A Complete Menu For a Very Vegetarian Christmas.

Everyone needs a good full menu idea for a very vegetarian Christmas so we thought it would be a good idea to do this, and as anyone can say their food is good we invited a couple of avid meat eaters to sample our offerings and give their verdicts - aren't we brave! Obviously we started off with a small drink of sherry....then

For the starters we decided on melon balls or fresh fruit in orange juice.

For the soups we chose the Fresh Tomato soup or the Winter Warmer soup.

For main we chose Roast Stuffed Peppers with a fresh salad or Red Pepper and Mushroom Rogan Josh with basmati rice and Chapattis  

For the sweet we chose Old School Chocolate Pudding with Mint Custard, or shop bought Panettone. If you haven't tried Panettone please do it's very good! 

To finish we ended up with an Irish Coffee. 

You can of course choose any soup that you want and do a traditional roast dinner with the Quorn or other slices. We did try the Quorn roast which we cooked in the oven first and (this was nice) and used onion gravy to cover.

The girls Sharon and Reena were lovely, and they gave their honest verdicts, and it does sound like they were very  pleasantly surprised! 

Here is the video of it.

The Recipes - Fresh Tomato Soup with celery, carrot, onion, veg stock and cornflour. (Vegan friendly)

Well, who doesn't like fresh tomato soup? Especially in winter. The problem is though tomatoes are out of season then, so its best to make this soup in summer when they are always ripe and freshly available. If you do choose to make this soup in winter, Christmas say like we do,  always source the supermarkets' reddest and juiciest tomatoes you can find. The carrot content in this recipe replaces sugar as they provide the sweet flavour to it. If you want it more sweet shall we say, like a certain very popular supermarket brand, just add a little extra carrot than specified. But be careful!! And always serve this with a nice crusty bread roll.....

Here is the recipe

The Recipes - Roasted stuffed peppers with aubergine, coriander, tomatoes and goat's cheese.

This recipe started out as basic one from a book. I tinkered with the ingredients, lost the breadcrumbs and decided to brush the peppers with olive oil, because when they are roasted in the oven in this way the taste is amazing! The peppers look better served in a little dish at the side of whatever you are having with them. You can serve them with fresh salad, or new potatoes and veg, or roast potatoes and veg - any way you want. 

Here is the recipe

 

The recipes - Tzatziki

This is a real cooling, refreshing dish. You can even use fresh garlic instead of dried in it if you wish. Don't forget to put it in the fridge as soon as you have made it so it is properly chilled. The first time I tried out this dip was on my mum and her friend when i bought some onion bhajis. Her friend frank said he didn't like cucumber. Fast forward to the end of the meal and mum's friend picks up the bowl and said "Can I finish this off?" So I let him - even though I also had my eye on finishing it off too! This goes really well with the onion bhajis on the YouTube channel even though it is a traditional Greek dish!

Here is the recipe

The recipes - Cauliflower Cheese.

You  can't beat a good cauliflower cheese. You need to use the whitest and freshest cauliflower though! My daughter didn't want too much mustard in it so this is why we ended up using just half a teaspoon. To be honest this gives  a more subtle taste. We usually have this with mashed potatoes, steamed carrots or cabbage. You can even use little portions of it on your main Christmas dinner.

Here is the recipe

The recipes - Spinach and Edam bake

 This recipe was one that I tested out from a book. I then added more spinach, messed about with the ingredients and got a much nicer taste. If you want a runnier bake and to put them in small separate dishes, don't drain the spinach as in the video and you will end up with little creamier bakes. We sometimes have this with just a salad or you can have it with new potatoes and veg of your choice! 

Here is the recipe.

The Recipes - Lancashire Egg, Cheese and Milk Oven Supper Dish

This dish is what my father used to make for us when we were little, and it was really good, to say that it was only three ingredients. One of our viewers wrote in with this little snippet of information for us: C Lou1 day ago (edited)

Saw this in the book "The Craftman", a murder mystery by Sharon Bolton. She was raised in Pendle, Lancashire. Here is the quote, it is near the front of the book. "I’ll just give them their tea.’ Nancy carried a metal dish to the table, where four young children sat, and began spooning food onto waiting plates. It was a supper dish I’d seen before in the North-West: an egg for each child, drowned in milk and crumbly local cheese, and then baked until the whole thing set."  

Served with sliced white bread. Yours is the only real reference I can find, other recipes have beaten eggs, tomatoes, cream, onions or other things and are more like a baked omelette. Very cool to find a unique regional dish. Thank you for the video.

I like it just as it is though, without the bread - Paige

Here is the recipe

The Recipes - Butter Pie

I made this recipe because I have always liked home cooked Butter pie. For me it has to be served with sliced brown onions that have been steeped in a dish of malt vinegar, with a little salt and pepper added, and left overnight in the fridge. Then grab a good helping of  pickled red cabbage, and beetroot too, sliced or pickled. ..
The first version I made didn't have enough onion in it for me to balance out the flavours, So I tried it again with more onions and this time got it just right!
I usually get ready prepared shortcrust pastry because it is quicker, but you can make your own.
One of our viewers, a lady called  Eunice Swan informs us that, "These were Catholic pies when I was young. You had them on a Friday cos it was a no meat day. Loved them then and love them now. Delicious!"  I have to agree with her because they are very warming and filling...and very tasty too!

Here is the recipe

The Recipes - Vegetable Broth and then Hash

With this recipe my father used to make Broth a lot and this is his own recipe. He also made dumplings - so I adapted them with vegetable suet and this is the result. It's a simple dish with celery, leek, carrots, swede, savoy cabbage, fresh and dried thyme, vegetable stock cubes, a dessert spoon of cornflour and some ground black pepper. This is a great and warming one pot Winter dish both vegan and vegetarian. For an even better taste add 18-20g of the fresh thyme to this recipe along with the dried.
On day two he would make up some mashed potatoes with a little milk, butter and black pepper, and then fry up some mash with a couple of ladles of broth mix, on a low to medium heat until the liquid reduced. Then serve it as it was with either a squirt of brown sauce in it or a squirt of tomato ketchup! I am in the brown sauce camp myself as was my father but it's entirely up to you.....

Here is the recipe

The Recipes - Tomato, mixed peppers and courgette bake with Parmesan style topping

I got the idea for this off an old recipe that used red peppers and tomatoes - I tried it with mixed peppers, small courgettes, lashings of garlic butter, vine-ripened tomatoes and a Italian grated hard fat vegetarian cheese that resembled Parmesan but was much tastier! This recipe is surprisingly easy and quick to make too - even for beginners. Update - Use about half to three quarters of each pepper though not a full one for a better taste.
I like to serve this with chips. If you make a chip butty (sandwich) on white bread with butter, and then mop up the juices it's delicious!! You can serve it with new potatoes if you like though instead.

Here is the recipe

The Christmas Table and The Vegetarian Roast Christmas Dinner.

                                                                                                                                                     
The Christmas Tableware is as follows:

Tablecloth, place mats and serviettes ( that we rolled into roses and put into the wine glasses), are from Poundland
Candle and crackers are from B&M
Holly and dinner plates from Morrisons
Wine is the vegetarian variety from Marks & Spencers.
Tulip wine glasses various suppliers.
Salt and pepper pots we sourced from a Cancer Research Charity Shop.

The full Christmas meal this year would be:

 Sherry to start.

Melon balls with fresh ginger.

Choice of Mushroom soup.

Or Tomato Soup.

Or Cauliflower and Broccoli Soup

Roast potatoes, carrots, brussel sprouts, sage and onion stuffing, Bisto onion gravy (in the glass jar) and Quorn chicken style or turkey style slices.
If you are using the beef style slices don't forget the small Yorkshire puddings. Also if slices aren't your thing be sure to substitute them with a couple of good vegetarian sausages!

Then Christmas Pudding with a brandy sauce.

Small slice of Christmas Cake if anyone has the room for it!

Then Irish Coffee to finish.

Finally Have a great Christmas everyone wherever you are!

The Pub Grub Vegetarian Introduction.

Hello and welcome to The Pub Vegetarian blog.

I created the YouTube Paige Turner The Pub Grub Vegetarian channel in October of 2016 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY_wqopSKDs0fuXHuxcgddw  to introduce new vegetarians, and non-vegetarians to how tasty this type of home cooked food can be. Perhaps I should have called it The Pub Grub Vegetarian/Vegan as quite a large proportion of the meals are suitable for vegans too!

Many of the meals featured are suitable for students, and low budgets, as most of the ingredients in them occur time and time again so ideally nothing is wasted. They are low in salt and sugar too.

As my father was an excellent cook it gave me a good idea of how tasty meals could be. The right spice here and there, the right amount of black pepper - I don't use white, after being introduced to ground black pepper some time ago, by a kindly dinner lady.

Each new recipe can take a while to create, I usually end up with two to four final samples, and then have a taste test to see which is the best. With the Meat free Meat Pie my daughter Lia who was five years old then chose the best, and I did tend to agree with her!

Barring work commitments and school holidays the recipes will continue, and each time I create a new one I will feature it.

We will also be reviewing the recipes, showing how they can be adapted, and have been since, and what you can serve them with if you wish.

We are also in the process of hand imputing subtitles on all our YouTube videos for the benefit of both our viewers and readers  who are hearing impaired - and also for our global friends so that they can translate them into their own language if they wish!  This is a laborious process and does take time, so do bear with us, and we have started with the oldest and most popular videos first .

I am also producing a collection of The Pub Grub Vegetarian books featuring many of the recipes from the YouTube channel at 99p each to download. It saves me having scraps of paper with them written on lying about all over the house! Paige