Anita’s Easy Vegetarian Recipes
If you have been following us for a while, you will have noticed our frequent reference to a new and exciting website in Scotland which is all about vegetarian, fresh food and how to prepare it. We have established quite a bond with Anita, and frequently exchange articles and recipes for fruit and vegetables, indeed anything that concerns fresh, local produce and how to prepare it.
Anita started her vegetarian site last year. Her Alexa world ranking was 4 million plus – not very good.
However, over a very short period of time, Anita concentrated on publishing articles about vegetarian and fresh produce – where to buy it, how to grow it and how to prepare it for the table – mostly from personal experience. As a result, her world rankings have rocketed to 428,000 in the world. That places her well inside the top 1% of all the world’s web sites – All 1,963,000,000 of them – that is some achievement.
Forty seven per cent of her visitors come from France, which of course, is highly regarded for the use of fresh produce in its cuisine. According to Alexa.com, Anita’s site is at 483 for the most visited web sites in Edinburgh, the capital City of Scotland. In the UK she is currently at 21,000 out of the three million registered web sites
Anita and her husband James have been in the catering business for many years. She recently retired from the mobile catering trade, and for the past few months has been concentrating on her website and developing new and exciting vegetarian recipes using home grown produce. She has an allotment where she grows most of her own fruit and vegetables.
I asked Anita about her sudden interest in the use of seasonal vegetables, with Scotland having a very cold climate compared to the rest of the UK and certainly nothing like our Spanish climate.
“Actually it isn’t new”, she said. “It’s just been taking a back seat for a while – just go back a generation to our parent’s day for instance, and people were still growing their own fruit and vegetables, and eating whatever was in season.
Then the big supermarkets took over, and before we knew it we were all eating ready meals, and not only that, we could buy strawberries in December! They tasted like cucumbers – but strawberries nevertheless.
Thankfully, we are moving away from this idea, and back to a real interest in what is seasonal and local.
The natural rhythms of the seasons mean that we can look forward to the first new shoots in Springtime, through to the joys of Summer raspberries and strawberries and new potatoes, and onto the more robust root vegetables like leeks, onions and parsnips which will need to see us through the Winter.”
And what about growing your own?
“I am completely converted to growing vegetables in raised beds and have about 60 of them spread throughout my garden. There is no comparison between shop bought produce, which could be imported and stored for weeks, and produce fresh from the garden to table with a couple of hours. Although we have great levels of light in Scotland, around midsummer it only gets dark for a couple of hours, we have much lower temperatures than the rest of Britain so I grow my most successful crops in my 25 foot long polytunnel. This keeps us supplied with fresh produce nearly all year round – no matter what the weather.”
What about soup? Fresh vegetable soup is very popular if you can get it. Does your home grown produce adapt to soup making?
“Let me start by mentioning that we used to make these easy soup recipes for a living – taking healthy homemade soup to events and festivals and have won Healthy Living Awards for our recipes. I absolutely love making soup and can think of nothing better to do on a cold rainy day – my biggest problem is with only 2 of us in the house, if I’m not cooking for the business, I can get overrun with the stuff!
This is where my daughter comes in – Roxanne, along with her partner Barry run a falconry centre, and they are happy to take any amount of homemade soup off my hands for those miserable middle of winter days when birds still need to be looked after, despite sub-zero temperatures outside!
I make a variety of easy soup recipes, and then freeze it in cups. These easy soup recipes can be made at home with no special equipment. You can get by with a simple kitchen blender, or even a sieve.
Most of our easy soup recipes start off by sweating some chopped onion in a little vegetable oil, then adding everything else together – it’s a really simple process, but the results can be amazing!
Making soup is so therapeutic. It relaxes and calms you. It was always a best seller at events. It soothes your soul, and all your worries are forgotten as you concentrate only on making those delicious vegetables into something tasty and nourishing to feed to your family or friends – or even to curl up with on your own with a crusty piece of bread and butter! Yummy!”
What about buffets, how do you incorporate your fresh produce into, say a table top buffet?
“Good buffet recipes are great to have on stand-by for impromptu parties and family gatherings. We were brought up on them – we were army kids and my dad had a lot of dealings with catering and the very precise way this was done in the “Mess”. We attended large gatherings with extensive well laid out buffets, and dad used to emulate this, catering for family weddings and other occasions – even their own silver wedding! So I was no stranger to buffet catering, but vegetarian buffet catering – that was another matter!
However, having had a catering business of my own for some time now, I have come to realize it is no big deal. It is perfectly possible to present a lovely well rounded buffet, all vegetarian, and your carnivorous guests won’t even notice. It does not have to be totally vegetarian of course, you can use whatever ingredients you prefer. But to stay with the ‘healthy eating’ style, vegetarian is the way to go. You will make a much better job of it if you carefully avoid soggy ham sandwiches and limp greasy sausage rolls!
Don’t try to imitate traditional buffet recipes – I came across some horrible spinach rolls recently – they were obviously there to feed the vegetarians in place of sausage rolls, but they were incredibly bad – puff pastry surrounding some sort of spinach and goats cheese concoction!
Instead, think fresh, healthy and wholesome. Go for the fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, nuts, beans and seeds that are part of a Mediterranean diet and are both delicious and nutritious. You can use properly baked potatoes as a starting point, then add lots of wonderful salad dishes to go along with them. Pizza is another great option – vegetarian pizzas are a joy to design, especially if you make them rectangular and divide them into squares.”
And lastly, I want to ask you about bread making. Do you make your own bread?
“Baking bread is a really relaxing way to while away a couple of hours. We have been making bread at home now for around 30 years. In the early days (the brown rice macrobiotic days), it was wholemeal with stone ground flour, and lovely though it was, it wouldn’t win any prizes for being light and fluffy. Actually it was like a proverbial brick.
Over the last few month I have been experimenting with a few new recipes, and the results have been great. I’ve made ciabatta, and for that I needed a special bread pan which James made out of an old copper water tank. I love that pan, and have used it today for a rustic country loaf in the French style I’m on a roll at the moment.
It’s not always easy to keep it up though, so it tends to come in fits and starts! There are great bursts of enthusiasm – these last for a few weeks, then something else comes along and the bread-making takes a back seat for a while!
This is when I turn to flat breads, or fall back on some old favourites that can be rustled up in just a few minutes a day. Homemade bread recipes can be played around with in loads of ways!
Once when I was having the family over, I made French style baguettes – instead of leaving them plain, I cooked some nettles to make nettle puree, some carrots for carrot puree and some tomato puree. These were put into the dough with the liquid and what I ended up with was some brilliantly coloured loaves which looked a bit like that tri-colour pasta you can buy. The great thing was though, there were no nasty additives or artificial colourings, and the bread tasted great!”
You can visit Anita at Anita’s Easy Vegetarian Recipes
LATEST NEWS- Since I wrote this article, Anita has come out of retirement and is now the new Food Services Manager at one of Scotland’s biggest tourist attractions – the Scottish Deer Park in Fife. Check her web site for the latest information from there.
Healthy Lifestyle – with Bill & Sheila
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