Vegetarian Cookbooks

One of my favourite things to buy is cookbooks. I don't necessarily use each one often, and I rarely follow recipes to the letter, but I love having the books to refer to, even when it's one I was slightly disappointed by after I'd bought it.

I use meat cookbooks as well as vegetarian ones, as I can often just substitute the meat ingredient with Quorn or tofu. This works particularly well with certain ethnic foods, where the recipe isn't so reliant on the natural flavours of meat. Some are even more useful to me than actual vegetarian cookbooks. For example, I have Simon Hopkinson's The Vegetarian Option, and though it's lovely and I really like the way it's organised (grouped by ingredient rather than course), it's often far too fancy and involved for my humble ambitions.

By far the best vegetarian cookbooks in my collection are Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (a gift from my sister who accidentally bought 2 copies). They are both visually sparse (Madison's contains some photos but Bittman's is pretty much just text), they are packed full of simple, straight forward cooking and advice, and are equally appropriate for those new to vegetarian cooking as old hands. MBK has given me a copy of Madison's Greens Cookbook, which I haven't had a chance to really sink my teeth into (so to speak).

I tried getting Heidi Swanson's cookbook, Super Natural Cooking, but it was out of stock at Amazon for so long I cancelled my order. Now she's working on a new one, so my interest is piqued again, but her blog is so good, I tend to rely on that quite a bit. Through her blog, I came across Bryant Terry's Vegan Soul Kitchen, which I love for many reasons, not least because of the fact that it has multiple recipes for Hoppin' John, a dish I grew up with (due to my Texan father's influence probably), and find very comforting.

And last, but not least, I love Denis Cotter's Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me. I can only dream of having access to some of the amazing produce he talks about, but now that we have a Waitrose on Byres Road, at least I can have Cavolo Nero, which is one of the key ingredients in the rich butternut squash mole recipe in the book. This mole is so good - I made it for Thanksgiving last year and I think everyone who came is going to probably buy the book on the strength of that single recipe. We had it with cornbread stuffing on the side, and the combination was perfect.

'Pork' fried rice

A rice cooker is one of those appliances that I'd considered getting, but didn't think I'd use all that much. My sister gave me one as an anniversary present back in June, and I pretty much never looked back. I can't actually remember the last time I cooked rice - or any grain for that matter - on the stove.

And the beauty is, once you put the rice on, you can then go off and do other things, and you don't have to think about it again until you're ready to use it, because the cooker knows when the rice is done, and will automatically switcher over to a warming function. Last night I put rice on, added some garlic, dried coriander leaf, chile and a bit of tomato paste straight into the rice cooker and the result was lovely, moist, spicy, aromatic brown rice. By the time it was ready, I had decided to make fried rice, and my vegetables were all chopped and my eggs were beaten and ready to scramble.

Sainsbury's had delivered Quorn bacon style chunks instead of bacon style rashers at the weekend, and I had no idea what I was going to use it for, but a last minute I realised it would make a suitable substitute for the meat you find in pork fried rice. As the rice was so flavourful, all I had to do was throw in the veg and add soy sauce, sesame oil, and a dash of rice vinegar. It was one of those lovely, improvised meals that often end up better than the ones I meticulously plan.