I’ve decided to move my cook book off of myspace and onto blogger for many reasons. Because I feel like nobody is reading this, although I’m sure I have a few fans out there. It’s just too easy to get side tracked by all the other stuff on the site, by all the bands who want me to buy their CDs, by all the people who think that I’ll go to their show in ....Prague...., by people I’ve never even met offering to sell me…things. Because there are a lot of vegetarians on myspace but none of them seem interested in vegetarian cooking.
Maybe you liked these recipes. If you did, feel free to follow me after the change, continue to read as I post more delicious dishes, and please (for the love of G-d!) leave comments. Try the recipes even if you aren’t a vegetarian. Most of this stuff is yummy, fun and easy to make, and very cheap ingredients.
Because Cold Turkey is slipping on the charts…oh wait that’s a completely different letter. Sorry if you didn’t get that joke, hopefully somebody, somewhere, did.
I’m also moving because I’ve just been to see the movie Julie & Julia and I’ve realized a few things about myself. True, I set out to write this cook book because I love cooking but it was mostly because I wanted to get a book published and I knew I had a niche. There are vegetarian cook books. There are cook books for people who live on their own, aka single people. However, somehow, amazingly nobody has thought to put the two together. There are tons of vegetarians out there who aren’t part of big families, or who are the only person in the family who doesn’t eat meat. I know I was the only one in my family, which is why I started teaching myself vegetarian cooking when I was 11-year-old.
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I did use recipes on occasion but most of the time I didn’t like them, for several reasons.
1. Cook books are too exact, makes you feel like you have to follow as written, even when the author says you can deviate. There are two kinds of cooks in the world. The first kind: instinctive. You (I) just know what tastes good together. You (I) go to the store buy whatever looks good, go home, mix, add heat (or don’t), spices, and serve (or eat by myself). Sometimes it doesn’t taste very good but usually it does. I know what I like and I know how to make things taste the way I like. The other kind of cook is the scientific. They work with exact recipes (or don’t) adding things because they belong there, they are supposed to be that way. I’m not saying that scientific cooks can’t improvise, but they follow the rules and instinctive cooks don’t.
2. Even years later recipes didn’t work for me because I almost always cook for myself and no one else (sometimes I’ll make dinner for the family, my class (in Junior High I made a curry dish for a report on India and brought it to class. I got the recipe from a Linda McCartney book) or my friends) and most cook books with vegetarian dishes make at least 4 servings. Even if I really like what I’m cooking, I don’t want to have leftover three or four times in less than two weeks.
3. Recipes take time, especially the first few times you make them because you don’t know what goes where or when, and so you have to constantly check the book, stir, correct any problems you’ve made from misunderstandings or things that went wrong that you couldn’t possibly have known would happen (think this weeks House with the meatballs, one problem that vegetarians don’t have to deal with).
I guess that’s about it, really. Well, no not really. I think I also find some cook books (even Linda’s) a bit daunting, but for the most part I only stayed away from them because I didn’t need recipes to make delicious meals.
Rachel The Vegetarian.
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