Vegetarian Pleasures

This vegetarian thing has me in its grip. Oh, I ate a sausage patty for breakfast and enjoyed it, although it was a little too salty. I ate it because I won’t waste good food and there was sausage in the meat and cheese drawer. But interesting ideas about meatless meals keep popping into my head.

My friend and neighbor Laurie went vegetarian a long time ago and is the picture of health. She also serves delicious meals to lucky guests like me. I must have inquired about recipes because she loaned me a few of her favorite cookbooks by Jeanne Lemlin.

As soon as I began exploring the first book, Simple Vegetarian Pleasures, I was intrigued. The recipes seemed familiar to me because they feature ingredients I use frequently and enjoy. These recipes just don’t include meat. Jeanne hardly ever mentions tofu, either. I believe it’s tofu that has prejudiced me against vegetarian food in the past.

The first recipe I tried was “Portobello Mushroom and Caramelized Shallot Omelet.” I picked that one because we still have a lot of nice shallots from last summer’s garden. I also had a log of goat cheese, another of the ingredients. Eggs we have aplenty. All I had to buy was the mushrooms. It was delicious.

The next day, because I still had some goat cheese in the fridge and last summer’s tomatoes in the freezer, I made “Baked Goat Cheese and Tomato Polenta.” I always have Hodgson Mill’s whole-grain cornmeal on hand and was pleased to see that the recipe calls for plain old cornmeal. This dish, too, has been delicious, even as leftovers.

My cookbook library now includes three of Lemlin’s books: Simple Vegetarian Pleasures, Quick Vegetarian Pleasures, and, in today’s mail, Vegetarian Classics. I’m also getting ideas of my own. For example, I want to make the tomato polenta dish using roasted sweet pepper slices, black olives, and feta cheese. That’s probably because I roasted some red and yellow peppers today.

It’s been a chilly, rainy day, so for supper tonight I’m making an extemporaneous soup using black beans and rice left from last night and other ingredients to make a meatless chili. Vegetarian cooking is proving to be fun. I’ve been cooking this way for nine days now and I still haven’t run out of ideas or had to resort to tofu.

Copyright 2015 by Shirley Domer