Winter Warmer: the veggie challenge

In Lunchista's early days of attempted vegetarian cookery, the same problem used to present itself over and over again: I just couldn't find a vegetarian dish that filled me with quite as much warmth, sleet-proof-ness and sheer alcohol tolerance as was offered by meat dishes. Given that wine appeared more often in my life than central heating (or indeed heating of any sort), this was a serious issue.

Now you know those old eejits who talk about "Things they wish they'd known at eighteen"? Well, here's mine. It is the recipe for the warmest veggie dish I know that doesn't actually involve weapons-grade curry powder. The only drawback is, it needs a bit of forward planning (unless you cheat), but it serves 4 hungry students, or one lazy student all week, even if they're vegan.

Soak 200 grammes of chick-peas overnight, then boil them for an hour (perhaps while you're reading some classic literature or tidying up after the last party). Alternatively cheat, and get 1 lb of already-cooked chick-peas.

Peel and slice into chunks 2 spuds, 3 carrots and 3 parsnips, cut up a celery or a fennel. Dice 2 red onions, a clove of garlic, a lump of ginger and some mint leaves. Make up 300g of veggie stock and drop in some threads of saffron. Grab a tin of the ever-useful Italian tomatoes and a large frying pan (or that wok, including a lid). Find 1/2 a teaspoon crushed chillies, or mild chilli powder.

Heat up a little vegetable oil in the wok, and cook all the vegetables slowly until they are soft, then lift them out of the oil and put them aside. Fry the garlic and ginger, then add the onions, mint and chillies/powder. When the onions are soft, tip the tomatoes in, simmer for a few minutes then add the chick-peas and some of the juice in which they've been cooked. Add the stock and the cooked vegetables, then simmer the lot for 25 minutes, and serve.

If there's any left over it will keep for days and days, because there is no meat and hardly any fat. This would have been extremely useful for the young Lunchista, who often came home from parties hungry. It's far cheaper and healthier than burgers or kebabs, and at 1 a.m. can of course be eaten in the relative safety and comfort of your own kitchen.

Car Booty

The Party kitty was, well not quite empty, but perhaps feeling a little peckish. An election was, well not quite imminent, but in the offing. The Meeting was collectively wondering what to do about this undesireable state of affairs, when somebody mentioned a car boot sale.

Now as you can imagine this isn't something Lunchista could take on alone, lacking a boot, a car and indeed permission to move anything larger than a bike (with or without trailer) along the public highway. So I offered to be co-pilot to whoever took this on. And somebody (let's call him Will) rose to the challenge. It turned out that, lurking in Will's garage, was a load of stuff he wanted rid of. You know the kind of stuff that's absolutely indescribable until you look at it and try to enumerate it, and even then it can be a challenge. Old camera gear, board games, a bathroom cabinet, shoes, well-used sports kit, ugly ornaments. And that was before the call went out to everybody else to take a long look at their wardrobes, bookshelves, cupboards and (for the better-off) garages and perhaps even sheds (though we're not the kind of party to have many punters with stables and outbuildings...yet!).

More and more stuff arrived at Will's house. I never asked (out of a kind of British politeness I suppose) but I'm willing to bet he was beginning to regret taking this on. Then a promising weekend materialised: the local car-boot, held at a former airfield, turned out not to need bookings, and the weather chart just said

HIGH

so we went for it. In mufti, so as not to scare off people (the vast majority of the population, in fact) who vote for parties other than ours.

By the time we got there things were already in full swing, and we drove past rows and rows of colourfully-laden tables, following directions and gestures, to a spot under a tree in the far corner. We had driven through the entire "field of combat", and it was massive!

As soon as we got out of the car and openned the boot, a crowd gathered round and people jostled for position to see what we had on offer: some of our things got sold before we'd even unfolded our table's legs. I began to get a bit worried about the money tin, especially now it already seemed to have quite a lot of money in it. As the morning grew hotter (it was high summer, literally, and we were becoming thankful for that tree and its shade) the action continued, at a scarcely less frantic pace. I couldn't get over the number of people there, or indeed the variety of languages that chattered past us.

We hadn't bothered to label prices for anything and it turned out that was just as well: better to adapt your price to your punter, using as a guide their apparent affluence and/or enthusiasm. If they stopped to ask, they were interested. If they didn't, my sales pitch became "come over here out of the sun, we're the coolest pitch at the airfield today!" or if people hesitated: "just because we're in the shade, doesn't mean we're shady!".

We took turns to sit on the one deckchair we'd brought along (there hadn't been room in the car for another), and were glad to have had the prescience to have brought along something to drink, and sunhats.

By about 2 pm we realised that most of the bulky stuff had gone, the crowds were beginning to thin out and the heat was just ludicrous. The shade from our tree was long gone and I had resorted to using my umbrella as a sunshade, far-Eastern style. A particularly long lull gave us a chance to consult the money-tin. It contained an indecent sum of cash and we decided to beat a retreat.

In case you may be wondering why I'm writing about summer exploits (and not even this year's, at that) when in fact we're facing the back end of October, it is for two reasons. Firstly to reminisce about hot weather (which is always kinder to memories than it is to real people at the time), and secondly to "compare and contrast" with a more recent car boot session.

Just last week we were back at the booty: same personnel, same venue, same vehicle. But making a wild difference to our fortunes were the range of goods we had on offer (lots of glass ornaments this time, and no ancient camera kit or home-made jewellery), the ambient temperature (although it was still bright and sunny) and of course the times of credit crunchiness to which we are now exposed.

One or more of those factors made the difference between clearing nearly £100 last summer, and our more recent, but rather less impressive, net total of £25. Sadly, however, it doesn't look as if we're in line for a bail-out from the government.

Bean-Counters

A younger member of famille Lunchista announced one afternoon, on arriving home from football, that she was going to go vegetarian. Nothing to do with me, Sarge, all I ever did was mention, just the once and ages ago, that I'd had a go at being vegetarian in my misspent youth, gone anaemic and given it up. The ensuing silence was deafening. Twice as much cooking! Having to find something new and at least vaguely interesting for two lots of people not just one! And all this with both of us working and one of us not even getting home til 7 pm (yes, it wasn't even as if I did most of the cooking). If I'd been one of those portly old blokes who goes to a club I'd have said "preposterous!" (in a particularly silly posh accent). But Lunchista is not an old bloke and couldn't afford a club even if we sold the house and banked the proceeds. And so evolved The Plan.

I pointed out that we could get almost as good a result, on the less-meat-eating front, if we all went vegetarian for one day a week. I also happen to think it's healthier for a growing lass to do low-meat than no-meat, at least to start with, and it's better for morale if we're all sitting down to share the same food. Sunday seemed like a good choice of day, because it was the only day of our week which afforded any spare time to pick up the pieces if anything should go wrong. So Sunday it was then, with The Cranks' Recipe book and a trip to the local Wholefood emporium for supplies and inspiration. It was there that I was reminded of the taste, variety and sheer protein-infested-ness of beans (and picked up The Suma Recipe book for nowt). Beans...they keep for ages in ordinary cupboards (and look fab). They go with absolutely everything. Their only two drawbacks as far as I can tell are that you have to remember to get them out in advance to soak them (hours or overnight) and you can't barbecue them.

Fess-up time: that was 18 months ago and we haven't managed to stick religiously to vegetarian every Sunday. But we have collected a useful repetoire of veggie recipes, and during that time a new middle-Eastern shop has opened its doors near the Uni. I wandered in just the other day and was greeted with shelf upon shelf of phenomenally cheap 5 lb packets of all sorts of beans, each type of which has a different recipe on. And as if that's not enough, the guys who run the shop have drawn up a load of recipes of their own, from their various countries of origin, and printed these out on pages which they helpfully offer to anyone who, like me, they jalouse is in need of veggie inspiration. They are also incorrigible flirts, especially with the more, erm, "traditionally-built" ladies who come into the shop: watching them in action from the safety of behind the far shelves is great fun!

On the back of a giant pack of black-eye beans we found the following simple recipe for 4 people:
Soak 200g of the beans for at least 5 hours (you will now have just over 400g, or about 1lb, of beans). Cook until soft, then strain and put aside. Put on one mugful of rice to boil then simmer. Finely chop an onion and fry it til transparent, add 1/2 tsp turmeric, 1/2 tsp chilli powder and a tin of the ever-useful Italian plum tomatoes. Stir for a few minutes, add the beans and cook for a few more minutes, then serve.

It tasted great. Not only that but it's cheap as chips and all the ingredients can be pulled straight from your in-case-of-Swine-Flu emergency store.