As anyone who is a regular reader of The City Lane can attest, I am most certainly a meat eater but I am also a big believer in the greatness of fruits and vegetables. I’ll often go several days without eating meat – not because I make a conscious effort to avoid meat but simply because there are numerous great tasting meals that are possible to make without meat, and I’m not going to add in meat “just because”.
Simon Bryant’s Vegies is a cookbook that came out in 2012 but I only became aware of it recently, when I received a copy from Bookworld. It’s a great cookbook that’s full of vegetarian recipes with a focus on seasonality and sustainability, with the recipes in the book arranged by season. Recipes include things such as sweet potato, peanut and mandarin curry, beetroot ravioli with roast garlic and lemon-zested chevre and walnuts, and lavender and orange broccoli with cous cous and sugar snaps.
The cookbook has a very genuine tone about it, and a lot of ideas that really resonated with me. For example “I like vegies that are gnarly, misshapen, a bit dirty and authentic”. I like this ethos and it’s very much the way I try and do my food shopping.
Just this weekend I visited the Carlton Farmer’s Market and bought some cherries which are at the start of their season. About half of the cherries were a little bit deformed, with two 4/5 sized cherries fused together on the one stem – for lack of a better image, they were shaped like little bums. I thought about how you’d never see cherries like this at the major supermarkets as they would be rejected for not having the “right” aesthetics. Isn’t it ridiculous that so much perfectly edible, tasty, healthy produce is wasted each and every day in developed nations across the world because it doesn’t look right?
As well as recipes, there’s a lot of discussion about how to choose vegetables, which flavours go with which and various cooking techniques.
You don’t need to be a vegetarian to appreciate Simon Bryant’s Vegies, you just need to enjoy good food and thanks to Bookworld I have 1 copy of “Simon Bryant’s Vegies” (RRP $39.95) to give away to a lucky reader. To enter, all you need to do is subscribe to The City Lane by clicking on the link below. Existing subscribers can also enter.
ENTER THE COMPETITION
Sorry to my international readers but this one’s open to those with an Australian postal address only. Entries close on Saturday 13 December and winners will be notified by e-mail on Sunday 14 December.