Another day, another chance for me to run as best i can in my unsuitable shoes from the local library squeaking 'Oh, you fools, i would have paid £1 for this book instead of the insanly low 25p you insist on charging me!' before doing a victory dance in the middle of the high street.
Yeh, new cookbooks do that to me, it's embarrassing and i am working on it- especially when the object of my slightly psychotic lust is 'Linda's Summer Kitchen' by Linda McCartney.
Published in 1997 it seems to have been created sometime round the mid eighties if the dry looking pictures, which all have vegetables in the background so you KNOW you're reading a vegetarian book, are all you have to go by (although you could make a kick ass collage from the pictures that are scattered amongst the recipes like so much vegetably fairydust)
The recipes work, i'll give them that but they're, well......bland and kinda old-fashioned but still better than the Linda McCartney roasted vegetable lasagne i brought that had ONE slice of pepper between the noodles! Not that i'm still bitter about that. In the slightest. AT ALL.
Plus a 'vegetarian mince and rice stirfry' is wrong, wrong, wrong, It's made in a wok for goodness sake! The potato and aubergine curry is delightful however, just leave out the 'steak chunks', they're not needed. And neither is the coriander but that's just bias speaking since no recipe needs the devil weed in it.
I cant help but think this book would be most useful if you fell through some sort of time hole and ended up in a vegetarian cafe in the late seventies trying to fend off hippies by offering to cook them 'country mushrooms' or 'rice and vegetable cheese bake'.
Heh, heh, I have just realised that despite not eating meat for 21 years, i still can't spell 'vegetarian', before i spell checked this i was apparently a 'vegataerien' a 'vigetron' and a 'vrgetaren'. Cool.
