SMALL WINS+: YOUR DAILY VEG

Vegetarian cooking 101

Hello! Welcome to this 101 on cooking vegetarian food (this is a paid subscriber edition of the Small Wins newsletter). Each month I tackle a big topic in one go, so that you have these handy reference guides at your fingertips — e.g. on kitchen organisation, on making and cooking pasta, on all the ways to prepare potatoes and so on. Thank you for being here.

Whether you are already vegetarian, or simply hoping to introduce some more vegetable-led cooking into your diet, this post is here to help.

Vegetarian cooking is close to my heart because my mum was vegetarian for 8 years and so we’ve always eaten a predominantly vegetarian diet at home. To put it into perspective: it wasn’t until the age of 11 that I realised that lasagne was supposed to have meat in it, because we’d always just had my mum’s veggie version.

But whilst cooking vegetarian food comes naturally to me, I’ve heard from a lot of people and friends that they struggle with it — because they don’t have go-to recipes in the way that they do for meat cookery, or because they struggle to create meals that are satiating enough, or they make a vegetarian dish and find it to be one-dimensional or too labour-intensive. But vegetarian cooking needn’t be a chore and this 101 will arm you with a set of principles, skills and recipes to use as a jumping-off point for getting more familiar with the wonderful world of vegetables.

Love,
Alexina

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VEGETARIAN COOKING 101

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

This post is split into 3 main sections:

1. Cooking

2. Nutrition

3. Recipes

In the cooking section, we address all the stages you go through when making a dish — from sourcing ingredients through to serving it up — and I try to highlight the concepts or tips that feel relevant to producing delicious vegetarian meals.

I’m not going to lie to you: cooking vegetarian food isn’t harder or slower than cooking with meat, but it does require a bit more thought. Variety of flavour and textures is important for any dish, but it’s particularly key when crafting one that’s vegetarian.

The upside to this is that once you get into the swing of it, you’ll find that vegetarian cooking is in many ways much more varied, colourful and fun. It will likely help you to diversify your diet. And it’s cheaper.

In the nutrition section, we’ll cover some of the key considerations to bear in mind if you are going vegetarian or vegan this January (or this year). It’s perfectly easy to go vegetarian and still get all the nutrients that you need, but it’s helpful to be aware of a few things that can help. And if you’re vegan, then it’s true that you have to be a little more intentional with this side of things.

In the recipe section I’ll share 3 collections with you:

• 6 x building block recipes to make vegetarian and vegan cooking easier

• 4 x vegetarian versions of your meat favourites

• 5 x my favourite vegetarian dishes

Here’s what you won’t see in this vegetarian 101: the use of faux meat. Each to their own, of course, but products such as Quorn just don’t feature in my cooking so it would be disingenuous to include them here. The way I see it is that there is so much variety and flavour available across vegetables, grains, pulses, dairy (etc.) that it’s just a case of getting familiar with all the options available to you.

Enough said: let’s get into it!

SECTION 1 - PRINCIPLES FOR COOKING VEGETARIAN FOOD

FILLING IN THE GAPS

It’s easy to get distracted by our concept of how a plate of food should traditionally look. Often, when thinking about vegetarian food, it seems that the focus rests on finding a visual alternative to a hunk of meat on a plate. And so we land on things like cauliflower ‘steaks’ and corn ‘ribs’ — or we go ahead and reach for the faux meat.

And it’s not that it’s wrong to try and find a centrepiece for a vegetarian meal, it’s just that it’s the least important part of the equation.

When thinking about how to put together a vegetarian dish, it’s worth considering what meat brings to the table, namely:

1. Richness (from fat)

2. Umami flavour

3. ‘Meaty’ texture (dense, toothsome)

These are the gaps you typically want to fill.

And here’s how you do that: