spices, such as clove or dried chili, can soak out through the pores of the tea ball; the ball is then readily removed and the spices easily discarded