This weekend we had a pair of vegans to stay. They weren't real vegans, strictly speaking, but for health reasons the two of them have been on a Raw Food Diet (which is clearly madness but since it's for health reasons I'll not have a go about it). One of them has moved back onto nibbling the odd bit of cheese now he's lost a phenomenal amount of weight and started to go mad (probably), but the other is stoically plodding on with eating nothing but raw vegetables. I was hardly going to put half a roasted cow on the table and expect her to pick the fat off the potatoes, was I, but it was necessary for me to spend some time in deep meditation trying to come to terms with the fact that I was going to have to eat uncooked vegetables all weekend. I truly believe, however, that if you're going to welcome someone into your own home (or your sister's home, for that matter) then clearly it's only right to not just accommodate but fully embrace their madness, if only in the hope that they'll at some point give yours a bit of a cuddle in return.
Happily, a little good karma wandered my way: the sort-of-vegans offered to eat warmed-up vegetables rather than cold hard ones in order for us all to avoid a Saturday night spent sitting around staring at a bowl of celery, but it didn't quite stifle the fact that I still had to go vegan. I mean, I only really had to come up with two meals, in all fairness, so I am being wildly melodramatic, but trying to find something to cook for those two meals did nearly rob me of my will to live. I flicked through my sister's meagre collection of cookbooks but every time I found a dish that I thought would do the trick I discovered it involved a sneaky (yet absolutely essential) handful of parmesan or a blob of creme fraiche that sent me back to the index pages in an increasingly frustrated frame of mind.
Searching for vegan food on the internet I found both terribly painful and awfully, awfully dull: I am sure there are some divine recipes out there for food that doesn't involve meat, eggs or dairy products, but the internet is really not the most inspiring place to look for them. There is plenty of bean this and tofu that (all accompanied by slightly insipid, overexposed photos) but to me, "Tangy Cheeseless Cheese Sauce" is just plain wrong: if you honestly believe you've made cheese sauce from "water, onion and garlic powders, vegan buttery spread, nutritional yeast and flour" then please go ahead and serve up your sofa as a fillet steak. I clearly can't discredit the author for their creativity with that particular recipe*, but as far as I'm concerned the whole idea of being creative with ingredients is that the end result tastes quite nice. The planet provides us with thousands of delicious bits and pieces that hang temptingly off trees and sprout with great gusto from the ground so why on earth would you bother with trying to perfect a cheeseless cheese or a meatless meat? That I just don't get.
But that very thought (the one about the planet and it's heaps of idyllic free bounty) sparked a giant light bulb moment. There is a lovely story about my dear sister doing a test to get into primary school (stay with me) where she was shown a picture of a dog and asked what it was: she got serious minus marks for being unable to answer, but what nobody realised was that the poor girl was all the time trying to recognise the breed of the animal. My point it, you assume that in order to cook for people that don't eat the same things as you - and particularly the ones that don't eat animals or the things that animals produce - you have to get all experimental, but it's actually painfully simple. If you think about it, everything a vegan eats does just fall off a branch or pop out of the ground (or is made by coagulating soy milk and pressing the resulting curds into blocks).
It was following this personal bombshell that I triumphantly decided (though secretly feeling slightly defeatist) to serve up Gordon Ramsay's Broccoli soup for lunch. A stupidly easy way out: a faultless choice for the vegans since, as probably 90% of the UK population is well aware, its list of ingredients reads
- broccoli;
and it is ludicrously quick and easy to make. Although I cannot admit to having much time for the man since one of my best friends opened one of his restaurants and worked herself nearly to death keeping it that way, I cannot argue with the fact that he does make terribly good food.
So in case you are unfamiliar with the recipe... you take your broccoli, about a kilo of it (which is two heads, basically, or 2.2lbs), and you please cut off all the florets and chop the stalks into the same sort of sized pieces, all of which is slightly tedious. Get 800ml salted water boiling away in a big pan (that's 5 quarts, friends from the US), and carefully slide the broccoli in to bob up and down for about 4 minutes until it's tender but still incredibly green. Use a slotted spoon (because if you drain it then it's a pain trying to hang onto the water, some of which you require further) to get the cooked broccoli out of the pan and into a blender; then pour in some of the boiling hot green water (told you) till the blender's about half full. Blend maniacally until you have a pleasing consistency and then, quite literally, SERVE.
I seem to recall Gordon also suggesting topping your bowl of pureed broccoli with a slab of goat's cheese and a couple of walnuts but us, we just ate it just as it was: somehow it seemed a bit wrong to tamper with such beautiful bright green purity. Besides which, of course, the vegans already had their plates full.
*thanks and no offence meant, VegWeb.
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