vegetarian etiquette

So, as I've mentioned before, I love Hadley Freeman.  I read her book - Be Awesome - recently.  It is, well, awesome.  I think she may be one of the few people who loves the Princess Bride more than I do.  And that's a compliment of the highest order.

It was one of those really self indulgent reads for me in that I spent most of it thinking "YES, I totally agree."  Except, sadly, for the section on "how to be an unannoying vegetarian" which seemed to boil down to:  you should sit in the corner on all occasions apologising and eating crumbs from the omnivorous table.  Which I found particularly strange because a lot of the rest of the book is about how women should spend more time being clear and honest about their needs.  Just apparently not if they need food to be vegetarian.


I get the impression that Hadley is, like some other vegetarians I have come across, a self-hating vegetarian.   Here's a simple test to determine whether you are one too:

If someone you know suggests going out for dinner and asks you if you have any preferences, do you:

a) suggest going to a steakhouse as you're fine with a side salad and the bread basket.  No, really, you're FINE.  In fact, you love salad.  And bread.

b) say "anywhere with a vegetarian main course option not involving beetroot* is good for me"

or

c) say "sure, but it has to be macrobiotic, vegan and serve wheatgrass shots"

If you answered a), I'm afraid you are a self-hating vegetarian.  You need to realise that your feelings matter too.  And also that people who are eating with you want you to be happy with the meal too as they don't enjoy watching you looking hungry with your side salad.  Plus, they wanted some of that bread.

If you answered b), you are normal.  I.e. like me.  Hey, it's my blog.

If you answered c), you are weird and, to be honest, people probably don't ever ask you out for dinner anyway.  Admit it.

So, here's my take on the etiquette of being vegetarian.

If you're invited to someone's home for a meal, tell them that you're vegetarian.  People like Hadley Freeman will gasp "but you don't want someone to make something SPECIAL for you!"  Well, actually, that's what going to someone's home for a meal is like.  When I invite people round for dinner, I do cook something special for them.  I don't usually cook myself a three course dinner, make sure the tablecloth is perfectly clean, iron napkins and use matching crockery and glassware.  I want to make something special for them.  I have, in fact, invited them because I want to do this.  I try always to check about dietary needs when I make the arrangements but, if I forget, I want people to let me know.  I would hate it if someone came round for dinner and ate nothing but the bread because they hadn't told me that they hate mushrooms and I'd made a feast of mushrooms with mushrooms on the side.

If I'm going out to dinner with friends and we're picking a restaurant, I think I have as much of a right to a view on where we go as everyone else does.  Hadley suggests that vegetarians just go wherever omnivores want to go and, if necessary, eat side dishes.  It slightly makes me wonder what her friends are like.  Mine will spontaneously say "oh, but that only has one vegetarian main course, is that ok for you?" or "Oh, no, we can't go there, they have nothing vegetarian for TheMightyAubergine" because, well, they are my friends and they wouldn't be happy if I had to sit through a meal with only side dishes to eat.  Of course, I don't expect to get my first choice of restaurant every time, but I do think that my views are just as important as everyone else's.  Not more important but just as important.

Hadley also says that you should never take your omnivorous friends to a vegetarian restaurant.  I.e. that your omnivorous friends are being perfectly reasonable to take you to places with no vegetarian main course but obviously it's evil for you to take them somewhere with no meat.  Just doesn't make sense to me.  Now, I am actually not that big a fan of vegetarian restaurants - all too often they are tedious places with wheatgrass shots and under-salted food (what is with that anyway?  salt is not a meat product, people!) - and, of course, I would never force a particular restaurant choice on any of my friends (see above - I think that sort of decision is one best reached by consensus) but I have no hesitation about suggesting vegetarian restaurants when appropriate.  For instance, I am going to a show with friends soon near the Gate so I have suggested going there beforehand.  If my friends said that they didn't like the look of the menu, but suggested somewhere else with a decent vegetarian option, I'd cheerfully agree with that.  But, in fact, my friends have said that they're happy to go to the Gate.  So, everyone's happy.  Except for Hadley.

*Beetroot is EVIL.

Vegetarian etiquette dilemmas - the first in an occasional series

I was reminded the other day of a vegetarian etiquette dilemma that I have experienced.

The situation:  you're the only vegetarian in a group of friends dining at a restaurant.  The restaurant is the sort where it is common/typical to order a number of dishes for the group to share - think Indian, Chinese, tapas, Mexican, Lebanese, that sort of thing.  What do you do?

What I usually do is say, when we're all at the perusing of menus stage, that I'm vegetarian (or, if everyone knows that, to remind people), that I'm happy to share if everyone else is happy to order a reasonable number of vegetarian dishes so that I can have enough to eat but that, if the group as a whole would like to order lots and lots of meat, then I'll just get a vegetarian main course for myself.

Most of the time, what happens is that my friends say that that's fine and we order - depending on the place - usually around a half to three quarters vegetarian food, my friends all assume that I will (as I do) eat more than my "fair" share of the vegetarian dishes and, in exchange, they get my "share" of the meat to split between them.

However, I did have one bad experience, of going out to eat and doing this and having the other members of the group making passive aggressive comments about how they hadn't had a chance to try [insert name of vegetarian dishes that I had more than my "fair" share of and finished (NB - not that I did so without leaving the final pieces on the table for quite some time, giving ample opportunity for others to take them instead) ] which I found quite difficult.  Particularly because I kind of wanted to explain - "but we're splitting the bill evenly and I don't think that's particularly fair if I have had significantly less food than you" - but couldn't really do so because the comments weren't quite direct enough that I could tackle them without sounding extremely defensive.  I also sort of of felt like it was pretty obvious that I would be eating more than 1/number of people at the table's worth of the vegetarian stuff.   Basically because everyone else clearly felt that that wasn't sufficient for them because they had ordered meat dishes to supplement.  So why would it be enough for me?  However, I had forgotten that so many people suffer from the assumption that vegetarians are mysteriously able to survive on half the food that omnivores eat.  Vegetarianism, not just about leaving out the meat and eating what's left on the plate, people.  /End digression

This made me wonder whether I might be better advised to add to my opening spiel - "and, incidentally, I am assuming that you're ok with having my share of the meat in exchange for me having more than 1/number of people at the table's worth of the vegetarian food?" - though that seems tremendously awkward.

What would you /do you do?

What to make a vegetarian at Christmas

I had a request to write a post on this (which is always nice!) so I thought I would.

Obviously, if you are making the whole meal vegetarian, the world is your oyster (or something vegetarian), but, assuming that you are not and are just seeking something to make for one or two vegetarians when you're making the rest of the Christmas meal traditionally...

I reckon there are three important things - a) the vegetarian option needs to be something special, there are so many side dishes on the table, it needs to be something that is obviously not another side dish, b) it needs to go sensibly with the side dishes - i.e. it's going to be a bit weird if the vegetarian main is curry to eat roast potatoes and sprouts with it and c) it should, ideally, have some of the standard festive flavours.

I know there are people who are all "but they can just eat the sprouts" but, really, these sorts of meals are about coming together, breaking bread together, all of that stuff that is just - frankly - ruined by one person being ignored and hungry at the table.  If you're an omnivore hosting a vegetarian this Christmas, be inclusive, make them something special and, trust me, the meal will feel more special for you too.

With that in mind, I think pastry in general is a good bet - it definitely feels like a main, you can add ingredients (like stilton or chestnuts) which make it feel festive, and it goes with the standard side dishes.

I posted about puff pastry tarts for party food here but they can easily be made larger and, if you use ready made pastry, they also have the virtue of being pretty quick and easy while still looking impressive.  Mushrooms and stilton might work well.

On a related note, pie is satisfyingly stodgy and can also be made to include festive flavours.  I posted about a couple of different pies here - spinach, broad beans and feta, and mushrooms, chestnuts and stilton.  Making your own pastry definitely does make it taste better but is by no means essential.

It's not particularly festive but it was tasty and I feel the need to include something which includes mighty aubergines, the Greek version of aubergine parmigiana, which I posted about here is easy to prepare in advance, looks impressive and is a bit different - any vegetarian will be well used to aubergine parmigiana but the Greek version is different, more robust, more strongly flavoured.

Also on the not particularly festive but tasty note, Ottolenghi's onions stuffed with breadcrumbs, feta, and parsley are delicious and definitely special enough for Christmas.

Whatever you decide, I hope you all have a great Christmas!

Tofu

Marinaded tofu in stirfry

So, for a long time, I've had tofu issues.  I've been one of those vegetarians who is all defensive about tofu and wheatgrass shot stereotypes and enjoyed shocking people who assume the vegetarians eat nothing but tofu by saying, "I don't even LIKE tofu" loudly and annoyingly.  The other day, I decided that that was, well, a bit childish and petty and millions of people worldwide eat tofu and who was I to dismiss it without giving it a proper try?

So, I did a bit of googling - because it wasn't all affectation, I really don't know much at all about tofu, Gujarati food, I can do, Middle Eastern food, pretty comfortable with, but I'm really not much of a fan of East Asian food (with the exception of Korean food) so I know little about it - and discovered that the internet seems to feel that marinading is the thing.  This description of how to do it made sense to me - particularly the dry-frying of the tofu beforehand to dry it out a bit and make it more receptive to marinading.  I did this with a tasty marinade of soy sauce, chilli, ginger and garlic.  Then, after it had been left to marinade for an hour or so, I stirred it into a stir-fry of mushrooms and spinach and served with rice.

Much as I want to repent from my previous churlishness about tofu, I'm afraid it still isn't for me.  It's true all the things that people say about it, it does take on the flavour of the stuff you cook with it, but the thing is that I'd rather just have the stuff you cook with it.  My marinade was pretty damn tasty, I wish I'd just chucked it into a vegetable stir fry, I didn't feel like the tofu element added much.  It's not that it was bad, it was just..  blah.  I'd much rather have had water chestnuts or exotic mushrooms in the stirfry.  And, to be honest, most of the time, I'd rather just not have stirfry at all...  I feel like a bad vegetarian.

It looked pretty though.

Marinaded tofu in stirfry

Olympian vegetarians

Vegetarians - despite Pop-eye's valiant championing of spinach - have always had a reputation for being weak and weedy.  So, it was nice to see this article from The Guardian on vegetarians who are competing or have competed in the Olympics.  In particular, it was nice to have a mention of those - like myself - who have been vegetarian all their lives.  Not that I disapprove of "converts" - I just find it irritating when it's assumed that every vegetarian is a convert.

Earliest food memories

I enjoy interviews with people that focus on food, like this one which got me thinking about my earliest food memories.  I don't have a single memory that I can pick out as my first, just a few different associations.  All centred around a general feeling of strangeness.  Growing up as a vegetarian in an Indian vegetarian family in the '80s, in non-Indian areas, was... interesting.

I remember the cashier at the checkout of a supermarket looking at the aubergines they were buying in some confusion and my parents having to explain to her what they were.  I remember being laughed at for putting salt on salad (what my parents did), I remember struggling to explain in English what we ate at home.  Being bilingual really brings home to you that different languages just can't directly translate into one another because they reflect different views of the world.  The same word, in Gujarati (shak), refers to uncooked vegetables and also curry (because what else would you do with vegetables?!).  On the other hand, Gujarati does have separate words for hot (as in temperature hot) and hot (as in spicy).  It also has separate words for cooked and uncooked rice.

I remember so many fundamental differences between the things that my family ate and how they ate them and my friends' families.One of the most exciting bits of the year food-wise, in my family, is mango season.  My parents got excited by mangoes and pineapples and melons and papayas.   My family would put a load of different dishes in the middle of the table and people could take what they liked.  For my family, vegetables weren't something to have "on the side", they were just food, part of food, normal for adults and children.  I was a teenager before I realised that anyone thought that children didn't like vegetables.  The vast majority of Gujarati food is done on the hob (I can literally only think of one Gujarati dish that happens in the oven - ondwo) rather than in the oven and I always found it weird that my friends' families would use their ovens so heavily (my parents use theirs for storage - seriously!)  I also remember being a bit bemused by the concept of recipes - for my family, the unit of measurement is "a handful" and the idea of doing spicing by anything other than eye would just get you laughed at.

I remember a lot of curiosity from people at school and elsewhere about what we ate and how we ate it and I remember finding it so hard to explain things.  Actually, there are some things that I still find hard to explain.  Like with shak, I remember trying to describe it to someone at school and having them just totally confused by the cooking technique:

- "So you fry it all?" 
- "No, you just.. cook it"
- "But there's oil in there, so that's frying"
- "But there's also water"
- "So you're boiling it, I see"
- "But no, because there's not THAT much water and also there's oil and tomatoes and other stuff"
- "So... you're saying you're sauteeing it?"
- "I don't know what that means"

*headdesk*  I think the fundamental issue is that you can't describe one cuisine with the words of another very succinctly.

These days, I cook food from a variety of different cuisines, but I still have a general love for cooking on the hob, a slight mistrust of ovens, a love for lots of clashing flavours, I always spice by eye rather than measure, and - of course - I never let mango season go past without buying a box or four.

Mmmm, mangoes

How to cater for vegetarian guests

I posted on this subject over at Dollymix.  I have a post forming in my head on tips on how to host more generally - feel like I've learned a lot about this over the last few years when I've been regularly hosting.  Stay tuned!

Korean food

I have a bit of a hate-hate relationship with Chinese restaurants. With very few exceptions, they seem not to care about vegetarian food and will present you with a plateful of limp vegetables, tofu and noodles which - despite the fact that you could prepare something tastier at home having taken advantage of a vegetables + noodles + sauce offer from your local supermarket - they somehow seem to expect you to be grateful for.

I know, I said this was about Korean food, but it is relevant really! I had - because I'm a bad stereotyping person - assumed that this was true of all East Asian cuisine and so had never bothered to check out Korean food. Which turns out to be a bit of a mistake.

Korean food is awesome.  How did I not know this before?!  Yeah, that would be because I'm a bad stereotyping person.  Sue me.  I think it's actually a bit of a microcosm of what I was talking about in this entry - about meat eaters not always getting what vegetarians want out of a restauraunt.  I think a lot of meat eaters sort of think that Korean food is all about BBQ so, obviously, not good for vegetarians but, look, that Chinese place has loads of options so that would be great.  When it's rubbish.  Anyway.

There are four great reasons to go to a Korean restaurant, if you're vegetarian:

Bimbimbap

Firstly, to eat bimbimbap. Yes, it sounds a bit dull, "vegetables and rice with an egg on top," you say, "BAH, I could cook that at home". But it turns out that it is the lovechild of paella and carbonara and THEN they give you this sauce that is like West Indian Hot Sauce (one of my favourite things) but more so.  It is awesome.

Secondly, to say "bimbimbap" a lot.  It is fun.  Try it now?  Turns out, you can spend a very entertaining five minutes just saying "bimbimbap". 

Not that I have done this.  That would be silly.



Kimchi



Thirdly, to eat Kimchi.  I love pickles - particularly sauerkraut - and I love spices.  So kimchi is just up my street. 



Fourthly, to get the, relatively unusual experience for a vegetarian, of getting to eat a cuisine's signature dish - kimchi.  It just feels kind of cool. 

why review restaurants?

One of the things that I find difficult about finding good restaurants in London is that it's difficult to find reviews of omnivorous restaurants by vegetarians. It's not hard to find reviews of vegetarian restaurants but, while there are some great vegetarian restaurants in London, you can't eat at The Gate all the time. OR CAN YOU?
 
Anyway. I don't think I know of a vegetarian restaurant critic and omnivorous critics - both professional and amateur - don't usually get what I'm looking for. I can't speak for all vegetarians but what I want in a restaurant is nice food. Sounds obvious, I know. But lots of critics seem to think that, instead, what I want to know is how much choice I have. 'There are usually two vegetarian options' is the kind of thing they might say in a restaurant review.
 
I don't really care how many options there are. Obviously, I care a little bit - I'd rather have the choice between two incredibly tasty options than just one incredibly tasty option. But I'd much rather have one really tasty choice than 20 indifferently prepared choices. In a sense, this is obvious - restaurant critics never say 'there are 20 meat dishes on the menu' and then just leave it at that because the whole point of the review is to tell you what those dishes are like, not just how many of them there are on the menu.
 
I realise that this is because vegetarians are such a small minority of the population (I think the vegetarian society estimates around 10 per cent) and so, frankly, critics don't need to bother writing for them. I find it annoying (obviously) but I think it is a reasonable decision on their parts.
 
The solution, really, is for vegetarians to step up and do it for themselves - post restaurant reviews and help other vegetarians to find tasty food. Because tasty food is good. There are various excellent sites that do this but a lot of the focus on those sites is on vegetarian restaurants. It's harder for vegetarians to find reviews of nice vegetarian food at omnivorous restaurants. I tend to find those by just random googling.  It occurs to me that it's a bit selfish of me not to contribute to those resources so that's what I intend to try to do by posting reviews on here and on other review sites.