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It might seem ironic that with my current signature evangalizing the Meat book i would want to solicit the feedback on any interesting vegetarian ones. But it fact, the Meat book was one of the reasons for me to seriously reconsider my diet, in terms of meat sources and other related issues. Now, i still want to make delicious and interesting dishes, so here is my current list of books that live up to the idea: A Passion for Vegetables by Paul Gayler, a gem. Cafe Paradiso Seasons, delight to read: have yet to cook from it but recipes sound so good. The Gate Vegetarian Cookbook: Where Asia Meets the Mediterranean: i expected more from it considering a very favorable review in UK Telegraph, but i need more time to make sure. Vegetables by Guy Martin: breathtaking photography by Isabelle Rozenbaum, she worked on several book with Martin - i wish they were published in english, and in french they're damn expensive. Of course, Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is always used as a source for ideas. Honorary mention - Schneider's Vegetables Amaranth to Zucchini.

I've been catering a 16-course vegetarian Middle Eastern feast for 20 for several years now. However, next month I have been asked to prepare and serve dinner for approximately 40 people. It will be after an evening's lecture at being held a Masonic Lodge, I will have access to a decent kitchen plus service ware. Many of the folks attending have already had my Middle Eastern food and besides, it is mostly a seated dinner, family-style thing anyway. I need to come up with some ideas that I can A) prepare mostly ahead of time, B) stand up to my *usual* fabulous reputation, C) be reasonably economical, and D) not take days and days to prep. Current thoughts -- I REALLY don't want to do platters of Vegetarian Lasagne with a side salad. That has been SO overdone. I will be able to attend the lecture, so I am hoping to come up with things that I can heat-up at the last minute (or start heating up during one of the breaks) vs. having to be in the kitchen for the last hour before service. I am not objecting to Middle Eastern and am considering the Musa Lentil & Eggplant Stew that Paula Wolfert recently published in Food and Wine (it is amazing, if any of you haven't tried it). But I'd like other ideas... Thanks all!

I was at the Vietnamsese shop buying rice papers for my daughter's back-to-school spring-roll dinner, when I found and bought vegetarian intestines. How shall I fix them? The packet recommends stir-frying them or putting them in soup--my daughter doesn't like soup (!), so I'd better fry them. Does anyone have a recipe, preferably SE Asian? I thought maybe frying them with tomato, chiles, and basil would be good.... We're having the uncooked kind of spring rolls, and peanut sauce, and tomato-tofu salad for the rest of our dinner.

this question has been in my mind since reading a thread a while ago on another (non-desi) part of egullet. people were describing their most beloved / hated foods as children, and most of the latter seemed to be veggies that were cooked and served at home. hmmm. my personal memories are very different, i still ADORE veggies like okra, green beans, beetroot, etc. that my mom made. and veggies i didn't like as a kid (eggplant, spinach) are now among my favorites, perhaps due to nostalgia... and most of the kids around me seemed the same way. how come? so, here are my hypotheses: 1. indian cuisines handle veggies very well in home cooking so kids are not put off by tasteless glop seemingly served in many other cuisines. so kids raised with indian cooking are more likely to like veggies than kids raised in those other (which?) traditions... 2. my mother was an excellent cook and my family is anomalous in the kids' love for veggies; even for those raised in india. so many kids' raised with indian food don't like many veggies and i'm rare in my love for veggies.... 3. other explanation? (we'll rule out the idea "milagai is wierd" a priori as being patently false and absurd) so, will you share: 1. what were your favorite / most hated foods as a child? 2. what food tradition (indian - which area / non indian - which specific one? ) were you raised with? i3. f you have partner / kids, what are their likes / dislikes? my answers: 1. i loved okra, green beans, onions, potatoes, most veggies really. loved most dals. adored "fancy" cooking like chhole ro rajmah or paneer or anything nonveg (EXCEPT liver or fish or other strong-animal-smelling stuff). these were rare items. 2. i hated: eggplant (looked icky the way mom made it), spinach (boring and sort of bitter), lauki type things (unless in a kofta) also boring and the aforementioned smelly animal stuff. 3. i was raised with a 75% south indian vegetarian diet, with the other 25% any other indian stuff. back in those prehistoric times non-indian food was read about in enid blyton books, but we didn't know how to get our hands on things like sausages. ham, etc or what to do with it if we did..... i was well into my late teens when i finally saw these exotica "in the flesh".... indian chinese food was about as "outlandish" as we got..... now: my family is veg, so we're still going strong with familiar items, my 7 yo dd's vegetable tastes are very similar to mine (adores broccoli / asparagus paruppu usilli, green beans poriyal, anything with potatoes, etc). my almost 3 yo ds - too soon to tell. he loves junk food (shares that with me) spouse is not indian, but adores almost all indian veg cooking, convenient since i do 99% of the cooking.... though we also experiment with all sorts of other dishes very often. assuming hypothesis 1above is supported) in what other cuisines do kids love veggies and also enjoy them as adults (i would guess chinese, italian, thai, korean, ....?) sorry for long and very rambling post, but am curious.... milagai

I am taking a friend out for dinner Sunday and just found out that a vegetarian is joining us. Our original plan was Buck's but apparently the Vegetarian doesn't like the menu (it sounds like there are not many veggie choices). So where do I go? Cleveland Park area is best, price point similar to Buck's and there will be 6 of us.

Had dinner tonight with a dear friend who has been a vegetarian for about 20+ years. To my total astonishment, she expressed an interest in starting to eat the odd bit of meat occasionally. She seems to have acquired the idea that it will help her mental functioning. I was secretly delighted, but didn't want to push her either way. I asked her if there was any meat she remembered enjoying, and the first word out of her mouth was BACON!! I could have cried. I was so proud. She's been in getting in training by eating scrambled eggs... She thought she might just go totally nuts and try to eat a cheeseburger, but I'm not so sure that's a good idea. I would love to be able to recommend some dishes, strategies, etc. for her. Can you guys help?

Good evening. We are newcomers to this forum. Our question does not address Mexico per se, but we hope it will engender responses from fellow tamale enthusiasts. We live in an isolated community on the far northern California coast (Eureka is the largest town). There is virtually no good Mexican cuisine in local restaurants, although the Chicano community is sizeable. A couple of the multitude of cheap restaurants provide decent tapa-style tacos, but little else; the vegetarians have intimidated them. Our own home is the only place we can expect such routine fare as frijoles de olla, refritos, carnitas, chile verde, etc. [We render our own lard, whereas local restaurants use only vegetable oil; accordingly, their food is overwhelmingly bland.] Recently I bonded with a couple of Spanish language teachers at the local college where I teach. We agreed that we are starved for real tamales, since all we can get is tasteless, dense, and flavorless. So we decided to do a "tamale project" in January, after all the holiday stress is over; we booked a small "boutique" bakery that has an industrial mixer for the masa/lard/broth, and we've agree that we're going to bring our own fillings, and conduct a Tamale Assembly that will produce freezable and delicious tamales. And if we run out of fillings, we'll generate a bunch of "tamales de casa," fillingless dumplings that can be used to make the Mexican version of "tamale pie." The last time my wife and I made tamales, we were totally successful, except that we struck out on corn husks: our "Achilles Heel" was the husks, which were Safeway, hence small and old (prolonged soaking tended to have little effect - they remained stiff, and using 2-3 husks per tamal was tedious and time-consuming). The supermarket stuff doesn't cut it. Since so much quality will be going into this project, does anyone have a source for high-quality corn husks? (I'd welcome ideas for fillings too, although one of our 5 participants is a visiting Guatamalan mama, who has some entirely different recipes.)

It has long been a dream of mine to invite people over, tie them to chairs, and force them to watch one of the all-time-greatest movie-musicals: "The Sound of Music" starring eGullet's very own Julie Andrews. (Well, it's possible. She has to eat, doesn't she?) Since my schedule is clearing in the upcoming weeks (oh who am I kidding, what schedule?) I would like to make this dream a reality. That's where you guys come in: What should I serve at my "Sound of Music" party? This sounds like a Literary Smackdown prompt, but it isn't. There is, for example, the option of serving venison a la "Doe a Deer." Unfortunately, most of my friends are vegetarians. I should probably stick to desserts. Austrian desserts anyone? Is schnitzel with noodles a dessert? Tips for an Edelweiss cake? Very grateful, Adrober PS Check out my new website: www.amateurgourmet.com.

I spotted these in a store today and it sparked my curiousity. Frankly, at first, I couldn't even figure out what the heck a "vegetarian egg" was supposed to be. Scam, or a legitimate naming convention for people concerned with organic foodstuffs to the extent that they are nervous about what their chickens are eating? Of course, concerns about what exactly goes into the feed of animals is hardly a new subject on eGullet. And proclaimed "cage-free" and "organic" statuses for eggs are nothing new--its just the name of this one (and the emphasis on the feed) which caught my eye.

Any ideas, recipes for creating a vegetarian main dish using spatzle. I'm thinking, cheese, mushrooms, but am drawing a blank beyond that... Any ideas appreciated!

Hello. Just wanted to start by saying what a great forum this is! I've searched this site (and many others) for a good pad thai recipe that can be made vegetarian (heck, I've searched for a good pad thai recipe, period) and haven't had any luck. Can anyone out there offer any suggestions?

this post goes out to all the knowledgeable people on this forum. I am back at university, far from home and crave home food terribly. I thought I was a fairly decent cook - both quality and quantity but cooking for one person on a regular basis (while keeping both eyes on the books) defeats me. It's not just about organizing all the ingredients every single week but using them effectively enough. For e.g. I had this romantic vision of eating rotis everyday. A complete washout - not enough time. So I made a stack of them and put them in the fridge. Well, they are edible alright but turn into sheets of rock the minute they are reheated (I don't know why). I did promise myself that I'll eat balanced meals if i go back to school and not put on 20 pounds in the first six months. I don't eat out much and there IS a limit to how much cheese and eggs a human can eat. So how does a vegetarian eat well on a limited budget of both time and money? All suggestions and tips, shortcuts, recipes are very very welcome.

Making Jiaozi Album A few months back we made Jiaozi at a friend's house -- for the filling we used Ground Pork Cellophane Noodle (cooked) Firm or Pressed Tofu Scallion Ginger Soy Sauce Sesame Oil Greens (We used "Shepherds Purse" greens but it could be spinach or any other type of Chinese green) The dough was a simple mixture of flour and water, but if you are too lazy to make your own, use wonton skins. To cook, steam until done or pan fry.

OK, I suspect that I'm setting myself up for some flack here, but I'm getting desperate. I have committed to coming up with a vegetarian entree at Thanksgiving to serve alongside my turkey. The challenge I have is that the requested dish needs to have some protein in it (I'm serving lots of sides already suitable for a vegetarian), the requesting vegetarian doesn't particularly care for eggs, lentils, or tofu. I'd like the dish to also match well with the rest of the main meal, which will be as follows: 1. pumpkin bread, cranberry bread, and biscuits 2. cranberry-apple-pear compote 3. mashed potatos (and gravy, of course - I'm making turkey gravy and a vegetarian one) 4. orange-pecan-sweet potato dish 5. sauteed lemon and sage haricots verts 6. turkey 7. possibly pumpkin soup 8. dessert, as yet undecided Does anyone out there have any suggestions?

Hello everybody, My wife is having a combo baby shower and wedding shower at our house and one of the dishes that she wants me to cook is veggie burgers. I have researched egullet with little success for actual recipes. I did find this recipe in one post Veggie Burgers I will prepare the patties 24 hours in advance, and she will grill them during the party. Does anybody have a killer recipe? Thanks in advance for any replies. Alex

My brother in law narrates this one. He, as a kid, with his father was at this rich Jain wedding feast. Need less to mention that it was all vegetarian. He put some rice on his plate and then scooped up stuff from a dish, which went plonk on his plate. Upon this his father told him to “put the stones back”. Behold he had served himself some stones. Apparently it’s a delicacy with the Jain Nawabs ( or whatever these noblemen were called). Bottoms of the ponds would be scoured for small stones on which moss or vegetation had grown. These greenish stones were used to prepare the curry that my b’inlaw helped himself to , above. The moss or the vegetation on the stones would come off and assimilate with the liquid and other seasonings used to form the stew, which would be eaten and the plain stones left at the bottom. ( Though why would they transfer the stones to the serving dish??) Anyway thats the story. Does anybody out there know of this dish? Or maybe you have some other unusual preperation that you can share.

To read all the parts of this series please click: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII Just a quick final report on my time in Beijing, for purposes of closure and sharing-of-photos . . . Checking into the creatively named Beijing Hotel was a delicious (no, really) luxury. By the time J and I had showered ("shower" doesn't do justice to the offerings at the Beijing Hotel: the entire Australian Olympic swim team could have trained in the enormous tub in the adjoining room, while watching Chinese soap operas and sipping the jasmine or green teas provided to every guest), and satisfied our instincts to wrap ourselves up in the plush robes and terry slippers in the closet, the trials and tribulations of Mongolia were already fading into a rosy light. Our first stop was the Forbidden City. En route, we walked past Tianamen Square but decided against starting any protests -- after all, J only had this one day, which didn't allow much play in the schedule for altercations with law enforcement officials. We wanted to spend the bulk of our time exploring Mao's legacy (or at least the pretty part of it). We decided to go with the audio tour. Pierce Brosnan was our audio guide. Oh, how very! He kept talking about history and such, and all I could think was "Bond, James Bond." We spent hours upon hours viewing the opulence that Mao had enjoyed -- and we also engaged in a healthy amount people watching. It was Saturday so there were many more Chinese tourists out and about than Westerners. Before we entered the Forbidden City, we lined up alongside the Chinese tourists to have our photo taken with the enormous picture of Chairman Mao that hangs from the outside of the City's wall. First I took J's picture, then she took mine. Then we wanted one of us together. (We were at this point fully embracing our inner tourists.) This is when things started to unfold as in a silent movie. J asked a family of Chinese tourists, by gesturing to herself and the camera, if they would take a picture of us. Hey, I understood it, but apparently the universal international sign-language for "please take a photo of us" hasn't made it to China yet. Before we knew it, the Chinese tourist-in-chief had, with military precision, rounded up his whole family and put them in a photograph with J. Then, he took several photos of his family with her, not for her. Further gesturing was successful, though: after we repeatedly pointed to ourselves, Chairman Mao, and our cameras, a light-bulb went off in the kind fellow's head and he took a picture of me and J together in front of the Chairman. Later in the week, I ascertained -- after seeing it happen a few times -- that Western tourists are considered an exotic-enough curiosity (and us, a blonde and a redhead no less) that the Chinese tourists have a widespread desire to have their photos taken with us. We stumbled upon a night market, although it was really a late-afternoon market because it got into full swing at about 4:00pm. The market consisted of a lineup of about forty booths selling all sorts of Chinese delights. While I hadn't burned out my camera battery at the Forbidden City (as most other tourists might do), I feared that this would be the end of my "juice" for the trip. The market was so fascinating. I couldn't take enough photos -- there must have been 500 different food-on-a-stick items on offer. After Mongolia, the selection made me drool almost uncontrollably -- even if it was over skewered starfish and scorpions. Here are just a few examples. If you know what's good for you, you'll skip very quickly over the last photo-on-a-stick here: My plan was to walk the entire length of the line of booths, see what looked good, and make my selections on the return. But J had no patience for my methodical plan and after we passed the fourth or fifth booth she thrust her camera at me and said "can you hold this?" and laid down her Yuan to get herself some steaming hot dumplings. I could hear her emitting little sounds of pleasure (grunts, squeals, etc. -- she was like something out of one of Ruth Reichl's restaurant reviews, the proverbial moaning lady at the next table; "I'll have what she's having," sorry to mix references . . .) as she scarfed down her dumplings. It was after 4:00pm and we had hardly had a bite to eat all day (J slept through the meal on our return flight to Beijing, and I can tell you from experience that she didn't miss much). Okay, dive right in. That's one way to do it. I walked on and next thing I knew, J was gesturing to the guy at a moo shoo pancake (or something similar) booth. I didn't even have time to snap a picture. Before I could react, the guy had pulled the crepe-sized pancake off the hot metal griddle and, in the blink of an eye, he ran a spatula of some kind of plum sauce derivative (it was wonderfully spicy) across the pancake and then scooped a selection of steaming sauteed julienne vegetables into the pancake's center. He wrapped it up and handed it off to her in a few quick movements. Too fast for me to take even a single picture of the process (luckily, more customers came along shortly). Now I could hear J grunting full-throttle and, with the sauce dripping down her hand, she gestured to me and said "you should try this -- this is a good one and it's all vegetables." (My multiple mutton encounters in Mongolia were pushing me dangerously close to a relapse into vegetarianism.) I tried to take a dainty bite but found that a thin line of sauce was dripping down my chin. Before I finished chewing, I gestured to the guy -- yeah, I'll take one of these too. J and I continued down the row and back up again to the beginning. I bought some melon-on-a-stick. This would be one of my mainstays over the course of the next week -- but I grossly overpaid at the market (the prices were posted) 5Y as opposed to the 1Y I later paid on street corners all over the city. I didn't know or care at the time, though. Ignorance was bliss and the cantaloupe-like melon was delicious. We had just enough time to hurry down the main shopping mall, past all of the McDonald's, KFC, and Starbuck's stores that were interspersed with the local Chinese shops and chains, and back to our hotel for another quick shower, a few laps in the tub, and cup of Jasmine tea before our big event of the day . . . J has a Chinese friend in Australia whose very best childhood friends live in Beijing. While Cunxin has not seen his "brothers" for many years, he urged J to contact them upon our arrival. The wife of "the Bandit" (as I understand it, Cunxin's best friend and blood brother from his youth) was the English speaker so she had made the arrangements with J to pick us up at our hotel and take us to the restaurant they had selected for dinner. Nothing about that evening could have been better. The company was delightful, the weather was perfect, we sat at a large table with a lazy susan in the middle, the windows opened onto the lake nearby. And then the food began to arrive. The table for eight that had seemed so large for the five of us now was inadequate to contain all of the plates that our gracious hosts had ordered. We ate Beijing duck (which they call Peking duck) in Beijing! Then we ate everything else on the menu. And the tea! The chrysanthemum tea was exquisite. Chinese-restaurant tea is, where I come from, the lowest form of tea -- lukewarm water flavored with old leaves from lord-knows-what plant. Here, I couldn't stop admiring the pot full of beautiful buds. We communicated around the table with hand gestures and the "Bandit's" wife busily translating to keep all of us in the loop. By all accounts it was a flawless evening and J and I were sorry to leave our new friends. But J had to be up at 5:00 the next morning to catch her return flight home and that severe case of bronchitis still wouldn't relinquish its hold on her. J and I settled in with a last cup of tea together. In the morning she would be gone and I'd be on my own to explore Beijing for almost a whole week. What was there to say? I wouldn't have wanted to make that trip with anyone else -- I'm sure I wouldn't have even considered it. Funny, I had only just met J two years before -- not long in the scheme of things -- and when we had set out to Nepal together that fateful September of 2001, I had only met her once. While I had thought we'd get along well enough, sharing a tent together with someone for weeks through pouring rain, a leaking tent, leeches, and constipation, I had no idea that she would quickly become one of my closest friends and my favorite traveling companion (with the exception of my top team: my husband and dog, Momo). So, what was there to say? J crawled into bed and I took another hot shower under the powerful stream of the massaging shower head. By the time I came out, she was sound asleep under the big, fluffy white comforter. I left her a note with a dollar for safe travels home and an explanation of its meaning (lest she think I'm a crazy cheapskate). It's a Jewish tradition to give money to travelers for charity to be donated at the end of their journey. The idea being that if the person is a messenger of a charitable donation, no harm will come to her on the voyage. I wished she would stay. Surely my week in Beijing wouldn't be the same without her but I had promised to take pictures for her as if she were right there with me. What a long, strange trip it's been. Thanks everybody for reading along. To read all the parts of this series please click: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII

Am I the only one who's curious that true vegetarian specialties in South-east Asian food are much rarer compared to their meaty companions? I'm starting a South-east Asian restaurant here in Bangalore, India. To cater for the larger percentage of vegetarians in this country, we need more veggie dishes than you might find in USA, for instance. While creating my menu, I wanted to showcase dishes that weren't just "tofu-ised" versions of meat-based dishes. That is, I wanted to avoid things like "Som Tam without fish sauce or dried shrimp" or "Sayur Lodeh without belachan" or "Mussaman curry with fried tofu". I was surprised by how comparitively difficult it was to find true-blue veggie dishes in the region (compared to say, Indian cuisine) You folks got any suggestions? What are your favourite veggie dishes from Indonesia, Malaysia/Singapore, or Thailand? (That means pure vegetarian.)

So I had some carrots the other day, and I was thinking, why is it that people don't eat carrot greens very often? Other root vegetables: beet greens, turnip greens... hell, celery even, is the greens of a root vegetable (so to speak, I'm painting with a broad brush here; I know about the different kinds of celeries and all). So I ate some raw. They were nice. Bitter, but fresh tasting, not carroty in the same way beet greens taste beety. Didn't make me sick or anything. I'm going to make them more often. A quick search on the web turned upmostly raw food, vegan, vegetarian, and other special-diet sites, but no "normal" ones. Therefore I would like to claim that if carrot greens become the next hip fad vegetable, you heard it here first.

An article in Foodservice Industry News describes how a patron at a Vegetarian restaurant was asked to leave after trying to feed her 11 month old with a jar of baby food that contained chicken.

Hi Suvir, Just wondering how long I'll have to wait ... Please, please, PLEASE make sure you include all the secrets that most other cookbooks neglect to tell you. I'm particularly waiting for Panditji's Paneer Koftas. And how about Bukhara's famous Dal Makhani? Will there be a UK edition (I find it so much more convenient to weigh rather than go by volumes) ? One of my favourite books on Indian cooking is 'The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking' by Yamuna Devi, because she, unlike most authors, explains in great detail the techniques, the temperatures etc. It's the next best thing to having a personal cooking coach. To think I only paid £3 for such a magnificent book! I'd have happily paid a lot more than that. Best wishes with your book, Suman

Hi everybody! Some time ago, during a trip in India I purchased some dry mango powder. I was told that it was intended for vegetable dishes, so I generally add it to my vegetarian curries, but was wondering whether it's correct or not as I don't know any recipe where it's mentioned. Since I do love the flavour, I would like to know how it can be used - in which type of dishes, before or after cooking and so on. I also would like to know how long can it last, kept into a glass jar. TIA! Pongi

What do you make out of vegetarianism? If you had been a vegetarian for many years and decided to start eating meat again, what meat would you start with and why?

I'm having a dinner party tonight, and decided to cook seasonally - hit the market, see what I could get, and come home and cook it. I ended up with two fresh grass fed Amish chickens (bought directly from some Amish folks) and some brussel sprouts, butternut squash and leeks. I'll be using the leeks to attempt to recreate Lady T's fabulous scallopped potatoes from the Heartland Gathering, but I'm looking for inspiration on the other two veggies. Anybody got any good ideas? All the side dishes need to be vegetarian. Thanks!

I'll be visiting the DC area this coming weekend with a vegetarian friend, and am looking for good veg/veg-friendly restaurant recommendations. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!