May 2009 Archives

After ten years of unsung work heading up the Delfina Studio Café in London, Maria Elia is slowly moving centre stage. As well as regular forays into television, the daughter of a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner was named as one of ten female chefs to watch by the Independent last year. After stints writing for food magazines, Elia has turned her attention to a cookbook. The result is the Modern Vegetarian - a creative, vivacious look at vegetarian dishes.

Bravely - and somewhat obviously due to the book's name - Elia has focussed squarely on vegetarian meals. Nowhere in her bio does it suggest that Elia has ever turned her back on meat, while her restaurant at the Delfina studios is far from an expressly vegetarian operation. However, by targeting this market Elia has geared her lively, pan-global cuisine to an oft-ignored area of cooking, and has given the book a creditable raison d'etre among the piles of cookbooks published each year.

Elia's CV is littered with worthy names, from stints at El Bulli and Arzak in Spain to spells in Italy, America and Australia. Her motives for writing a vegetarian cookbook, cited in the introduction, is the feeling that vegetarians are treated with contempt in many modern restaurants. "As much as I love a mushroom risotto or a mozzarella, tomato and basil salad, I am always amused to see how many restaurants only offer these dishes as their vegetarian choice," she says.

With not a nut loaf in sight, Elia unleashes her lively style on meatless and fishless dishes. Grilled radicchio and strawberry risotto, lemongrass and sweetcorn soup with crème fraiche, sumac spiced aubergine schnitzel with tabbouleh exhibit a vibrant and cosmopolitan approach to vegetarian cuisine reminiscent of the Ottolenghi chain of restaurants. Mediterranean and middle Eastern influences are scattered throughout - rosemary porcini on toast for example, or carrot pancakes with houmous and feta salad as well as dishes of a more fine-dining lilt like textures of peas.

For chefs unwilling or uninspired to jazz up their vegetarian option this book could be the catalyst to finally consign that goats cheese tart to the annals of your restaurant's history.

The Modern Vegetarian
Maria Elia
Kyle Cathie Ltd £16.99
ISBN 978-1-85626-820-2

It's getting near festival season. Will you be gathering round a campfire with a man called Racoon and his bonga drums at Glasto? Breaking up some popper-high sixteen year-olds from a bout of knuckle-meet-face introductions at Reading? Dressing up like a six foot stick of rock at Bestival and crying because your parents still don't know the truth? Or will you, like party livewires Yoko Ono, Seal and Chris Martin (pictured left ushering a journalist who said his grandmother "liked Parachutes more than La Viva La Vida" towards the exit) be savouring the real talk of festival season. Yes, it's that time of the year in which we - and by "we" I mean people who walk down the Sainsbury's meat aisle just as a short-cut to the soya milk shelf - celebrate everything non-meat based. Hurrah - or at the very least a weak-limbed air punch - for National Vegetarian Week (sponsored by Cauldron Foods)!

Despite the wholly unfounded and snobbishly closet cynicism I'll be listing some great veggie recipes, veggie book reviews and anything else veggie related this week. To check if there is anything gonig on near you, visit the Vegetarian Society's website here.

From the lesser known but excellent Mike North at the Nut Tree Inn in Murcott, Oxfordshire. Everyone should visit Mike out there, it truly is one of the best secrets in UK dining and an amazing little bhatched pub to visit of a summer's day.

Sea trout with nettle velouté, asparagus and Jersey Royals
(Makes 4 portions )

Ingredients
20 spears of asparagus
20 small Jersey Royals, scrubbed
Sprig of mint
200g washed nettles
salt
50ml white wine
100ml light fish stock
100ml double cream
4 fillets of approx. 180g of wild or sea-reared seatrout,
(skin on but scales removed)
4tbs olive oil
50g unsalted butter

Method

Trim, peel and cook asparagus in salted water for 3 minutes, or until tender and refresh
Cook Jersey Royals in salted water with a sprig of mint for 15 minutes or until tender
To make the sauce, blanch and refresh nettles, puree with a little water and reserve. In another pan reduce wine by half, add the fish stock and reduce by half again then add the cream. Reduce to a light sauce consistency and reserve.Pan fry sea trout skin side down in a hot pan with olive oil for 4 minutes, turn and cook other side for 2 minutes. Add nettle puree and butter to sauce and season to taste. Reheat asparagus and Jersey Royals.

To Plate
Arrange a pile of 5 potatoes on each plate and 5 spears of asparagus. Place sea trout on top and spoon sauce around.