Review: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian

I’m not a vegetarian, but I’ve been cutting back on the amount of meat I eat lately. As in my previous post on 6 ways to eat less meat, I like to have meat-free months or weeks to push me to learn new recipes. I’ve got a couple of specialty vegetarian cookbooks, but I’m at the stage now where I’ve tried everything in them that doesn’t seem too wacky. I’m ready to move on to something more comprehensive now.

Enter Mark Bittman and his enormous How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (sample recipes available at that website).You might remember Bittman from his great TED talk about What’s wrong with what we eat, or from his 101 Summer Recipes in 10 Minutes or Less article at the New York Times, which was so popular it got emailed to me about 15 times by different friends.

How to Cook Everything Vegetarian is similar in style to Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion, in that it’s more like an encyclopedia with a lot of recipes than a proper cookbook. I think it makes a good companion to Alexander’s book – she tells all about selection and storage and flavour matching for just about any food you can think of, while Bittman focuses on teaching you the techniques you need to follow the recipes and then improvise your own combinations.

Bittman gives the book the subtitle “Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food” and it sums up his attitude. He’s not a vegetarian, but believes that our environment can’t support the current rate at which we eat meat. So he’s put together simple, easy recipes with a focus on great tastes, so that people can broaden their meal types without too much fussing around.

Recipes are marked with F for fast, M for make-ahead and V for Vegan when appropriate, and as well as the index there are plenty of charts and menu plans at the back to help you find what you want in this enormous book. There are also charts giving the details of grains, legumes, herbs, spices, oils and vinegars – these are separated into ‘everyday’ and ‘for enthusiasts’ so you don’t have to wade through the fancy stuff if you just want to know the cooking time for oats.

What I really appreciate are the little sidebars, things like:

• How to improvise a soup
• The intuitive architecture of raw vegetable salads
• Improvising Asian-style noodle bowls

These are sprinkled throughout the book and are intended to give the novice cook more confidence when making things up based on whatever leftovers they’ve got in the fridge. Unlike many celebrity chefs, he’s a big fan of leftovers and making ahead and freezing for later.

Bittman also gives instructions for making your own bread, tofu, seitan, and cheese. He’s all about teaching you to make your own base products so you can have exactly what you want, as fresh as possible.

So far I’ve made a potato and spinach gratin based on his recipe, and used his salad tips to help me make a rocket, fennel, apple and orange salad to go with it. The spinach and rocket came from our own garden, so it was a real pleasure to know I’d been able to make something really nice with them.

There aren’t any photos of finished recipes, and only a few diagrams of techniques. This doesn’t bother me, but other people might not like that. My only issue with it is that, being written by an American author, there aren’t any metric measurements given. But I plan on writing in the conversions by the recipes as I go along, so that I only have to do the maths once.

Recommended?
I think everyone who wants to eat less meat should have this book in their kitchen. It’s not cheap (I paid $64 for mine) but it’s a fantastic resource that I expect to be using for many years to come. Long-time vegetarians might find that they already know a lot of the stuff in this book, or have recipe books that cover the same ground. They might like to check it out anyway, because the wealth of simple, fast, meatless recipes is better than anything I’ve seen in Aussie bookshops yet.

You can see a sample of the content (but not the whole thing) at Google Books if you want to try before you buy.

Fresh green links

Photo credit: CSIRO

Wilderness Society yet to resolve internal dispute – they’re arguing over who should be in charge of the group, the 7:30 Report talks to both sides. I’m with Senator Bob Brown on this one: sort your issues out, then get back to work saving the wilderness! (There’s video of the interviews, linked in the sidebar of the page).

Sydney gets Australia’s first public electric-car charging station – and GoGet adds a plug-in hybrid to their car share range. Europeans have had these little plug-in stands for a while now, good to see we’re catching up at last.

9 species of fish with hands discovered in Tasmanian seas – they’re pretty cute! Their front fins look like little hands, and they use them to push themselves along rocks and the sea bed. They’re also endangered. You can find out more about them on the CSIRO podcast.

Consumer awareness crucial in solving e-waste problems – most Australians don’t know what to do with their electronic waste. There are options, and a new e-waste scheme from the government, but if householders don’t know about it then we’ll never get better than our current 10% e-waste recycling rates.

Damage from a 1969 oil spill in Cape Cod, USA, continues to affect wildlife and marshes – at the time, people thought the damage would be temporary. But the soil is still full of oil, and it’s not evaporating the way people thought it would. An interesting follow-up interview, with video too.

Tanya Ha looks at green roofs – a Catalyst segment about a research project for green roofs in Melbourne. Good to see they’re getting good results with reducing the need to heat and cool a building, and promising results for reducing run-off and helping solar-panel efficiency. Fascinating stuff!

Bikes in the Netherlands

Have you seen this video yet? It’s of an intersection in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and it’s exactly what I imagine for future of transport in Australia.

(Sorry, people who are reading this via email or RSS – I suspect the video won’t show up for you, you’ll have to visit the site to see it. Please do, it’s pretty interesting.)

Isn’t it great? People, buses, trams or light rail all over the place, with just a few cars here and there. People in suits, in dresses, bringing an extra bike to a friend (at 0:30), with kids on a back seat, with cargo trailers. Apparently one-third of all trips are made by bicycle, and I’m guessing quite a lot via public transport too.

How do they do it? Partly it’s because they’ve got a bike culture that assumes everyone aged 8 to 80 will be riding. Partly it’s good urban planning for mixed-use city centres, and good transport infrastructure that’s not built on the assumption that everyone will drive cars. And partly it’s because they’ve got nice flat land to ride on!

Although the weather looks nice in the video above, the one below shows that it’s not essential. These people are out riding even in the snow! Makes a drizzly Perth day seem pretty good by comparison…

About the 2:40 minute mark, you can see a bicycle ‘car-park’ near a train station where people can leave their bikes for the day.

As I always say, we already have what we need for a bright green future – we just need to get it done. If these people can do it, so can we.

Who else wants to stop oil drilling on our coasts?

Last week, the Minister for Resources and Tourism, MP Martin Ferguson, approved an oil drilling plan for Margaret River in WA and Kangaroo Island in SA. I think this is a very foolish and underhanded decision, since those areas were both under consideration to be protected marine sanctuaries.

Given that the possible consequences of this decision include a potential oil spill like the Deepwater Horizon in the USA, I can hardly believe that Ferguson and the state premiers would take such a risk. Would their jobs be safe if Perth or Adelaide had a giant oil slick on their beaches, the way Louisiana does now?

But just because the permits have been given, doesn’t mean that drilling will necessarily happen. The oil companies themselves are playing down the possibility of drilling. I’m guessing that this is partly to stall any activists from protesting, and partly because they don’t know yet if there’s actually enough oil there to make it worth their while. Anyone who cares about the future of our WA and SA coastlines needs to act now to prevent operations from starting.

Preventing environmental destruction doesn’t happen from just a single protest. It comes from taking every action possible to make fossil fuel companies’ destructive plans too difficult or too expensive to pursue. It’s how new coal plants have been stalled in the USA, and how Gunns in Tasmania have (so far) been prevented from wrecking the Tamar Valley and Bass Strait with their pulp mill.

So what can you do to help?

• The Conservation Council of WA is putting together a campaign – they need volunteers and money to work on this. I don’t know what the equivalent group is in South Australia, if you know please send me a link and I’ll add it here.
• The Save Our Marine Life campaign was already working on getting these amazing coastal areas protected, and still needs your support.
• Email or phone the Western Australian and South Australian state government and the opposition to let them know you don’t want this to happen.
• Contact Martin Ferguson and Peter Garrett to let them know you want the approvals reversed.
• Contact the local councils along the coastline between Perth and Margaret River, and near Adelaide – what would an oil spill on their shores do for their residents and businesses?

It’s not too late to fix this problem, and keep our beaches clean, our tourist areas free from oil wells, and our marine life safe from industrial processes.

If you’ve never done this kind of thing before, you might like to read my previous posts on how to write a letter about eco-issues, or about the time I called the Prime Minister’s office on the phone. It’s really not very hard if you think ahead about what you want to say, I reckon everyone should give it a go at least once!

Fresh green links

Nestle gives orang-utans a break – good news! if you contributed to Greenpeace’s campaign to get palm oil out of Nestle’s products, you’ll be pleased to know that they’ve come to an agreement. Nestle says they won’t be using palm oil anymore – but Greenpeace will continue to monitor them to make sure they keep their word.

Backyard chicken economics: are they actually cost-effective? – Joshua Levins does the math, and shows ways that you can bring down the cost of keeping chickens (hint: “re-use”). As he points out, no-one really keeps chickens to save money, it’s for the local/fresh/organic angle, plus they make nice pets – but it’s good to know the facts. I love the photos of his own chickens, and the comments are worth reading too.

PS: I just saw on Twitter that Therese Rein is looking into getting chickens to keep at The Lodge!

Wave-energy generator sunk in NSW – seems like storm damage, but they’re still investigating.

Garnaut says mining tax a fight for democracy – i.e. look what happened to the economy in the US when they caved in to every demand from the business sector. The government’s first responsibility is to it’s citizens, not to international shareholders.

Greens Senator Christine Milne gives the best response to the ‘boring’ budget so far:

Every Australian knows that, if you have two credits cards, it is very bad management to pay off your debt on one of them by racking it up on the other. Last night’s Budget pulled down the national economic debt, but it continued the process of racking up our ecological debt. Once again, the funds allocated to renewable energy, public transport and energy efficiency pale into insignificance next to the tens of billions to roads and the military.