McCartney - Linda McCartneys vegetarian home cooking: 308 quick, easy, and economical vegetarian dishes

Linda
McCartneys
VEGETARIAN
HOME COOKING

Linda
McCartneys
VEGETARIAN
HOME COOKING

ARCADE PUBLISHING
NEW YORK

Copyright 2011 by Skyhorse Publishing First North American edition 1990

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on file.

ISBN: 9781611451832

Printed in China

PUBLISHERS NOTE: The author of this book, Linda McCartney, is American by birth but has made England her home for the past twenty years. Virtually all the ingredients contained in this book are available in both the United States and the U.K. Many of the meatless dishes call for the use of TVP. For those not familiar with this product, TVP is textured vegetable protein, a common meat substitute available in health-food stores throughout the United States, and even in many supermarkets. TVP can be found in a variety of forms: flavored, unflavored, minced, and in chunks. In the frozen-foods section of most health-food stores there are even ready-made products shaped and flavored to resemble sausages, bacon, patties, and fish fillets. Linda McCartney and her family have been cooking and eating vegetarian for many years, partly for nutritional reasons, but also out of their profound respect for animals. These are her tried-and-true recipes, which she has used to good effect with her own family through the years.

To my husband and children who,
like me, love animals and enjoy cooking.

My thanks to Peter Cox for all his help
and research in making this book possible.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a family of food lovers. We rarely had fancy meals but they always tasted good. I used to spend a lot of time hanging out in the kitchen, partly because I liked to be around food, but also because I loved to watch my mum preparing a meal often without measuring or weighing any ingredients. She just seemed to know instinctively what was right.

I like to think Im a person who picks things up easily, and those hours I spent hanging around the kitchen have served me well. Theyve given me a natural feeling for putting together a meal without spending hours poring over recipes.

There is, of course, one main difference between my cooking and the food I was brought up onI dont use any meat but everybody seems to say it tastes as good as, if not better than, using (to put it bluntly) dead animals.

Which brings me to the reason Ive written this book. Partly as a way of handing down my recipes to my family, but most importantly because I want to encourage all those people who so often say to me, Id like to cook without using meat but I dont know where to begin, or How do you fill that gap on the plate where theres usually a piece of lamb or beef? My response is simplethere are quiches, pastas, salads, and many wonderful new soya protein foods that taste so much better than meat!

And to those people who complain, Id love to be a vegetarian but my family would never allow it, I suggest you try a few of my recipeswithout mentioning theres no meatand see how much they enjoy them!

We stopped eating meat many years ago. During the course of a Sunday lunch we happened to look out of the kitchen window at our young lambs gambolling happily in the fields. Glancing down at our plates, we suddenly realized that we were eating the leg of an animal that had until recently been gambolling in a field itself. We looked at each other and said, Wait a minute, we love these sheep theyre such gentle creatures, so why are we eating them? It was the last time we ever did.

Some people find it easier to cut out meat gradually, supplementing their diet with chicken and fish. We chose not to take this routea decision which was reinforced a few weeks later when we found ourselves stuck behind a truck packed tightly with beautiful white hens. As it turned into the chicken processing plant a few miles ahead, we imagined the fate in store for those poor hens and felt we had acted wisely.

There are people who try to justify eating fish by saying they have no feelings. Well, you watch a fish gasping for breath as its pulled out of the water and then try and tell me it has no feelings! Anyway, with the amount of pollution in our poisoned rivers and seas, Im surprised that