Gourmet Vegetarian Slow Cooker - Lynn Alley [1]
The solution to the problem seemed to be beans. I went to the Davis Co-op and bought as many different kinds of beans as they had. Each day, I’d put a different kind of bean on to cook in the slow cooker. When the beans were tender, I’d add some good salt and choose an herb or two from the small herb garden outside the double-wide. A dash of olive oil gave my beans a bit of staying power.
And that was how I learned to appreciate the fact that not all beans taste the same. And not all beans have the same color or texture, for that matter.
This was a terrific experiment for me. It enabled me to experience something that country folk throughout the world have long known: how to take what you’ve got in the back forty and turn it into something that will keep you happy and well nourished.
In Italy, such cooking has been dubbed la cucina povera, roughly translated as “the cooking of the poor,” or, more graciously, “country cooking.” It doesn’t entail using exotic and expensive ingredients from around the world. It involves the artful combining and preparing of what is at hand.
Examples abound throughout this book. Think of the simple Cracked Wheat Berries with Honey and Ricotta breakfast, or the Risotto with Lentils from the Italian chapter. Or the French Alpine Cheese, Tomato, and Onion Soup which utilizes summer tomatoes, onions, bread, and cheese from France’s alpine regions. Or the Scalloped Potatoes Auvergnats, which calls for potatoes and blue cheese made in the central French region of Auvergne. Or the Baby Limas with Spinach of the Greek chapter. Or the Armenian Apricot Soup, which juxtaposes apricots from the region of their birth with the humble lentil.
Although I am a food and wine writer, and have partaken of many very elegant meals prepared by professional kitchen artists and craftspeople, I admit that some of my favorite meals have been the simplest. Fried okra, just picked from a friend’s garden and piping hot on a paper towel. Warm, fresh-picked tomatoes that have never seen the inside of the refrigerator, dusted with a pinch of salt. Bread fresh from a Spanish oven with a cooling gazpacho of tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions.
Those wonderful slow-cooked beans, too, remain in my heart and in my pantry. (Nowadays, I often slow-cook a pot full of beans, salt them, then freeze them in individual portions so that I have something on hand either to eat unembellished or to use as a base for a soup, stew, or salad when the need arises.)
It is my hope that the recipes in this book will honor the traditions of those people who have used what they had in their kitchens, pantries, and gardens in countries around the world.
Some of the dishes (such as the Italian and French recipes) come from cultures where “bare bones basic” works. Some (like the Indian and Mexican recipes) come from cultures that have traditionally drawn upon a more complex mélange of ingredients and cooking techniques.
All the dishes, however, are vegetable-based and reflective of the cultures from which they are drawn, and hence timely for the modern American kitchen, in terms of both health interests and economic considerations, in a world where many of us are realizing that we can live well and happily on a lot less than what we’ve been conditioned to believe.
Most important, recipes without meat make a statement of compassion for the animals cruelly confined to factory farms throughout the world. Whether or not we consumers choose to see and acknowledge their suffering, it exists and we can choose to be a party to it or not through our food choices.
Cooking Times
You will find this book contains a mélange of dishes inspired by cultures around the world and a variety of cooking times. Some of the dishes require relatively short periods of cooking (2 to 3 hours or so).