Vegetarianism is hard
Go on, ask me. Ask me how my New Year’s resolution – to go mostly vegetarian in 2017 – is holding up. I’m holding it together, mostly. Over the past fortnight, my ingested inventory of carnivore comestibles has been reduced to pepperoni on a pizza, six rashers of bacon, two bits of crumbed gurnard, one grilled chicken breast and the marinated wings of half a dozen prepubescent chickens. (Stop laughing; my parents taught me it is rude to leave food on your plate, and Mum cooked the wings so it would have been doubly rude not to eat them.)
To even up the ledger, I’m proud to report that my summer salad consumption has skyrocketed since New Year’s Eve. I’ve eaten several variations on the classic potato salad (courtesy of a bumper crop of spuds at our bach), tabbouleh (courtesy of a prolific patch of Italian parsley), finely sliced Florence fennel (you get the picture) drizzled with fresh lime juice, Lebanese cucumbers tossed in toasted cumin seeds, steamed globe artichokes, chargrilled capsicums, and enough roasted beetroot to turn my wee the colour of cheap red wine.
Summer salads, I have rapidly come to realise, have come a long way since I was a child. Mum’s summer standards were shredded iceberg with condensed milk dressing, a vinegarsoaked menage a trois of sliced tomatoes, red onion, and telegraph cucumbers, and coleslaw, whereas these days salads are the vegetarian version of kinky sex: there are no limits as to what is socially acceptable to attempt if it turns on your taste buds. Thus, what I would once have called a deep-fried zucchini fritter, I can now accurately describe as a warm salad of organic zucchini and chive flowers, bound with free-range egg and bathed in smoking hot extra-virgin olive oil.
Salads, I have simultaneously come to realise, are a jolly faff to make. Compare the time spent slamming sausages on the barbie with the complicated rigmarole that is dryroasting pine nuts, spinning lettuces, zesting lemons, peeling quail eggs, julienning carrots, dicing shallots, crumbling feta, and emulsifying dressings.
I’ve become a slave to the salad bowl, I sighed to Jesse Mulligan on the radio last week. ‘‘Let me offer you salvation in chickpeas and cauliflower,’’ he said (or words to that effect), pointing me to a recipe by the clean-living goddess of , Gwyneth Paltrow.
Rinse and drain a can of chickpeas. Toss into a roasting dish with the florets of a cauliflower and 3 tablespoons of olive oil. Roast at 200 degrees for about 45 minutes, until soft and brown. Whisk together 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard, 1 tablespoon grainy mustard, 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar and cup olive oil. Dress the cauliflower and chickpeas, and finish with cup chopped Italian parsley. Serve warm with a good quote from Mark Twain: ‘‘A cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education’’.
Not that I have anything against cabbages, which is fortuitous, because my garden currently boasts one bed of beach ball-sized purple cabbages, and another of their crinkly savoy cousins.
The savoys, sadly, have been shredded by the caterpillars of the white cabbage butterfly, Pieris rapae. Each black-and-white minstrel can lay up to 100 eggs and, from egg to adult, their life cycle can be completed in as few as 30 days. This means that, over the course of the summer, three generations of those chubby caterpillars can hatch out to chew great holes in your crops and crap all over them at the same time.
It is possible to halt this brassica massacre by covering your broccoli, cabbages, and cauliflowers with net curtains from your local op-shop or fine-grade insect mesh from a garden centre. A good drench with Kiwicare’s Organic Caterpillar Bio Control does the trick, too; this Bio-Gro certified spray leads to a fatal bout of caterpillar-specific gastroenteritis but has no withholding period, so you can slaughter your bugs in the morning and eat a bowl of coleslaw for dinner.
Or just do as I do, and look the other way at the chopping block. Is it cheating if I accidentally add a little extra protein to my salad bowl?
Summer salads, I have rapidly come to realise, have come a long way since I was a child ... these days salads are the vegetarian version of kinky sex.