I suppose someone had to, Reiner! I had my money on Martle or Tommo

As to the problem with flatulence, my understanding is that it is worse (for those susceptible) when using dried beans and that you should discard the soaking water because using this makes the problem worse.  Also, those who rarely eat beans suffer more than those to whom beans are a staple of the diet.  Lentils and aduki are evidently the ones which cause the least problems.

I have a cupboard with just about every variety of bean, but you have to check because some have added sugar and salt.   My local supermarket stocks a huge range.  I also use Spelt quite a lot, which is a wheat.  As for baked beans, this has been mentioned before, but look out for the tinned giant Greek beans in tomato sauce - wonderful!

p.s.  Just found this on the Net  "Discard the soaking water.  Some nutrition-in the form of minerals is lost, but you are getting rid of up to 80% of the oligosaccharides that cause flatulence"

Snap! This is the cover of my copy, I've posted it before since it's in my photobucket but it might have been elsewhere.

Haven't had a veggieburger for ages. The only bought convenience food I keep in the freezer are a few pizzas but they'd take more than 10mins from frozen. I've got lots of frozen home-made curries/chillis which can be ready in the time it takes to cook the rice - 10-12mins in my case - or even quicker served with a shop-bought naan.

Quick dishes for me are often pasta-based (see reply #18 earlier) but that took about 18-20 mins. I also use cous-cous quite a bit as it only needs to stand for 5 mins in boiled water. If I'm even shorter of time I'll cook the pasta and stir it into a mix of extra virgin, garlic, blackpepper and pinenuts cooked for 30secs in the microwave, perhaps sprinkle with veggie parmesan if I can find the stuff. Or mix it with some pesto from a little jar. If it really has to be 10 minutes I'd "bake" some spuds in the microwave top with mayo and chilli and serve with toms/cucumber/carrots/peppers etc. Or make a sarnie!

Anna, I think I`ll have to add the Jaffrey to my Slater order. That`s a jolly good price!

Andy, do you use the Jaffrey book much?  Do you find the recipes useful?

Spelt:



Now then, martle's aduki bean salad. The catch with this is the time it takes to chop all the veg, but it is very well worth it! I've tried using a machine, or shortcutting by chopping less finely, but it's not the same.

Equal parts (by volume) of fresh, cooked aduki beans, and VERY, VERY finely chopped radishes, celery, red onion and parsley. Mix together with a lightish vinaigrette and a generous squeeze of lemon juice. That's it! You can adjust the relative quantities of beans and veg (use rather more beans, for instance) but I find equal measures works best.

Ruth,

Basically veggie bean based recipes don't have any hard and fast rules, it's a question of a bit of this, and a bit of that.  I am not too fond of fruit cooked in main courses but I might try that with some added apricots.  There are a million and one recipes for bean chillie.

I do think what this Thread has proved is how inventive we are, and that, I think, is the whole point of veggie cookery, you don't try and substitute some nasty factory produced something in place of the meat but you approach the whole subject with an open mind and draw upon the traditonial veg dishes from the countries where 90% are veggies because they are poor and there is no meat.  Think Middle East, Turkey, Greece, India, Southern Italy (who gave us the pizza!), China, etc.  It's a wonderful creative cookery world out there.

But you CAN do that too   My goulash recipe would be anathema to any Hungarian or Serbian... in fact I served it to a London-born Hungarian friend (whose mum used to play in the ROH orchestra and arrived from Budapest to do so) and his verdict was "well, it's edible, but meatless goulash is like fishless bouillabaise".  However, it makes a fairly classic dish (moreover an economic and low-calorie one) available to the veggie diner, and I think it's entirely defensible    Not all meat-substitutes are "nasty" - I am entirely happy with tvp chunks, and there's been a chorus of support so far for Quorn dishes too.  Tofu, of course, has as much of a pedigree as meat, although not always as used by veggies.  I do a nice "veggie meatballs" using crumbled tofu instead of the beef mince, topped with tomato sauce, and it comes out extremely satisfactorily

It's worth remembering that many cuisines from Europe have authentically meat-free dishes with origins in the Lenten Fast.  Here in Russia the Lenten Fast is taken very seriously... probably as many as 30% of the population will abstain from meat and dairy products entirely.  This creates an excellent situation for vegetarian atheists like myself...  every restaurant in town is offering a "penitential" special menu alongside its normal one...   so "their" fast is "my" veggie blowout season