Vegetable Main Dishes

Appears in

Published 1999

About

This chapter was my greatest challenge. I love cooking vegetables; their variety of colour, shape and texture offers constant inspiration. Yet creating a main dish consisting entirely of vegetables, which is sustaining enough without being stodgy, is not easy. I am sure many people have memories of shapeless vegetarian dishes, always brown, and either mushy, or with so much fibre that they leave you feeling completely bloated. However, vegetarian food has changed a lot over the last years and a good principal dish can be more exciting than when meat, fish or poultry is the main ingredient. Increasingly, different vegetables are available to us and flavourings are wide-ranging and often subtle or unique. Since I am not a vegetarian myself, I found I had far more ideas if I was cooking for someone who was. Therefore my oldest daughter and a few vegetarian friends have been extremely useful when working on the recipes for this chapter. A vegetarian main dish should not be simply a larger version of an accompanying dish but something which makes as much of an impact as a meat-based dish. You should think of it as the star turn of the meal; it must arrest the attention and remain in the memory both for its appearance and its taste. Many of the dishes in the pasta, rice and pulses chapter also have these qualities.