Vegetarian Pantry
Saturday, February 27th, 2010Well there isn’t always a great vegetarian restaurant www.vegetarianrestaurant.com.sg around or maybe there is but you just don’t feel like eating out again. At some point it will be important to stock up on some things to make at home. Learn to enjoy cooking will be a must unless you have someone else doing it for you. That would be nice. Anyway, if you are your own cook here are a few ideas that will help make the meals you make at home more interesting.
Many vegetarian dishes, as you may have figured out already, have a strong influence of Indian or Asian foods and spices. You may want to stock up on Soy Sauce, Miso , Tahini and other stir fry sauces. Soy milk, coconut milk and olive oil will get used. Also nut butters are great for many things. You can either eat them off of fresh veggies like celery or crackers. They are also great as thickeners in things like home made cookies. When it comes to spices many of them you have already in your cabinet like Basil, Pepper, Chili Powder, Garlic Powder, Oregano, Onion and Parsley. There is another more mysterious spice that you may not be using right now and that is Curry.
There are plenty of vegetarian cookbooks like 500 Vegan Recipes by Celine Steen, that will help you learn more about Curry. You may have had some curry in dishes at Thai food restaurants or India food restaurants. It is actually a combination of spices that make up most curry dishes like turmeric, cumin, coriander, red pepper and fenugreek. In the western world curry is a spice but as you learn more about it you realize that it is actually a sauce. There are quite a variety of curries depending on what kind of dish you are making.