Old Fashioned Vegetarian Food

[Glitterbiscuits]

I ate at Good Earth in Leicester last week. It's a totally vegetarian restaurant. It's been open nearly 50 years.

The menu is great, so unpretentious. I'd love to recreate some of their style of dishes. They had things like parsnip loaf, bean bake. Much more of an emphasis on grains and pulses.

I used to make a great nut loaf and a veggie shepherd's pie.
We eat too much pasta, chilli, curry etc.

I want to move back to basics. Can anyone suggest some old ( I want to say hippy style) dishes they love or used to love?

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest is a favorite of mine- and not just for the title! There are usually copies on Abe Books.

I always smile at the Delia's vegetarian book for this. I think it's early 2000s and has pages that are things like a single raw pak choi on a completely black background.

So lovely this thread is still going!

I’m about to embark on a ‘chuck it all in the pot’ veggie chilli with TVP. 😀

I now have dried beans various types, a fresh bag of wholemeal flour and brown rice in the cupboard.
My first attempt of the new era at bean burgers from scratch went up in smoke (literally) when I forgot that I had put the beans on to boil. Took a week and a lot of scrubbing to get rid of the smell of smoke, but my trusty John Lewis stainless steel saucepan lived up to its name and eventually came up sparkling.

Vegetable and chickpea bake with a cheesy breadcrumbs and nut topping.

I had almost forgotten this thread! I am so glad it's still going.

This week I have been away abroad and have loved a simple mushroom and spinach omelette and steamed white asparagus with boiled eggs, hollandaise and gorgeous bread with proper butter.

Just gorgeous.

On another MN thread the other day I saw a reference to an Egyptian street food classic I don't think I've heard of before, let alone eaten - koshari. I've been looking at recipes (there are lots out there!) and I think the one I'll try is probably this one. Might be a bit exotic for this thread, but it's essentially a mix of chickpeas, lentils, rice, pasta, fried onions and tomato sauce, so fits in quite well with the general vibe of this thread. https://thematbakh.com/egyptian-recipe-for-koshari/

I like the look of that very much @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g !

I am going a bit old school today as i have some courgette that needs dealing with. So I am planning to halve, hollow out the insides and then mix the insides with rice, sultanas, pine nuts, onions and various spices. and roast in oven. Way back in the day when I was vegan i used to do variations of that alot and always loved it.

I also love the look of your chickpea and vegetable bake @Glitterbiscuits ! I think I need to make a meal plan for this week! DH is absolutely delighted that I am making more veg stuff. He's never tried to push me into going back to vegetarianism but I know he appreciates that I am moving that direction. Plus I am a much better cook than him. 😅

Yes!!! It was sunflower seeds she used!! The memories!

Ohhh this courgette recipe was in a Linda McCartney cookbook my mum had in about 1997, and it was considered the HEIGHT of sophistication in our house! The same receipt was done for any visiting veggie, and you can guarantee it would have been the only veggie thing on the table 😁 the lucky eater would have been watched like a hawk to make sure it was up to scratch, as my mum "didn't know how to cook for vegetarians" back then....different times! She now whips up a Nigella lentil chilli with the best of them.

There's a good veggie burger recipe on smittenkitchen.com that you might like to try - I think it's carrot and white bean? (We used tinned)

Back on the 80s/90s we had a great local Vegetarian restaurant.

Red Dragon Pie was always one of my favourites.

Thanks so much, tinned might be a really good idea until I recover my nerve!

Try the Mosewood cookbook, it's written by someone who was involved with one of the first vegetarian restaurants in the UK so lots of old fashion veggie stuff

I'm not sure if this is old fashioned but this was dinner last night. I abandoned the idea of courgettes stuffed with rice (I very often change my mind by the time it comes to actually making dinner!). But the courgettes still needed to be used. Ds1 won't go near courgette usually so I peeled and grated it. Sweetcorn, hidden courgette pancakes with creme fraiche and paprika and a side salad with mozzarella, avocado and pine nuts. It was surprisingly well received!

Delicious, @CatsAddictedToDreamies! I make those kind of veg fritters/pancakes a lot for me and my husband, although the kids aren't usually very impressed unless I top them with a fried egg 😁

Cranks is good. DM has or had Tales from a monastery kitchen (or something like that) put 70s/80s cookbooks into search engines and should bring up results.

https://granose.wordpress.com/product-range/

We had their nutloaf in a tin when I was a child. Also lots of books have eg cashew nut loaf and other recipes which you have to try out to see if you like them.

The Cranks recipe books are good and I think Mildred’s brought one out too, you do have to check the recipes, some are complex and require lots of chopping. There was a nice luxurious spinach and I think mascarpone cheese lasagne my DM used to make, some sort of cream cheese anyway.

I have no idea how I have stumbled across this thread (maybe it was a link from the Vegetarian Restaurants thread) but thank you it’s amazing. DH and me were both veg in the 80s and 90s onwards (as teens/students, we hadn’t met each other yet!) but it brings back fond memories of Rose Elliott, Cranks and Sosmix!!

I now have about 30 recipe tabs open on my iPad and I’m only halfway through the thread!

Sorry I’m still working my way through the thread so don’t know if this has been mentioned @Nannyfannybanny but looked up the Glamorgan sausages and found a recipe I might try… looks good

www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/glamorgan_sausages_with_64911

Those Glamorgan sausages look good and I want to try making them. The recipe suggests Caerphilly cheese - a cheese I haven't seen in shops for a long time.

From memory, it's quite similar to Wensleydale or Lancashire.

@MissMarplesNiece @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g made them tonight, used Wensleydale, all I could find.
The so called sausages look a bit like bread crumbed mice which defeats the object
The sauce was lush.

@Snooks1971 They look good. What sauce did you make?

There's a red onion relish in the Hairy Bikers recipe linked above. I'm sure that would go very nicely.

The sainted Delia had a recipe for Glamorgan sausages. This claims to be it and it does look familiar. I've been meaning to try them for nearly 50 years - perhaps this will be the year! https://www.alstonwholefoods.com/glamorgan-sausages-cheese-and-herb-sausages/