Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> > I am interested in doing more meat-free and low-cost cooking and am open 
> to
> > ideas on a new thread or subject if you guys want to throw out some ideas 
> or
> > your favorite cook book. 

One thing I'd encourage the meatless cook to do is drop the idea of "meat 
substitute", that is, trying to make nuts and beans into something that 
resembles 
meat.  It's an insult to both cuisines.

If you make meatless burger patties, don't view it as a hamburger substitute. 
 It isn't.  Let it be its own food in its own right.

Any peasant ethnic food from around the world offers good examples.  Tonight 
we had bean tacos (beans, corn tortillas, onions, lettuce, sour cream, and 
quesa blanca all from the homestead, yet another 100% homestead meal!)

When eggplants are in season, we have the middle eastern 'mezza' cuisine,  
baba ganouj, falafel, humus, tabouli.  We grow the eggplants and chickpeas 
but 
buy the sesame paste.  

There's shepherd's pie, stir fies,. potato pancakes, mousaka, and a host of 
other things that don't attempt to imitate meat and can be grown on the 
homestead.

You can even go back in time and have a medieval meal of bread and sop.  
Peas, lentils, or fava beans were cooked into thick gruel, a sop, and eaten 
by 
dipping pieces of bread into it.  Hence the word 'supper'.

It's a mindset  to think that meals need be complicated.  Sometimes we have 
suppers of bread and cheese, or cornbread and milk.

"Now in Wang Lung's country, if a man had a stalk of garlic and a good piece 
of wheaten bread to wrap around it, he had a good meal and needed no other 
..."
(from Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth")

James   </HTML>