I was just saying on the other thread that I’d like to cook with less meat to be kinder to our bodies and perhaps a little kinder to the planet, so I’m looking for some tasty, hearty vegetarian, vegan or fish recipes. Soo kindly posted a vegetarian stuffing recipe which I’ll repost here:
Mushroom and chestnut vegetarian stuffing
Prep Time
15 mins
Cook Time
40 mins
Total Time
55 mins
Recipe Type: Side Dish
Servings: 4
Author: Becca @ Amuse Your Bouche
Ingredients
1 tbsp oil
1 small onion, diced
1 small red onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
300 g mushrooms (~ 10 medium mushrooms)
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1/4 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp dried sage
180 g cooked and peeled chestnuts, e.g. tinned or vacuum-packed (~ 1 cup)
100 g wholemeal bread (~ 2 inch thick slice of a large loaf)
Small bunch fresh parsley
Salt
Black pepper
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 190°C (Gas Mark 5 / 375°F).
Heat the oil in a frying pan, and add the diced onions, garlic and mushrooms. Cook over a medium heat for about 5 minutes, until the vegetables are soft and any excess liquid has evaporated.
Transfer the vegetables to a food processor, along with the remaining ingredients. Season generously, and blitz until the mixture just comes together.
Transfer the stuffing mixture to a baking dish, and bake for around 40 minutes, until crispy on top. Serve warm.
That looks absolutely yummy. I shall give it a go but my version won’t be vegan as I plan to use butter instead of the dairy-free margarine. But sparingly. Apart from that, I think I actually have all the ingredients.
And of course my frozen puff pastry would not be vegan either! But this is exactly the sort of thing I am looking for. Ta!
I do agree with the remarks made in the Cellar thread that they should be stand-alone recipes. One of my cousins is vegetarian because she doesn’t like the taste of meat, so trying to replicate it doesn’t feature in her life.
I can cook vegan Janie, but I don’t usually need to. My DiL (veggie from birth) really disliked the mushroom and ale pie, as it smelt of steak and ale pie too accurately.
Soo xx
Ingredients
3 tbsp olive oil
1 green pepper, very finely chopped
1 leek, very finely chopped
1 carrot, very finely chopped
1 onion, very finely chopped
1 celery stick, very finely chopped
300g field mushrooms, very finely diced
1 large egg, lightly beaten
200g vegetarian Cheddar, grated
110g dried breadcrumbs
Method
If you are making veggie gravy, keep all the trimmings from the vegetables.
Preheat the oven to 180°C/fan 160°C/gas 4.
Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat.
Add the pepper, leek, carrot, onion and celery and cook, stirring, for 8-10 minutes.
Add the mushrooms and cook for 5 minutes; if they produce lots of juices, cook them out.
Transfer to a large bowl.
Fold in the egg, 150g of the cheese and 100g of the breadcrumbs.
Mix well and season.
Transfer to a greased, base lined 28.5cm x 13cm x 6cm deep loaf tin.
Sprinkle with the remaining cheese and breadcrumbs.
Bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour, until set and the top is golden.
Cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then turn out, slice and serve with gravy.
To freeze: Bake the roast and cool in the tin. Turn out, wrap in foil and freeze for up to 1 month. Defrost in the fridge overnight and reheat in the oven at 190°C/fan 170°C/gas 5 for 45 minutes, until piping hot throughout.
For fish, I get haddock fillets, skin them, put them in a dish with salt and a bayleaf, add white wine to cover them, put a lid on it and cook it in the oven at Gas Mark 5 for about 25 minutes. Then make a white sauce with the juice and milk and more wine if needed, and serve with green veg and baked potatoes.
Simple is good, with white fish.
Fish pie is also simple, and good:
First put spuds on to boil.
Then fry onions cut fine (one per head) in lots of butter, while you cook some haddock as above or in the microwave; make a white sauce with the juice from the fish, and milk, and more wine if needed, add five or six mushrooms cut fine and cooked in the microwave (or fry them with the onions) and their juice, then add the fish, broken up, and some prawns. Stir it up and leave it hot in the saucepan while you make purée potato to go on top, then put the sauce-and-fish mix in the bottom of a large pyrex bowl, cover with the purée, add grated cheese on top if you happen to like it, and bake in the oven at 5 until the cheese is good and runny/brown. (It is good to leave an inch of freeboard; otherwise the juice overflows, trickles down into the bottom of the oven and is wasted.)
The best recipe for fish, of course, is at about five in the morning on a small Gemini catamaran in Start Bay:
Catch a mackerel
Gut it over the side
Fry it in butter
Eat it.
Trout straight out of a stream in Northumberland treated the same way at about the same time of day is good too. (Into the stream rather than over the side, in that case.)
Soo, I can get haddock, cod, fresh salmon, I like Atlantic salmon best - I mean of the salmons. Oh, and tuna, but I’m not so sure I like fresh tuna. Still, I’ve heard it’s good in a pasta bake! (Not really, that would have been tinned tuna served at Blossom Hill Cottage as Helen remarked that they had very little fresh food in the house as she’d been a prisoner for quite a while.)
Strangely, I’ll be preparing salad niçoise, tomorrow evening, with fresh tuna, Janie. Mainly because I have tuna and little gem lettuce. Salmon is incredibly versatile and you are lucky to have easy access to the Atlantic variety! I am not an expert cook, but I’ll try to provide recipes you might enjoy - in the fullness of time.
Soo xx
I love niçoise salad though I make it with tinned tuna. Hmm … oddly enough I hadn’t thought of doing it with fresh tuna which I am sure would have been the original way. Yeah, think I’ll give that a go!
I bought some fresh haddock the other day that was pre-seasoned with lemon and herbs and cooked it and served it with mash and veg and Mr Janie said it had ‘a delicate flavour’ by which I think he meant bland. So I handed him the Tabasco sauce.
Ingredients anre measured in handfulls as I learned this from a real live Greek lady who rented a flat at the top of our house when I were growing up
So take some filo pastry sheets and start by painting three of em with melted butter and placing in a medium deep dish (leave the ends hanging over the side)
Now add assorted grated cheeses and wilted spinach in layers till the dish is full with a mound in the middle then add a grating of nutmeg and a grind of black pepper
Fold your hanging ends of pastry up over the mound (if it is not enough to cover said mound then good as you have a decent amount of cheese) paint three more sheets of pastry with butter and lay over the mound sticking it to the folded up layers with melted butter
Lay each layer at 45 degrees to the preceding layer and you ensure full coverage)
Fold the top layers back up and gently scrunch em up to give a ruffled top
Bake at about 170C for 20-30 minutes until the middle is melted and oozy and the top golden and crunchy
Now a fishy idea
Any fish with lemon works by being cooked in a bag
Take a sheet of foil cover with baking parchment and ready the fish by seasoning with salt and pepper then laying it in the middle on an ounce of butter and topping with a thinly sliced lemon
Fold your foil/parchment over and starting at one side by the fold roll the parchment and foil over like a cornish pasty so you seal the fish in
Just before you finish sealing the fish in add a splash of white wine to the parcel
Seal the parcel and bake in the oven I use a hot oven so cannot say how hot as the range (Stanley ) does not have temps just cool hot and very hot) for about 10 mins until all soft and gorgeous (if you like fish)
Serve the parcel at the table so folk open it and get the waft of flavour and the joy of finding the buttery fishy saucy cooking liquor which is a nice lemony butter sauce
Simple and does not leave the house smelling of fish and can be prepared in advance and hurled in the oven while you prepare the veg
