#NusGourmet Vegetarian Edition

• Tweet
• Email
• Sharebar

• Tweet
• Email

That Longo’s event did two things to me: (1) it made me really hungry just writing about it and (2) it inspired me to create something.

In a nod to my vegetarian friends I thought I would cobble up something that is not just vegetarian but vegan even! I like food of all kinds, but I respect my friends’ decisions to eat whatever and however they want so I figured I would take a walk in their shoes.

Let me dispell something for you hardcore carnivores: eating your vegetables doesn’t have to taste bad! In fact if you’ve ever been to a good vegetarian restaurant you’ll have noticed that they try really hard to be more creative with their preparations to make whatever dish that comes out of the kitchen as flavourful as possible. So, uh look…there’s no need to make beautiful plates like they do at a restaurant to get tasty food so let’s focus on flavour ok?

I don’t usually cook vegan food but here’s my first real attempt. It was actually surprisingly easy and it turned out so delicious. The best part is that I just pretty much raided my fridge and came up with this super easy ratatouille inspired hors d’oeuvre. You can find all these ingredients as fresh as they come at a good store like Longo’s.

Another thing I noticed is that vegans are as picky as anyone and just because they’ve cut out about half of the food pyramid from their diets doesn’t mean that they eat any and all fruits and veggies. Everyone has preferences and the two veggies that kept getting the black x were zucchini and eggplant! GASP! I love both those veggies but in the interest of making this as accessible as possible I’ve omitted them from the recipe.

Either way this really came out tasting amazing!

Easy Ratatouille

Ingredients:

A bunch of Yukon Gold potatoes. The smaller the better. Look for the mini ones.

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 carrot, peeled and diced

1 red pepper, diced

1/2 a red onion, diced

5-6 stalks of asparagus, woody ends removed.

1 tomato diced

1 large leaf of basil

1 tbsp (or to taste) of dried thyme

1/2 a cup of vegetable stock (you can buy this at any store – Campbell’s makes them. Knorr too)

Fresh cracked pepper

Salt

Method:

- Start boiling the potatoes as you begin to prepare the veggies below as they take a bit of time to get soft enough to eat.

- Just dice everything as shown in the picture. For a tutorial on how to dice and onion, click here. You can apply the same method for dicing an onion to the tomato.

- To dice the carrot: once it’s peeled, cut it in half widthwise in the middle, then cut each half lengthwise into about three sticks. Cut across the sticks for the dice.

- Mince the garlic and throw it in a pot with a little olive oil to sautee.

- add all the vegetables and stir for about 2 minutes.

- add thyme

- slowly stir in the vegetable stock

- Season with the pepper and salt.

- cover and let simmer for 40 mins

- about 20 minutes in, cut up the basil leaf and mix it in. Taste your creation and adjust flavours accordingly with salt and pepper.

Serving:

- Halve the cooked potatoes and spoon a little of the mixture on top of each half.

- Tell that classy vegetarian lady who called you a disgusting meat-eating T-Rex that you’ve changed and that you would like to group hug with an ancient redwood.

- Hug redwood and girl.