Almut's kitchen

From: Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking, p. 104

A baked savoury loaf made of lentils, breadcrumbs, cheese and spices.

I tried making this lentil loaf today, adding some nutmeg and nutritional yeast to it for some extra flavour. I also used 2tbsp olive oil instead of the butter. The loaf had a pleasant consistency but tasted rather plain. It definitely needs some kind of gravy or tomato sauce to go with it.

Gluten-Free: Use gluten-free breadcrumbs in this recipe.

From: Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking, p. 121

A stew with TVP chunks in tomato sauce with green peas.

This is the 187th recipe I am trying out from Linda’s book and I must admit that I am tiring of all the recipes that use TVP and/or vegetable burgers in some kind of tomato sauce with the addition of either sour cream, cream or cheese. There are quite a few of them in the book and many of them seem to be left for the last weeks of my project of cooking them all. I do get a feeling I have to slow down a little and cook other things (not from “Home Cooking”) in between for a better balance.
Surprisingly, my family does not seem to tire of these recipes at all. My husband, who likes to eat meat every now and then, loves all kind of stews or curries and might be an example of those eaters Linda had in mind when writing the book. She wanted to create a book for meat-eaters or for people who want to cook vegetarian meals but want to keep on using the recipes they are used to. And she wrote the book for cooks and eaters in the early 1990s.

This recipe is very plain and TVP plays the main role here. As a vegetarian I would prefer vegetables as the main ingredients, and would also like to have a more interesting combination of spices than just bay leave, thyme and vegetable stock.
I would also prefer a lighter, vegan dish and think I have had too much sour cream or cream in the past weeks when cooking many of Linda’s recipes.
One ingredient, the horseradish sauce, did add a little twist to the taste of this dish- something to keep in mind for other dishes in need for an interesting taste component.
Still, I think that this will not be one of the dishes I will try out again- and I hope that there are some positive surprises waiting in the other TVP or burger recipes I still have to cook from this book.

From: Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking, p. 118

A rice dish with asparagus and parmesan- it is a little like an asparagus risotto but by using long-grain rice it remains fluffy and does not take on a creamy risotto consistency. It is great with a salad or another main course, preferably a stew with flavoursome sauce.

Linda recommends using part wild rice and part long grain rice, which I have tried. The problem seems to be that wild rice takes longer to cook than white rice and that during cooking time the wild rice’s dark colour tints the white rice as well. If you really want to have white and dark grains of rice, you need to cook the two separately and then mix before serving.

The asparagus used is also briefly sautéed at the beginning and then boiled with the rice until the rice has finished cooking. This way the asparagus turns very soft, which I would like to avoid. Therefore I chose to add the asparagus pieces only a few minutes (8?) before the rice was done to allow the asparagus to preserve some of its bite. Unfortunately, the asparagus was also coloured in a greyish shade by the wild rice. So again, wild rice might not be the first choice for a dish where all ingredients are cooked together (or you need to add the cooked wild rice to the dish shortly before serving. I have also seen mixes of wild and white rice in the shops and know that they work well when cooking them together. So maybe the mixes use another variety of wild rice or are treated in a special way to avoid that the dark colour spreads?)

Overall, the dish had a very pleasant taste and was a quite light main course that can easily be combined with other dishes or any salad. I think that using green asparagus for this recipe (I used white asparagus and there is no specification in the recipe about what to use) would make it more attractive to look at. Additionally, the slightly more intense flavour of the green asparagus would go well with the other flavours in this recipe,

Vegan: I think there is no need to use any parmesan in this recipe, so you could just omit the cheese. If you like, you could also use some vegan “parmesan”.