[Sca-cooks] non-meaty cooking, was Re: Meat prices

[Ariane Helou]

At 06:37 AM 5/5/2005 -0600, you wrote:
>I've been starting to explore some meat-free or meat-reduced cuisines. 
>I've only got the one, little cookbook on curries and Indian 
>(sub-continent) food, and would love to get a good cookbook for it. Does 
>anyone have any recommendations?

I recently got a copy of Deborah Madison's "The Savory Way" as a gift for a 
friend of mine -- it's a classic of vegetarian cooking, and she is still 
one of the pre-eminent vegetarian chefs in the U.S.  Alice Waters (founder 
of Chez Panisse, my favorite restaurant in the world!) is likewise 
goddess-ly when it comes to dealing with fresh produce, although she does 
have plenty of recipes for meat, poultry, and fish as well.

>I'd like to know how to make paneer, for instance, which my little book 
>doesn't touch on, although it has interesting things like instructions for 
>making coconut milk, and various fresh spice blends.  Mmmmmm.....
>--maire, making herself hungry and it's not even breakfast time yet! ;o)

Actually, I find paneer at my local grocery store -- granted, it's on the 
pricey side, so I haven't bought any yet.  If there are Indian markets in 
your area, they'd certainly carry it too...  Paneer reminds me of certain 
Middle Eastern cheeses, which can be cheaper and easier to find, and I've 
thought about trying to substitute them in recipes and see if they 
work.  But first that involves buying the paneer itself to make the 
comparison.  It's a vicious cycle. ;-)

So, on a totally different note, I just got done translating this 14th c. 
Italian cookbook.  There are a couple of really funky things in there that 
I can't figure out, so I've hopped back on this list after a long-ish 
absence to try to get some advice, if I may, about on what's going on in 
these recipes. :-)  More questions to come...


Vittoria