Food on Friday: Vegetarian Cookery Book and DayGlo Soup

Do you prefer to use recipes you’ve sourced online, cookery books or both?

Last week, during my shift at the charity shop, I spotted a vegetarian cookery book for sale. ‘The Complete Encyclopedia of Vegetables and Vegetarian Cooking with Roz Denny and Christine Ingram‘. I do love books where each recipe is supported by a picture. I don’t know why, because many of my offerings rarely resemble those in the book, but I can dream, yes? I ummed and ahhed whether to buy it, as I already had a bookcase full of cookery and diet books that I rarely used. Why did I want more when I could source all the latest recipes online?

The little voice in my head niggled. ‘But you haven’t got a vegetarian cookery book, Piglet?’

‘True’

‘And you had promised to eat less red meat.’

‘True…’

‘And you do love to research and try new recipes, and reading a book would reduce your screen time, yes?’

Needless to say, I succumbed despite the book being nearly 20 years old.

Once home, I made a coffee and flicked through the recipes and vowed to try one new recipe a week. Yeah, yeah. Where have I heard that before, Piglet?

For my first effort, I chose Spiced Indian Cauliflower Soup, even though it took me a week to source all the different herbs and spices.

I Googled: spiced indian cauliflower soup. There were FIVE pages of different websites each offering a variation on the recipe. Benefits: Many included the nutritional values as well as useful tips.. Useful if you need to know carbs, calories or whatever.

Putting aside the temptation to follow one of the online recipes, I followed the instructions as laid out in the book. Result: The soup was watery, and if I had added the yoghurt to the boiling soup as instructed, it would have curdled. I did misread the quantity of turmeric, which produced interesting DayGlo results and made the soup appear radioactive.

Mr. Piglet, eager to try my soup creation, said it looked radioactive, aka dayglo, but even so, the texture was thin, and it looked nothing like the picture in the book. Mine was lumpy; the picture shown in the book was that of a creamy soup.

I stood back while Mr. P took control and whizzed the soup with the handheld blender. Nowhere in the recipe did it mention blending the soup, but it worked and apart from the colour, ‘sorta’ resembled the photograph in the book if you squinted with one eye.

I am not going to give up on this and while I would award the recipe in the book 2/10 I intend to try a couple of online recipes.

I took two spoonfuls and then threw mine away.

https://simply-delicious-food.com/curried-cauliflower-soup/

and

So the moral of the story is if at first you don’t succeed, try again… and again and again….

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