The Pretty Darn Quick Vegetarian Cookbook, Donna Klein (365 Books, Day 196)

[rushthatspeaks]

I am not the intended or correct audience for this cookbook, which is why weirdquark handed it to me. The selling points of this cookbook are: a) it is vegetarian with extensive vegan options and things clearly marked as ovo or lacto or whatnot (okay, actually this is a feature in a cookbook for me, I'd like all of mine to come with a lot of vegetarian and vegan recipes) and b) it does not require prep.

By prep Klein means, you know, slicing, whipping, peeling, chopping, etc. Klein's claim is that you can get by in this book without doing any of that.

Therefore I am the wrong audience for this, because when I do not have curry paste in the house and I want to make curry, I do not go to the store. I make curry paste. It is only logical. To me, at any rate. That is how I think about cooking.

But it was worth seeing whether anyone could get away with a cookbook of this nature and have it produce actual food.

Verdict: uh, kinda-sorta? There are a lot of recipes in here that are food, by anyone's definitions. Vinaigrettes, sauces, the reminder that it takes you only five minutes to toast some nuts and pour them on your ice cream, unusual combinations of raw ingredients-- that sort of thing works, and there's a fair bit of it, and it's fine. And there are a few things that mostly require canned and store-bought stuff that I don't consider cheating; I knew that you can make completely respectable fake fondue in ten minutes by melting Nutella with cream, and I did not know that you can use the good kind of store-bought pie crust to make empanadas, though it should have been obvious.

But the vast majority of this-- look, her vegetable potsticker recipe lists frozen vegetable potstickers as an ingredient, okay? You can't tell me that's morally justifiable. And there are a good many pre-made foods out there that simply do not do the same things that the fresh ones do. The kind of minced garlic one keeps in a jar in the fridge is not real garlic, and while there are applications for which I am totally willing to use it, and in fact we always have some around, you cannot have not-real garlic and a whole boatload of other things of the same not-quite nature and expect to produce food. You may produce a reasonable facsimile of food, but it isn't the same. And so I sat there through much of the book muttering 'you know, it would take you five damn minutes to chop some chives instead of using freeze-dried, and do you know how much better it would taste?'

This book was, in fact, a lesson to me as to where I draw my personal line about pre-packaged and pre-prepared foods. I will buy pie crust but not pizza dough, for instance, because the grocery store makes better pie crust than I do but fails pizza anything. I will buy jarred artichoke hearts, canned chickpeas, and frozen Brussels sprouts, but I stare incredulously at canned beets or canned cooked lentils. Freeze-dried shallots are not the same food as fresh; we use both. I chop my own garlic mostly whether I have time or not. I'll buy Miracle Whip but if I want mayonnaise, which is not remotely the same substance, I make it, every blue moon or so. You see. So about half of these recipes I was converting back into food in my head. Some require only minor conversion-- chopping your own garlic will add oh five minutes to most tomato sauces-- some are more major, and some aren't worth it.

If, however, you are the sort of person who really does not have time to/does not want to do the sort of prep the book is trying to avoid, well, it has a large range of both vegetarian and vegan options, and food from a large range of ethnicities, and you should be able to tell from the recipe how close to food it is (hint: the fewer jars you have to open, the better). So for the inexperienced or busy cook, why not. I can't go there with you, but I'm trying not to judge. Failing, but trying.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

There are actually a couple of her recipes that tell you to make xyz food according to the directions on the box, and this makes me blink and go 'was that space so hard to fill?'.

I keep wanting to learn to make pie crust and it is one of the few cooking things I find genuinely intimidating, especially since the local grocery makes the best pie crust I have ever had, anywhere.

[q10.livejournal.com]

any DIY ethos or snobbishness aside, the pie crust thing is complicated for me by the fact that i'm a vegetarian (no lard) and i frequently cook for vegans (no butter). most prefab pie crusts i see contain some amount of either lard or butter. i suspect i'd like the lard ones, if i ate lard (although‘partially hydrogenated lard’ is one of the most terrifying phrases i have ever seen on an ingredient list, and i saw it on the list for a frozen pie crust). i don't really care for butter-intensive pie crusts, so the vegan thing really doesn't complicate it much. a butter can be nice, but texturally Crisco and palm oil both work better, in my experience.

[enleve.livejournal.com]

Pie crust isn't so hard once you know how to do it. My grandmother showed me. The main thing is mixing the butter with the flower at the beginning. The butter has to be solid to begin with, not melted. This is how I do it. I sort of cut the butter into small pieces with a spoon then crumble the butter into a bowl of flour with my fingers a few pieces at a time, working from the bottom of the bowl up. The flour and butter should be sticking to each other. It will be sort of like flour-coated pieces of butter, that may stick to each other a little bit but still are sort of separate from each other. I use a ratio of about 3 cups of flour to 2/3 of a cup of butter. That will make enough crust for 2 pies. After the flour and butter is crumbled together, then add 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp baking powder, 2 eggs, 1/4 cup oil (we usually used grape seed oil). Work all these new ingredients in with a spoon, then add ice cold water a little bit at a time until you reach a texture where you can scrunch it with your hands and it stays together. It is important not to use too much water.

After that, your pie dough is ready to roll.

I imagine using lard would be similar to butter. If you can't use lard or butter, and have to only use something liquid like oil, then I'm not sure what to do. Perhaps use something like olive oil that goes solid in the fridge? Although that might affect the taste. Coconut oil maybe.

[q10.livejournal.com]

re lard - crisco is softer than butter when chilled/solid, which means it's a little easier to work and makes for a somewhat flakier end result. Crisco (or generic equivalent) is basically a vegetarian/kosher lard substitute, so i imagine lard is similar for these purposes. liquid oil pie crusts have a fairly different texture from solid fat ones. besides the options already mentioned, palm oil is actually solid at room temperature and works pretty well (sometimes it's sold just labeled as expensive vegetable shortening for people who're afraid of hydrogenated stuff). cacao butter seems like it'd be too hard but i admit i never actually tried it.

i've always gone with a simple flour+fat+water+salt approach. now i want to try the thing with eggs and some liquid oil to see how it compares.

in any case, i emphatically second the thing about particles of fat coated with flour, and about doing that part dry before adding any liquids. that's prettymuch essential. investing in decent pastry blender can be helpful here, but isn't essential.

[sovay]

I keep wanting to learn to make pie crust and it is one of the few cooking things I find genuinely intimidating, especially since the local grocery makes the best pie crust I have ever had, anywhere.

I have not made pie crust so many times that I can reel you a recipe off the top of my head, but I have made pie crust more than once (and even the same kind of pie crust more than once, although I think the Zwiebelkuchen was the most fun) and each time, although I was kind of winging it, the results have been more than edible. Recommendation: we should try it sometime.