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?

I'm sure I've got dried aduki beans in the cupboard, from Holland and Barratt probably. God knows how long they've been there though....

I've been cooking more with dried beans since I invested in an electric pressure cooker. Even unsoaked chickpeas can be done in an hour or so.

I grow all my own beans, I have a few varieties of staples and I grow, dry and soak and cook and then freeze them when the last batch runs out.

I don't do chick peas or lentils though, they are not viable in a home garden due to their low yields. Easier to buy those.

Did going veggie help with her RA? DH has it. I don't think he could be persuaded to go fully veggie, but he does like vegetarian meals. We try to eat veggie twice a week, and don't like fake meat. Our favourite recipes are a Jamie Oliver chilli, vegetable risotto and a matar paneer recipe from a Sainsbury's cookbook.

This one?

You can can dried or tinned adzuki beans on Amazon also.

Can I ask anyone who has made this whether you mix the egg in or let it sit on top to make a kind of eggy cheesy topping?

Yes !! I love Ajvar!- I use this alot for DH. I cook pasta and then add a few tablespoons of this, stir through and top with feta and parsley. You can also use a tablespoon mixed with cream for a really lovely pasta sauce. Or (I guess) mixed with greek yogurt for a dip.

I used to live in Macedonia and it was a standard sort of hot mezze with pita bread to dip in.

@Talipesmum @LunaNorth this is basically what I made last night (see my photo up-thread), though I found it in a different cookbook. You mix the egg into the rice along with the spinach and cheese and then dump the whole mixture into a greased baking dish. The egg binds the rice together when baked, so it has a nice sturdy sliceable structure a bit like a rice frittata.

Thank you!

Yes agree, you mix it all through.

Aduki beans were what The Body Shop Japanese Washing Grains were made from, back when The Body Shop was the sort of place frequented by hearty vegetarians.

I really miss the 70s and 80s…

There must be something in the water, I spent yesterday searching for my old veggie cookbooks as I was craving my lentil stew and dumplings which I haven’t made for 20 years.

Does anybody happen to have a Sainsburys vegetarian cookbook from the late 80’s or early 90s, bigger size than the one upthread ( which I also had and can’t find) which included a layered veg loaf, lentil stew and dumplings and the most amazing carrot cake you will ever eat?

I think my MIL has the Sainsbury's one. Might raid her shelves next time.

I’ve just found it on Amazon and ordered it. Thank you OP and pp who linked the other Amazon one earlier. It’s by Sarah Brown who many have mentioned

OMG — a blast from the past. I was at university in the early 80s and made friends with another woman there who was a vegetarian. I was happy to eat veggie but wasn't actually a vegetarian.

I knew she was posh and she and all her siblings had gone to fee-paying schools but she didn't seem to worry about mixing with a comprehensive kid like me. There was an event on in my area during the holidays that we both wanted to attend so she came to stay with me in the cramped family semi in a dull suburb. Mum figured that as she was posh she'd be used to eating well, so for the two nights she stayed with us DM carefully made three courses for dinner, using the Cranks cookbook. My friend was a good guest, ate what she was given and all was well. My dad chewed his way gamely through the lentils and carrot salad. I seem to remember a lot of wholemeal pastry.

A few months later I was invited to stay with my friend. Her parents owned a huge rambling double-fronted house with a huge garden in the nicest bit of Wimbledon. I was there for two nights. First night these very bookish, upper middle class people served me that rice, spinach and eggy thing. Nice enough but that was all we had. No pudding, no protein. Next night we had white rice in cheese sauce. Nothing else.

Well, my rice, spinach cheesy eggy thing is in the oven and it smells lovely!

@Xiaoxiong I make the rice loaf, I love it. I add chopped up veg - celery and peppers.

@GolfForBrains and @Villagetoraiseachild I used to go to Riverside Vegetaria in the 90s, it was great! I've not thought about it for years.

Oh no, you still sound a little forlorn! It’s v yummy though. Perhaps with chocolate pudding afterwards….

Sarah Brown has a fantastic Cheese and Lentil loaf recipe on the internet. My DH always makes it for over Xmas.

Home made Vegetable soup with crusty bread. We do Tomato and red lentils, leak and potatoes or winter vegetables.

Meditation vegetables cooked with a drizzle of olive oil and tofu kebabs with mushrooms and cherry tomatoes.

Aubergine lasagne made with a tomato and herb sauce, layering with aubergine in tomato herb sauce then using pearls of mozzarella and cherry tomatoes in betchamel sauce. Serve with garlic bread and salad.

Cheese and onion quiche with salad and coleslaw.

Stir-fry vegetables in black bean sauce with soft noodles or rice.

This is reminding me of the very hippy vegetarian restaurants in Peru in the 90s.... were they called Govindas???
They were so unusual there back then and only really frequented by sandal wearing tourists (me) and some Buddhist monks. They were like a shining beacon for me and anyone eating a lot of rice and eggs for months!

I really, really enjoyed that!

@caringcarer I make tofu kebabs too - lots of chunks of mushrooms, courgettes, green & red pepper in the kebab with the tofu. I make a marinade out of soy sauce, honey, mustard & tomato puree that I coat the tofu & veg with.

DH is currently cooking the green Lentil croquettes I mentioned earlier in the thread.

Meditation vegetables? Not altogether sure this is a typo, given what hippies were like ...

Another blast from the past - I have that one. I remember thinking how Californian it was when I saw the recommendations for dishes which worked with a few joints afterward 😀