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.