How to Cook Everything Vegetarian  It's been a slow Saturday. After getting up late; well one of us got up late, the other couldn't sleep and got up to cook steel cut oatmeal for the first time; very good, nuttier and chewier than regular oatmeal but it takes 30 minutes to cook on top of the stove. Got to figure out a faster way, probably by soaking overnight. Anyway we decided to bike over to the floor store to look at new vinyl flooring for the bathroom.

Afterwards we vegged out by flipping channels on tv and came across a PBS cooking show by Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything. Apparently he's a famous chef, known as The Minimalist who wrote the book How to Cook Everything which is described as a hipper Joy of Cooking, which was one of my favorite non-vegetarian cookbooks (I now see that there is a vegetarian book in the Joy series, Joy of Cooking: All About Vegetarian. Will have to check it out).

We happened across the How to Cook Everything show with an interesting segment on cooking rice in different cultures. From watching the risotto demonstration, it appears I've been cooking mine incorrectly, stirring way too often, causing the rice to break and lose texture. Later I was clicking through my links for the latest news, etc. and happened across the Sierra Club blog the Compass and lo and behold there was an entry on a new vegetarian cookbook by Bittman, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

...the days of all-meat-all-the-time (or, to be slightly less extreme, of a diet heavily dependent on meat) could not go on. Averaging a consumption of two pounds a week or more of meat (as Americans do) is not sustainable...

posted by Bruce Wright at 9:53 PM #