Cronish - Netties Vegetarian Kitchen

NETTIES VEGETARIAN KITCHEN

NETTIES
VEGETARIAN
KITCHEN

BY

Nettie Cronish

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Cronish, Nettie, 1954
Netties vegetarian kitchen

Includes index.
ISBN 0-929005-80-5

1. Vegetarian cookery. I. Title. II. Title: Vegetarian kitchen

TX837.C76 1996 641.5'636 C96-931605-4

Copyright 1996 by Nettie Cronish

Edited by Rhea Tregebov
Illustrations by Chum McLeod

Printed and bound in Canada

Published by
SECOND STORY PRESS
720 Bathurst Street Suite 301
Toronto Ontario
M5S 2R4

This book is dedicated to the memory of
Emma Berkeley Urquhart Cronish,
November 6, 1994 April 6, 1995,
our darling daughter who died of
sudden infant death syndrome.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks for inspiration, support and taste buds to: Kate Gammal, my distinguished recipe tester; to Pat Fletcher, Eve Weinberg, Gabriela Sousa Machado, Heather Scott, Helen Pasion, Gerry Pratt, Liz Greisman and Barbara Barron. Thanks also to the Hens Teeth Food Buying Club: Marney Berube, Jane Larimer and Laurie Malabar; to The Big Carrot; The Womens Culinary Network Executive: Marilyn Crowley, Kate Gammal, Lili Sullivan and Heather Epp; to Second Story Press and Rhea Tregebov. And final thanks to my husband Jim and to Cameron, Mackenzie, Helen Cronish, Aunty Jenny, Edwin and Elaine Beallor, Cousin Suzie and Sari Neilson.

The path to writing Netties Vegetarian Kitchen has been a long one. I suppose it started in 1981, when I began teaching cooking classes. I had been a vegetarian since 1974, and when I got a phone call from the Director of Torontos Skills Exchange asking if I would teach a vegetarian cooking course, it seemed like a great idea. Here was an opportunity to think about exactly what I ate and to learn whether others would share my taste in cuisine.

At the end of the first course, a Globe and Mail reporter who had been in attendance approached me about writing an article on changing food trends. In preparation for the course I had begun to put my thoughts down on paper, so the newspaper article seemed like a natural next step. I was delighted by the offer, especially since the publicity for my catering company, Vegetarian Gourmet Delights, was welcome. The article was published and soon my phone was ringing off the hook. Before I knew it, I was cooking long into the night. The time came to expand, and I opened a deli in a health food store (Goldberries, on St. Nicholas Street in Toronto), where I cooked and catered for a year.

When the lease on the health food store was not renewed and the shelves were not restocked, I began for the first time to have leftovers. Jim (my lifes partner) suggested I freeze them, and came up with the design for a Mister Natural funky vegetable label. Soon I was in the frozen vegetarian food business, distributing up to two thousand dinners a month to eighty stores.

When I had my first child, I could no longer maintain the catering cooking schedule I had previously sustained. I began teaching again, at Torontos Big Carrot Health Food Store, developing courses that emphasized organically grown fruits and vegetables, soy foods, beans and grains. This experience confirmed how much I enjoyed teaching and meeting people whose diets were in transition. Teaching grounds me and keeps me from creating recipes with ninety-nine ingredients!

My understanding of vegetarian cooking expanded further when I got myself a job at the King Ranch health spa, which had just opened, as a demonstration vegetarian chef. I had never worked with so many other women in a kitchen and it was a supportive, non-competitive, hard-working, fun place to be. There I met and worked with Anne Lindsay who opened my eyes to the nutritional side of a recipe her computer program to analyse nutritional values gave new meaning to my understanding of a recipes profile. Because King Ranch was committed to serving food that had 30% or less of its calories from fat, everything had to be measured and every recipe monitored for its fat content. I had thought vegetarian cooking to be quite low in fat, but in fact it isnt necessarily, especially when a lot of dairy products are used.

When the King Ranch went under, I became a founding member of the Womens Culinary Network, which was started by four women chefs and the Associate Food Editor of Chatelaine magazine. Although it has changed and evolved, today the Network has over 100 members, with chapters in other cities. (See page 19 for more information.)

So, fifteen years later I am still searching for delicious, easy to use ingredients that will excite my taste buds and nourish my soul. Diet is constantly evolving, and change is gradual. The aim of this book is to introduce people to vegetarian staples. I have tried to write concise, delicious, fast recipes that accommodate busy lives. Most of the people who attend my five week introductory cooking courses are not vegetarian. Over and over again, people remind me how pressured they are, how hard it is to consistently eat well. Change is tough. When people ask what I do and I respond with Im a vegetarian cooking teacher they often will tell me how much they love to eat vegetables. I know then that I have twenty seconds to engage their interest in a non-threatening way, and to explain that there is more to vegetarian cooking than vegetables.

Vegetarian cooking is experiencing an upswing in popularity. Compared to a typical meat-and-potatoes meal, vegetarian food is usually higher in minerals, fibre and vitamins, lower in saturated fat, and easier to digest. A growing ecological awareness leads to a vegetarian awareness too. Land that grows beans, grains and vegetables will feed up to twenty-five times the number of people than the same piece of land used to raise beef. Looking at the worsening condition of the environment, it is not surprising that more and more people are considering vegetarian options.

Human hunger, religion, economics and good health are some of the reasons why people are changing their diet. I often refer to people who are lowering their consumption of animal foods as being in transition to a healthier diet. Food consumption categories can be quite confusing, so for the record, here are three basic categories:

Lacto-ovo vegetarians avoid all animal flesh but they do use eggs (ovo) and dairy products (lacto). Lacto vegetarians exclude animal flesh and eggs and use dairy products. Ovo vegetarians use eggs but avoid dairy products.

Vegans avoid all foods of animal origin including dairy foods, eggs, honey and gelatin. (Gelatin is made from the bones and connective tissues of animals.)

The macrobiotic diet is based on the Japanese concepts of yin and yang. It is dairy-free, but it may include fish. This diet puts an emphasis on following seasonal foods and on eating foods locally grown. Foods are classified according to their expansive and contractive qualities, for example, alcohol and sugar are yin, expansive; meats and salt are yang, contractive. The goal of the macrobiotic diet is to find a balance of foods closer to the centre.

I find macrobiotic cooking too time consuming and I enjoy grated cheese in many a casserole. My diet, and this cookbook, uses small amounts of dairy. But tailor these recipes to your own preferences. Soy milk can be interchanged for regular milk, good-tasting nutritional yeast for grated cheese, and pured tofu for eggs. Desserts can easily be converted into lower fat versions when fruit pures such as apple butter are used to replace most of the oil or butter listed as ingredients. Flax seeds can be used to replace eggs in baking (see page 203 for details).