Nerves and New Complete Vegetarian Review

Hello, hello.

Last night I had a dream about the Great North 10K on Sunday. I dreamt I ran it in six hours and when I looked at my Garmin I'd only covered 3.2 miles or thereabouts. Wail!

Running has been better and I no longer have stomach aches, but then I've been slacking recently and haven't been pushing myself at all. It's feeling like I've been building up to the race forever and I'm beginning to get bored of it. I think this apathy is due to being worried because I haven't received my race pack with my number yet. To my paranoid mind that means it's not going to come and I'm not going to be able to run in the race. I've been raising money for charity and if I can't run in the race I'll have to tell everyone and it'll be humiliating. Also even if I run I've been so rubbish recently I'm going to run it really slow and come in at 1 hour 30 or something because I still haven't gotten around to walking the course and I don't know what the hills are like and I'm worried that they're crazy steep and and and...

And breathe.

On to the review. A while ago I bought Rose Elliot's New Complete Vegetarian. I like it. It's clearly and concisely laid out and has some gorgeous photos, but not so many that as with some other cookbooks you wonder if the glossy photos are padding out a book lacking in recipes.
 The recipes are well written but invoke my pet cookery book peeve - no indication of how long it takes to prepare and cook the food at the beginning of the recipe. Grumble grumble.


I've tried out a few of the recipes. They tend to be on the easy and cheap side to make and favour everyday vegetables like carrots, courgettes, peppers, potatoes, and peas etc. Even the curries have ingredients you could easily find in a supermarket and won't languish unused in the back of your cupboard. Most recipes are healthy and just a touch on the 'wholesome' side of life with lots of brown rice, pulses, fresh vegetables and little oil. However there's plenty of cakes and bakes at the back of the book if you want to indulge.

I've tried peppers and macaroni (sauted peppers, onion, and tomatoes mixed with macaroni), courgette rice (brown rice cooked with courgettes, tomato and onions), and pea, potato and carrot curry. On the whole they've been quick and simple to make, although sometimes lacking in a little oomf when it comes to taste. Mr Scientist thought the peppers and macaroni and courgette rice were bland, although by 'bland' he actually meant 'not a curry containing 3 chilli peppers'. They were still nice, however, and the peppers and macaroni perfect for a quick midweek supper.

This book is not going to collect dust on my shelf, and I'm going to use it a lot.

Buddy Holly

I did intervals today. 10 x 1 minute jogging at 10 min/mile followed by 1 minute running like my life depended on it at 07:24 min/mile. By the 6 repetition it was kicking my arse, by the 10th it was handing it to me on a plate. I remembered why I hate interval training, but I've really struggled with my last few sessions so it was good to see that I could do this.

I finished The Beauty Myth last night and it was brilliant. By the end I'd grabbed a biro and was underlining bits and writing notes in the margins and I never do that.

I'm not going to go into much depth about the book because it's been reviewed by people more talented at getting to a book's essence and well-versed in feminism than I.

In the book which was originally published in 1991,Wolf asks the question why do women feel under greater and greater pressure to conform to certain physical standards while actually when it comes to political and personal rights we enjoy more freedoms than ever. She theorises that the monolith of 'them', 'the patriarchy', 'the establishment' feels threatened by the gains women made during the first wave of feminism and as such needs to create what Wolf calls an Iron Maiden. A metal sarcophagus in which victims are placed to either suffocate to death or be stabbed by the spikes inside and bleed to death. 

According to Wolf the Iron Maidan which can be found imprisoning and suffocating women in all aspects of their lives: work, culture, religion, sex, hunger, and violence. It is not enough to merely be, women are told in all domains of their lives, they must also live up to a rigid and perfectionist set of standards which they are simultaneously being told they will never be capable of doing.

What Wolf doesn't really examine is how the myth affects non-white, non-middle class, non-heterosexual, non-professional and non-college educated women. Ethnic minority women and working-class women get a look in occasionally, but only as bit players that support the perspective of middle-class women. I suspect the book would be a multi-volume affair if she had. Subsequent books on similar topics, such as Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, have made greater efforts to be more inclusive. 

I read this feeling more and more guilty about the makeup bag in my bedside cabinet. Was my mascara a political statement saying I have bought into the self-loathing and misogyny? Wolf points out that there's no shame in wearing makeup or dying your hair or wearing skyscraper high heels, (or, ahem, losing weight) as long as the place from which you approach them is positive and not negative. I run to be strong, not to fit some else's ideal.

  

Also my frown deepened and deepened as I read it, because I don't know any men that buy into the beauty myth. The men in my life - my partner, brother, father, male colleagues and friends and acquaintances - treat women with dignity and respect, or rather, as human beings. But Wolf acknowledges that patriarchical institutions and not men as individuals enforce the myth. 

Wolf is astoundingly perceptive - she notes that the beauty myth hurts men as much as women, and goes on to say that men will begin to be targeted by the rigid perfectionism of the Iron Maiden. She predicts a rise in male anorexia and other eating disorders. 20 years later men are being targeted by the beauty industry in similar ways, and eating disorders in men, which were once almost non-existant, have increased. 

However I think that progress for men and women has been made since The Beauty Myth was published. I think equality has risen. How can it not have now fairer paternity leave is being openly mooted? And yet female badminton players are finding out that being female badminton players is not enough, they must use their femininity to market themselves and attract male attention (Hat-tip to Inspiring Sports Women and Muslim Women in Sports )

To steal someone else's phrase, I believe in very gradual change.

And I wonder what Wolf would make of the internet if she were writing today. 

Congratulations if you made it this far. But what does this have to do with Weezer? When I was in the gym Buddy Holly came up on my iPod and there I was running along to a song which felt as fresh and relevant today as when I first heard it in 1994, much like The Beauty Myth, which was published a good two decades ago, does today.

Both of them made me feel a bit old as well. Seriously? The Little Mermaid's closer to the moon landing than today?  I remember getting a free Flounder and Ariel with a Happy Meal. Jesus...

Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian

I turned vegetarian a few months ago and, getting bored of trawling the BBC Good Food website for veggie recipes, bought two vegetarian cooking bibles  Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, and Rose Elliot's New Complete Vegetarian. I'm going to be trying them out over the next few months and giving my verdict.

I had a flick through World Vegetarian yesterday.

First Impression
At first I felt a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of recipes in the book as there a quite possibly thousands of them. I bit my lip and worried it would be relegated to my bookcase shelf and never be used. But then as I flipped through the pages I began to make a mental note of all the recipes I wanted to try and it grew and grew and grew and grew. These recipes sound delicious, and Jaffrey's introductions are charming and personable without being whimisical or irritating - Sophie Dahl I'm looking at you - and it sounds like she's stood in the kitchen with a cup of tea chatting about where she first heard about this or that, or giving tidbits of advice about presentation.
 
Presentation
It's well laid-out. There aren't any mouthwatering pictures to pour over, which is a shame. It would have been nice to have seen the beautiful cover design mirrored in the book's contents.

Oraganisation
It's fairly well organised. The chapters are Vegetables; Dried Beans, Dried Peas, Lentils and Nuts; Grains; Dairy Foods; Added Flavourings (by which she means chutneys, sauces, and spice mixes etc); and Soups Salads and Drinks.

The recipes are then organised alphabetically by the main ingredient and at the beginning of each section there's a short introduction to the vegetable touching on Jaffrey's experiences and how to prepare them, where a picture or two of a dish would be nice. Each recipe has a short introduction as well for example giving advice on how to chop the ingredients, or what kind of an effect the spices will have.

There is a list of special ingredients that the reader may be unfamiliar with information on how to prepare it, where it comes from or what effect the ingredient will have on the dish. There's also a list of necessary equipment and of suppliers of hard-to-find ingredients.

Finally at the end is the index. It's comprehensive but could be organised better. The recipes are listed by the main ingredients and often duplicated in both sections if there is more than one main ingredient - so asparagus with pine nuts comes under Asparagus, pine nuts with and Pine nuts, asparagus with. Recipes are also listed under the type of food and also again by what part of the world they're from. So for example, Turkish bread appears under breads and later on under Turkish-style recipes. The index, unsurprisingly, is a little hard to navigate at first because everything's in a tiny font size and the only difference between entries is that non-English words are in italics. It would be easier to navigate if different types of entries were differentiated somehow.


Recipes

I've tried a few recipes and will blog them. I must say I'm impressed. The recipes vary from curries that require you soaking ingredients over night or toasting and grinding a special spice blend to simple salads that can be chucked together in seconds. So far they seem to work, although it's hard to go wrong with a curry and I haven't tried to make any of the breads yet.

Some are very simple and economic to make from readily-available ingredients or store-cupboard staples. Some require pricey, specialist ingredients and Jaffrey occasionally notes good substitutions. Generally the recipes are fairly healthy, but there are exceptions with lashings of coconut milk and oil or cheese. Some recipes have 3 or 4 ingredients, some have a whole shopping list's worth.

There is incredible variation in where recipes are from. From what I've seen there are recipes from China, Japan, India (including Gujarati, Kashmiri, and Rajasthani recipes), Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran, Ethiopia, Italy, Macedonia, Bangladesh, Australia, Latin America, Mexico, Spain, Lebanon, Cyprus, Greece, the Ukraine and the list goes on...

The recipes could be written a bit better, however. How many servings it makes comes right at the end, which is mildly annoying. The recipes don't explicitly state how long it will take to prepare and cook, which is fairly aggravating. Word of warning - if it is a curry it will take ages regardless.

Summary

The sheer variety of ways to prepare common and rarer ingredients means it's not going to languish unused. There is something for whatever mood you are in and for whatever your tastes. It's great for when you're in a food rut, or need to eat something up and aren't feeling inspired by that very full bag of polenta skulking in the cupboard.