Carol at Make It, Bake It has set up a new monthly In Season Challenge to make something from an in-season ingredient.

And I have to say, what a brilliant idea! We started trying to cook more with in-season ingredients a few years ago. This was brought on by a need to cut down on our outgoings, however, we soon discovered that fresh, local, in-season produce tastes a lot better than the stuff that’s travelled hundreds of miles on a boat or a plane, artificially chilled and so on.

We don’t manage to cook entirely with local, in-season produce, but we definitely try to use it as much as possible. And it tends to fit with the weather, too. Root vegetables feel better in the autumn and the winter; salads feel better in the spring and summer.

The ingredient for this month is Savoy Cabbage, which is a great vegetable. It has a lovely colour, texture and of course taste. It’s great in soups and stews, but can also be used to wrap other food, as a side dish in itself, as vegetable lasagne and probably a whole bunch of other things, too. Head over to Make It, Bake It on 6 February to read others’ Savoy Cabbage posts.

Three Cabbage and Chick Pea Soup

Warming, tasty soup, which can be served puréed or ‘au naturel’. You can vary the cabbage types as you like, but keep the Savoy as the dominant one.

Ingredients

• 2 onions
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• ½ Savoy cabbage
• ¼ Sweetheart cabbage
• ¼ red cabbage
• 1½ litres vegetable stock (I use 4 Kallo stock cubes, rather than recommended 3)
• 1 (400g) tin chick peas
• 2 tsp ground coriander (or handful fresh coriander for a different flavour)
• 2 tsp paprika

Method

1. Peel and chop the onions into rough 1-cm cubes.
2. Heat the onion in the olive oil until translucent.
3. Meanwhile, chop all the cabbage into 1–2-cm chunks.
4. Add the cabbage and stir.
5. Cook on a low heat for 10 minutes.
6. Add the stock and simmer for half an hour.
7. Add the chick peas, coriander and paprika and simmer for a further 30 minutes.
8. (Optional) Purée the soup.

Serving

Serve with buttery chunks of crusty granary bread. Small bowls as a starter, big bowls as a substantial and nutritious main course.

The Vegetarian Christmas Dinner post has been getting a huge number of views, particularly from people searching for ‘Vegetarian Christmas Dinner’. One reader, Catherine, requested this recipe from the post, so here it is. I’m happy to post other recipes, if anyone wants them, though I don’t have photos for any of the others!

Vegetarian Christmas Pie

Serves 6–8

This makes an attractive centrepiece, especially when cut into. You can adapt it quite easily for different tastes and diets, too.

Ingredients

• 8 eggs·        
• 2 large carrots·        
• 1 tbsp honey·        
• 2 tsp mustard·        
• 2 tbsp water·        
• 500g spinach·        
• 75g ricotta·        
• Salt·        
• Pepper·        
• Nutmeg (optional)·        
• 8 red peppers·        
• 50g butter·        
• 250g mushrooms·        
• 5 gloves garlic·        
• 50g butter·        
• sweetcorn·        
• puff pastry (thawed)·        
• 1 egg yolk for brushing (or milk)

Method

1. Hard boil the eggs and allow to cool.
2. Peel the carrots, then slice them lengthwise into about 0.5cm thick slices.
3. Heat them in a pan with the honey mustard and water on a low heat for 10–15 minutes. Set aside.
4. Wash the spinach then wilt it in a covered pan.
5. Mix the spinach in and season with some salt and pepper and ground nutmeg (if desired).
6. Deseed the peppers and cut into thirds (roughly).
7. Place skin up on a baking tray and put under a high grill for about 10 minutes.
8. Allow to cool slightly, then peel the skin off.
9. Melt the butter in a saucepan or frying pan and then heat the peppers for about 5 minutes.
10. Chop the mushrooms into slices (about 1cm wide).
11. Melt the butter in a frying pan.
12. Finely chop (or mince) the garlic and add it to the pan.
13. Add the mushrooms and cook on a low to medium heat until they are softened. Set aside.
14. Make sure all the vegetables elements and eggs have cooled.
15. Roll out the puff pastry – I normally roll out two pieces to make two large sheets that are a bit bigger than my baking sheet.
16. Grease the baking sheet and place one puff pastry piece on the baking sheet.
17. Layer on the vegetables, leaving 2–3 inches of pastry around the edge. You can layer them in any order you want, really, though its best to put the egg layers in the middle not at the edges.
18. Place the other puff pastry sheet on top then join the edges together, fold them over and crimp them (kind of folding at an angle).
19. When you’re ready to put it in the oven, brush with egg yolk (or milk).
20. Bake in the oven (on a medium to high heat) for around 40 minutes or until the pastry is brown (not burnt!). You can cook the vegetables at the same time.

Adaptations

To make it vegan, leave out the ricotta and egg and brush with soya milk instead of egg or milk. You can change the vegetable layers considerably – go for bright colours for the best effect, but you can also go for strongly contrasting flavours or complementary ones. You could make it into a particularly Christmassy pie, by putting Brussels sprouts and parsnips layers in. You can pretty much change it entirely to your liking – or have a layer to suit all your different tastes – a cheesy pasta layer for the children, a nutty mushroom layer for Granny… and so on…

Accompaniments

Well, it’s Christmas dinner so you’ll be wanting all the trimmings, won’t you? Roast potatoes, roast parsnips, Brussels sprouts, carrots and some lovely gravy (I use 2 tbsp marmite, 1 tbsp tomato puree and one Kallo stock cube with 1 litre boiling water, then thicken up a bit with 2 tsp cornflour and 2 tbsp cold water mixed into the stock). And don’t forget the Christmas crackers! It’s also delicious cold on Boxing Day with a light salad.

Drinking suggestions

Red wine or dark ale. Orange juice and sparkling water. Or the Co-op’s sparkling raspberry juice is also very nice with it.

If you need to move furniture around, then you should wait until all possible children are home and in the room. In fact, it would probably be advisable to arrange a couple of playdates, so that you really have maximum numbers of helpers. This works particularly well when moving the furniture will expose toys, mementos and dead spiders who have not been seen since, well, probably last Christmas. That way, when you’re cleaning out the space for the tree, you can have small children running between your legs and tripping over bits of Lego. It’s also particularly helpful if you try to move as much furniture as you can all by yourself. You never know, this might help you find a way to A&E in the run-up to Christmas.

If the children somehow manage to escape the lure of sparkly tinsel and baubles for the lure of the television, giving you far too much time to actualy clear the space and put the tree up, do make certain that you call them back before you put the lights up. Especially if you are likely to have any dead bulbs that need replacing. Because impatient children are really essential to the whole process.

If you’ve bought new decorations, do make sure they’re all still in their box, preferably secured to each other or the box by means of impenetrable wires. It’s a strong bonus if you have bought decorations that include some shaped like teeny tiny presents, because then you can have the fun of watching one child open one out of curiosity, while the rest copy the leader. You can then be sure to throw in that most Christmassy of Christmas traditions, threatening to send a small child to bed for opening a present too early – and you don’t even have to damage a real present in the process. Perfect.

Any old decorations should, of course, be as tangled up as possible, requiring hedge trimmers and Vaseline to extricate them and work out which two can actually be reused this year. By this point, you will probably have lost your child helpers and may well be left to finish clearing up the various messes all by yourself. If so, large doses of alcohol should be administered in order to mimic the effects of small children.

One of the first questions people ask me when they find out I’m vegetarian is ‘But what do you eat for Christmas dinner?’ And the answer to that is along the lines of ‘Anything I want to’. To be honest, I think being vegetarian actually opens you up to more adventurous meals – the everyday ones as well as the special ones. It’s quite easy to come up with seven varieties of meat (or maybe fish) and two veg to get you through a week, whereas it’s less so to do the same without the meat (and fish – let’s get something straight right away: if you eat fish, you are not vegetarian). These days, you can probably manage it with a variety of Quorn products or vegetable burgers, but for the most part, if you’re vegetarian you’re still more likely to be preparing and cooking your own food (yes, I know there are plenty of exceptions).

It’s easy, too, to fall into a tradition of what to eat for Christmas dinner – and, actually, that’s not exclusive to meat eaters. So many people seem to have roast turkey (and all the trimmings) or roast chicken (and all the trimmings), with the odd leg of pork thrown in. We always used to have a mushroom and nut wellington. My aunt’s family usually have a sweetcorn, potato and cheese pie. And we all still have these with all the trimmings. Christmas dinner really isn’t the same without roast potatoes, is it?

I try to do something different each year – both for the big meal at our house every other year (where I’m cooking for my folks who are vegetarian) and when I’m up in Scotland with Chris’s family, where I’m the only vegetarian (though it’s always important to make extra, because everyone wants a taste of whatever I do) – oh, and we usually have a second Christmas on New Year for my folks on the years we’re in Scotland. But I do really only ring the changes with the centrepiece. I still do (or share) roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, carrots and parsnips. Sometimes I have a traditional (but veggie) gravy and sometimes a different sauce, such as cream of red pepper sauce, or cream of asparagus.

Here are some of the centrepieces I’ve made over the years. The majority of them are wellingtons of some kind (that is, something rolled up in puff pastry), though there is an occasional meander of this path.

Mediterranean Wellington

Halloumi surrounded by couscous and wrapped in roasted Mediterranean vegetables (courgette, aubergine, pepper), all wrapped in puff pastry – looks beautiful when sliced (which is one of the main things to look for in a vegetarian centrepiece, in my opinion). (Make it vegan by leaving the haloumi out – you could replace it with some vegan cheese, but I don’t think that would be necessary. Or some tofu might work nicely.)

Nutty mushroom and sausage wellington (vegan)

This one is closer to the one we had when I was little. Large Sosmix (vegetarian sausage mix that you can get from most healthfood shops and a lot of supermarkets) sausage in the middle, either with stuffing inside or wrapping it, wrapped in fried garlic mushrooms and then coated in crushed nuts. Again, the whole thing is wrapped in puff pastry.

Egg and vegetable wellington

This is what I did last year for Christmas Number Two. Different vegetables cooked in different ways and spread on puff pastry in separate layers, include a couple of layers of egg. Vegetable layers can include honey-roasted carrots, spinach and ricotta (or goats cheese), garlic mushroom, olive oil and olives with courgette, sweet peppers and butter… or anything you or your family particularly likes. Bright coloured vegetables make this one look particularly spectacular. (Leave out the egg and swap the butter for marge or olive oil, and you have a vegan version.)

Here’s a recipe for a version of this.

Roulades of courgette and goats cheese and sweet potato and red pepper

Make roulades with pureed vegetables and egg white spread out in a Swiss roll tin and baked for about 20 minutes on a low heat. When they’ve cooled roll them up with a filling – goats cheese and rocket, red pepper and cream cheese, avocado and chilli… whatever you fancy and will go well with the matching roulade. Once prepared I then sprinkle with some parmesan and sesame seeds and reheat for maybe 15-20 minutes. You then serve a thick slice of each to everyone. They look pretty stunning.

Puff pastry pasta cake

Make a cheese pasta – with macaroni or smaller pasta. Roast some vegetables – could be seasonal ones, such as carrot, swede, butternut squash, etc. or Mediterranean, such as courgettes, peppers and aubergine. Put a large circle of puff pastry on a baking tray. Put a layer of the pasta at the bottom in a circle (leave a really good amount around the edges – maybe 10 centimetres), then add the vegetables in layers. Top with the pasta, and then try to spread the pasta around the edges too, so that the vegetables are completely surrounded. Put a smaller circle of puff pastry on the top and then fold up the edges and seal round the edges. Bake for around 35-40 minutes on a medium heat. Serve like slices of cake. (You can do the same but wrap it in roasted aubergine slices, too, rather than puff pastry.)

I’d serve all these with the usual Christmas Day trimmings – roast potatoes and parsnips, with carrots and Brussels sprouts. I’d serve the sausage and egg wellingtons with a traditional gravy (I make mine with a stock of marmite, Kallo veg cubes and a bit of tomato puree and then thicken it with cornflour and water mix). I’d serve the Mediterranean wellington and the roulades with a cream and red pepper (pureed) sauce, and the pasta cake with a tomato and courgette (pureed) sauce.

I should really try to ring the changes a bit with dessert too, though. I’ve served up Delia’s chocolate roulade for the past few years (with a Chantilly and preserve filling, rather than her chocolate mousse). I did make a very nice one many years back, which was individual panetone bread and butter cheesecakes – panetone and butter base, topped with mascarpone and sugar cream and finished off with a berry puree of raspberries and strawberries.

I hope this is of some use to anyone trying to come up with something to cook for a visiting vegetarian, for any vegetarians looking for something new to cook – or maybe even to some meat-eaters who would like an extra centrepiece to accompany the goose or fatted calf.

If you are cooking for vegetarians, take note that a lot of us will not eat roast potatoes and vegetables cooked in the same oven as the turkey (or whatever you’re having). Chris’s parents have a double oven, so when I’m coming to stay the veg gets cooked in the little oven, but before they had their new kitchen I got sauteed potatoes instead (par-boiled then deep fried). You could also roast some in advance and then just give them a quick zap in the microwave.

Whatever you do, do not serve a vegetarian roast potatoes cooked in goose fat – they might be the most delicious thing ever (so I’ve heard, anyway), but they are most certainly not vegetarian. (And while we’re on the tips for cooking for vegetarians, don’t ever use chicken or other meat or fish stock – there are plenty of vegetable stock cubes available, these days (Oxo vegetable stock cubes aren’t very nice, but Kallo are fantastic – just my opinion). A lot of vegetarians also want to have vegetarian cheese (made with vegetable or synthetic rennet, rather than the cow-derived stuff), watch out for jelly which often contains gelatine (try agar agar flakes or there are quite a lot of veggie jelly mixes available these days) and check the ingredients on sauces, sweets and even cakes and any ready meals. If you see the words ‘suitable for vegetarians’ you should be OK, especially on pre-packaged food.

If you’re feeding a vegan, please be extra careful. Honey is not vegan. Eggs and dairy are not vegan. You should also be very careful about cooking utensils and serving dishes (though you should be if you’re feeding vegetarians, too!).

If you’re vegetarian or regularly feed vegetarians for Christmas, I’d love to hear what you have made or are making this year.

And I hope you have a lovely Christmas Meal, whether it’s vegetarian or not.

EDITED TO ADD: This post is getting a lot of visits from people searching for something to cook for vegetarians and vegans for Christmas. I’ve added some notes on a couple of the ideas for how to make them vegan. If you want me to do a separate post of any of the recipes in full, leave a comment, and I’ll try to do so before Monday 19 December, so you have time to plan your shopping.

I love traditional tortilla, but it is jam-packed full of potatoes and so really quite high GI. So, I thought I’d experiment and see if I could come up with a low GI version. This worked really well (though not as popular with the children as the traditional one).

Ideally, you’ll need a (non-stick) sauté pan (deep frying pan with a lid), but I’ve also used two frying pans of the same size, with one used as a lid with no problems.

Ingredients

2 red onions
1 large courgette
2 tbsp good extra virgin olive oil
2 handfuls of black (pitted) olives
3 handfuls frozen peas
1 block feta cheese (250–300g)
8 eggs
Salt and pepper

Method

Chop the onions into chunks (about 2 cm).

Slice the courgette lengthwise into quarters and then cut into chunks about 1 cm wide.

Put the oil in the sauté pan and heat it up to medium.

Fry the onions and courgettes for 5 minutes.

Chop the feta into cubes (about 2.5 cm).

Chop the olives in half.

Add the frozen peas and continue frying for another 5 minutes (or until you’ve finished mixing the eggs).

Break the eggs into a large mixing bowl.

Add the salt and pepper.

Use a fork to break the yolks up and mix the yolks and whites together, but do so very slowly and gently. Do not whisk like you would an ordinary omelette. The idea is to mix it together without getting any air bubbles into the mixture.

Put the fried vegetables and feta cubes into the egg mixture and mix thoroughly.

Put the whole mixture back in the pan, put the lid on and place on a very, very low heat (if you have a gas cooker with different-sized rings, put it on the smallest ring at the smallest setting). Cook for 30 minutes.

Get a large plate, remove the sauté pan lid, place the plate over the top, take the pan over to the sink and flip it over while over the sink (sometimes some liquid will escape, so it’s safest to do it over the sink). Once the omelette is on the plate, slide it gently back into the pan to cook the other side.

Put back on the very low heat and cook for 15 minutes.

Flip out onto a large plate again, as you did in Step 13.

Adaptations

You could try different vegetable and cheese combinations – asparagus and pecorino go very nicely (I would use a white onion, rather than red onion); sundried tomato, rocket and goats cheese would also work well; you could also try a winter root-vegetable omelette with sweet potatoes, swedes and carrots, with strong cheddar.

Accompaniments

Perfect with a Greek salad or just a nice simple green salad. It’s also lovely with a tomato and bean salad (which would give a great low GI boost, too).

Drinking suggestions

Red or white wine, or grape juice with fizzy water.

Ignore: EUZ7G9YW7UWX

Chris and I are trying to lose weight and get healthier and fitter and, in terms of diet, we’ve found aiming for a low- to medium-GI diet works well for us. We had both lapsed considerably over the summer and are trying to get back on track – both in terms of our diet and exercise. I’ve started running, doing sit-ups and have been sent a Zumba DVD to try out, which I started yesterday (and today everything aches). Chris is jogging with the dog, doing sit-ups, doing a weight-lifting routine and going on long walks.

Chris’s version of the low-GI diet is high in protein and very low in carbohydrates and he has a lot of choice because he can have various meats, fish and seafood. It’s a bit difficult to do high protein when you’re vegetarian, though, especially if you want to keep the high-fat dairy foods to a minimum. Eggs are great, but you can have too many of them. So I am using Rose Elliot’s Low-GI vegetarian Vegetarian Cookbook as a basis, which doesn’t cut out carbohydrates entirely. You can keep the good ones (the slow-release energy ones, essentially) such as oats, wholemeal bread, al dente pasta, buckwheat and quinoa (though bread and pasta should be kept to lower quantities when trying to lose weight).

Beans and pulses are fantastic, because they combine slow-release carbohydrates and protein really well. Having at least one bean- or pulse-based meal a day makes a huge difference to me, reducing my desire for snacks between meals and they also seem to help the weight drop off. I’ve been back on track for only about a week and have already dropped 7lb (still 5lbs to go before I’m back to where I was before the summer slump, though).

The other big thing we’re doing is to have lots of salads. We like to have two or three salads on the go and normally make enough to last for at least two meals, sometimes three (any more and the freshness is completely gone).

Lemon juice and olive oil can reduce the GI of a meal, so if you have your salad dressed with this (vinegar works too), then you can have a bit of medium- or high-GI foods if you want (potatoes are the ones that I want the most).

For snacking, the best savoury thing is salted popcorn. Popcorn seems to have a miraculous weight-loss effect, though I can’t find any documentation to scientifically prove this. Oatcakes are good too, especially spread with lashings of hummus (pulses, olive oil and lemon juice!) The best sweet snacks are fruit, but I’m not very good at just eating a piece of fruit, so I like to have a fruit salad in the fridge to dip into. Chris likes a sliced apple with some Greek yoghurt – or the yoghurt with some breakfast topping mix. Special K is good too and I like to mix mine with some banana and raisins (though they’re not technically low GI). A couple of chunks of dark chocolate are good, too!

After a couple of weeks (I’m not quite there yet) you stop craving high GI stuff (not completely, of course!) and you also want less snacks in between meals. And I find the need to finish the girls’ meals dissipates, too – especially if they’ve got something with a high GI.

I’m not sure what makes us slide away from the low GI diet, though, as we did over the summer, because it honestly feels great when  we’re sticking to it – as long as you keep to predominantly low GI meals, you can have the odd baked potato, chips or ice cream. (One great and odd thing is that a low GI meal plays forward – a beany meal with lots of salad at lunchtime means you can cope with a high GI meal at dinnertime, for example.) But I think there’s still that underlying idea that it’s a diet rather than a new healthier way of eating, so you need to reward yourself by stuffing yourself full of the things you’ve denied  yourself.

I’m hoping not to slip down that route again.

Have you tried Low GI? What’s your preferred weight loss system? What exercises do you do?

Oh look at me, I’m Sudocrem’s Mummy Blogger of the Month. There’s a little interview with me there (I’d completely forgotten I answered these questions, so it was quite fun re-reading it).

We love Sudocrem and have been using it for nappy rash with both our girls since birth. Do you use Sudocrem or something else? It seems to me that it’s pretty ubiquitous and I rarely hear of any other nappy rash solution.

Remember how I have this aversion to cleaning and somehow got talked into showing the unsavoury state of our fridge? Normal people probably would have got out the Mr Muscle – or the vinegar and baking soda – and given the whole thing a really good clean. Not me. I bought a whole new fridge-freezer instead*.

We have bought a couple of major appliances from Appliances Online before – our dishwasher and washing machine – and have always been very happy with their choice, value and service, so we went looking there again this time (well, actually, Chris looked at Argos and Curry’s and a few other places first, before I reminded him that Appliances Online is the place to go).

Downsizing

I spent a bit of time drooling over the rather lovely looking Hotpoint Quadro, but then we talked about it and came to the realisation that we actually didn’t need an all-singing, all-dancing, stupidly huge fridge-freezer (the old one was an American-style fridge-freezer with an ice maker and chilled water – neither of which had worked for a fair while – and huge amounts of space), because we really didn’t make use of most of the features. When we first bought it, we used to fill it up (with hideously extravagant ready meals and exotic fruit and veg from Waitrose) and then end up throwing lots of food away because it would go off before we’d managed to finish it. These days, we buy most of our food daily or every other day and really the only times the fridge would get full use were Christmas and parties. And, honestly, it’s a bit ridiculous to buy a huge fridge (and spend a couple of hundred more pounds on doing so) for one or two occasions each year. My sister lives round the corner and we can invade her fridge at Christmas if necessary. And keep stuff in the basement or outside because it’s usually cold at Christmas, anyway. We also thought it might be nice to be able to open the fridge without having to perform crazy contortions – our kitchen is teeny and definitely not the sort of room suited to a huge American fridge. So, we settled for the plainer, but functional and efficient Indesit BAAN12S. It’s a downsize, but it’s actually much more suited to our current lifestyle.

The new fridge-freezer

Look – no yucky stain! (Yet.) the last photo is of the girls’ favourite freezer drawer. Talking of the freezer drawers, I actually find it much easier to fit things in and access things in this freezer than the old one, which was very narrow. Oh, yes, and it does make ice. Kind of. See those bumpy bits in the freezer? You put water in them and they make ice cubes – you just bang the holder on the side and the ice comes out. I think it’s quite funky, but obviously it’s not quite the same as an automatic ice-maker that’s plumbed into your water supply. We had no problem fitting everything from our fortnightly Sainsbury’s shop in the fridge and freezer and still had room to keep three bowls of leftover salad that evening.

Cheeky request

Anyway, as I said, we were going to use Appliances Online anyway, because we’d had good service from them before and they have a really wide choice of appliances and then I remembered that I was following Appliances Online on Twitter and so I sent a very cheeky tweet asking if they fancied giving a parenting blogger with a PR of 3 a discount. And, lo and behold the lovely David Ingram said yes and gave us a nice refund. Which is great, because it’s kind of like free money. We were going to buy it anyway (actually we had bought it already) and I was probably going to write this post, too (I couldn’t resist the opportunity to show my way of getting a clean fridge), though perhaps not with quite so many direct links!

Delivery service and special mention to Terry

The delivery service is very good. While you’re just given a day of delivery when you order, you get an automated call and text message the night before letting you know the four-hour period when the delivery will occur and then we also got a personal call from the driver giving even more detail about when they’d be there. We had booked and paid for them to take away our old machine but, unfortunately, our old machine was a lot bigger than the new one, so they didn’t actually have room on the van. But the driver booked it in to be collected the next day. There was a bit of a mix-up then, as it had been booked in as a washing machine to be collected somehow and, again, they didn’t have room on the van. But the driver, Terry, arranged for it to be collected the next day. And, then, he went above and beyond the call of duty and checked the next morning whether it had been booked in as an American fridge and when he saw that it hadn’t been booked in correctly again, he arranged to take out a different van and come and pick it up himself go make sure it got collected. Of course, I can’t promise you’ll get Terry (and, if you’re recycling something that’s not like-for-like you should be sure to double-check that will be OK), but all the delivery drivers we’ve had from Appliances Online have been very helpful and friendly.

So, if you’re looking for a new fridge-freezer, I’d definitely recommend looking at Appliances Online.

* Yes, OK. That’s a lie. The old one broke and I’m (fairly) certain it had nothing to do with the yucky stain at the bottom. Fairly certain. We spent over a week without a fridge. Just when the weather got hot. We had milk bottles sitting in the little sink and we bought a teeny little fridge, designed to fit six cans of coke. It was not fun.

It’s National Vegetarian Week this week and I’m guest-posting over at Plus 2.4, so please go and read about how we deal with having a family with one vegetarian, one omnivore and two haven’t-yet-decided children. There are some handy tips about adapting recipes to cater for the different tastes and preferences. And while you’re there read the rest of her Vegetarian Week posts and recipes. There are some yummy sounding recipes up there already and some food for thought too (sorry, hideously obvious play on words there).

In the meantime, here’s my recipe for Vegetarian Lasagne – plenty of dedicated meat-eaters prefer this to a mince lasagne, though I do have to admit that Rosemary’s still not a big fan, which is a shame as it’s one of my favourite dishes.

Vegetarian lasagne

Preparation time: 45 minutes
Cooking time: 40 minutes
Serves: 6-10, depending on how hungry everyone is

Ingredients

For the tomato and vegetable sauce

Olive oil
3 cloves garlic
1 medium onion
2 medium carrots
2 medium peppers (I prefer red and yellow)
1 large courgette
half tube of tomato purée
1 tin of chopped tomatoes (or tin of plum tomatoes, chopped)
herbs to season (I usually use basil, oregano and tarragon)

For the cheese sauce

100g butter
4 tablespoons plain white flour
1 teaspoon mustard powder
1 teaspoon vegetable bouillon powder
250g extra mature cheddar, grated (set aside two handfuls for topping)
milk (probably around .75 litre)

For the topping

2 slices of stale wholemeal bread
a couple of handfuls of the grated cheese from the cheese sauce

Sheets of lasagne

Method

Finely chop the garlic and finely dice the onion and sauté lightly in the olive oil.
Finely dice the carrots and add, stirring.
Finely dice the peppers, stirring.
Finely dice the courgette stirring.

Note: Even if you finely dice it all in advance, do it in that order and leave some time between each ingredient – it doesn’t taste the same if you just shove it all in together.

Allow the vegetables to cook for a few minutes before adding the tomato purée, tomatoes and herbs. Simmer for 20 minutes or so, adding a little water if it gets a bit too dry.

Meanwhile, make the cheese sauce.

Melt the butter in a largish saucepan (non-stick, ideally) on a high heat.
Mix together the flour, mustard powder and bouillon powder.
When the butter is completely melted, add the flour mixture and stir until you have a roue (thick paste).
Gradually pour in some milk, stirring continuously. The sauce will thicken considerably. Keep adding milk and stirring, until the sauce starts thinning out to the consistency you want (thicker than pancake batter, thinner than cake batter).
Take the pan of the heat. Add the grated cheese and stir until it’s melted in.

Note: It’s essential to take the pan off the heat when you add the cheese, otherwise you lose a lot of the flavour.

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

Layer the sauces and lasagne in a lasagne dish – tomato sauce, lasagne, cheese sauce, lasagne, tomato sauce, lasagne, cheese sauce (or just first three, if your dish isn’t deep enough to do two of each layer).

Mix the breadcrumbs and grated cheese together and sprinkle over the top, covering the cheese sauce.

Cook in the oven for 40 minutes.

Accompaniments

Serve with a salad and garlic bread or roast new potatoes and red wine.

Adaptations

We sometimes make two lasagnes – one vegetarian and one meat. We share the cheese sauce and sometimes make a separate tomato sauce which is split in two and to which we add mince or vegetables. If we do it this way, I usually roast the vegetables for 15 minutes, rather than cooking them as above.

You can vary the vegetable content, according to taste and nutritional requirements – e.g. you could add mushrooms, lentils or beans. A layer of fresh spinach (usually requires two whole bags!), blanched for 2-3 minutes, is very nice.

There was a report or study or something a while back (yes, I know, I should really go and look it up, but I have to go and do some work and it would take me ages to find it and then the momentum would be gone, so perhaps one of you would like to be my research assistant and go and find it) that said that non-parents are consistently happier than parents. A lot of parents were disbelieving of this – who, having had children, would give up the joy they bring? Others nodded their heads, thinking back to their pre-children days and remembering how much easier and less stressful everything was. And still others marvelled at the media’s (and bloggers’) quickness to jump on some study or other to write a story.

The thing is, though, what they were talking about was being consistently happy (none of this is actually based on the research, by the way, it’s just me blathering on, so do take it with a pinch of salt). Being asked on any random day, at any random time, how happy they were and they’d consistently say they were happy. Parents on the other hand would be caught saying they were furious, stressed, sad, exhausted, blank, murderous… but also fantastic, on top of the world, content, happy…

Because a parent’s life can go from the deepest depths of despair to the highest heights of elation many, many times. In the same day. If you average out the happiness quotient, perhaps it would be a bit lower than the non-parents’ happiness quotient, but they just potter on being consistently content. Sure, they don’t have to deal with the despair and the fury, but they also don’t get to experience the wonder, amazement and sheer, absolute bliss that comes with children.

Today, I have had one of those days. It started with Rosemary being woken a bit too early by Eleanor (who was standing on the windowsill trying to get up to Rosemary’s top bunk, shouting ‘Ro Ro! Ro Ro! Ro Ro!’) and on my refusing to stay upstairs with her (because I had to let the dog out, make tea, feed Eleanor… not because I was being mean, honest) screaming, kicking and coming very close to throwing up. In essence she was having a meltdown not at all dissimilar to those Eleanor had been having in the middle of the night lately. She couldn’t be calmed down at all and trying to talk to her or cuddle her or do anything at all to help just made it worse. After a while, her breathing changed and she picked something funny to talk about and then she was fine. For the rest of the day (well, pretty much).

We then had a bit of nice playing and boiled eggs and soldiers for breakfast, before heading upstairs for the morning shower (which these days I get to share with Rosemary and Eleanor). This went pretty well and everyone’s hair got washed and rinsed with minimal tears. Dressing time came and it was achieved with only one change of mind from Rosemary (three or four are very more common) and only having to read four books and spend about ten minutes giving Eleanor ‘dot dot’.

Then, suddenly (it’s always sudden) I realised we were running late and had to get out of the door pretty damn quick, so I ran round gathering things together, being grateful that it wasn’t a school day and so I didn’t have to worry about snacks or book bags. At this point Rosemary decided she wanted to wear her (shiny new) school shoes, but she couldn’t find them. She got all the shoes out of the shoe box and left them in the middle of the floor. She refused to wear her ordinary (not so new, but still pretty shiny) purple shoes. She refused to look upstairs. I put all the shoes back. She looked in the living room but couldn’t find them. Until I went in too and spotted them on the sofa. We came back through to find that Eleanor had now pulled all the shoes out and left them in the middle of the room. I put them back again.

There then followed an hour-long walk to the new ballet venue. Through pouring rain. Many Quavers were fed to both children, as well as some other bits and pieces from the baker. We got there just on time, after the last 10-15 minutes being filled with ‘Are we going to be there soon? Is that it? Are we there yet?’ Ballet went fine and Eleanor had fun in the waiting room as usual. I even managed to change a poopy nappy in an ordinary toilet (i.e. no changing facilities) without covering myself in poo (enough to make me jump with joy these days). Then we had a pleasant walk into town with friends, and the added benefit of being shown a quicker route which should cut off at least 10, probably 15 minues, from our journey time.

We bought some nice things from the bakers – pasties, cream cakes and flapjack and ate them as we wandered home through the market (where I wished we hadn’t just bought pasties, because there much tastier looking ones there) and the churchyard (where Rosemary stopped to say hello to a friendly dog and two separate women offered to help me down the steps with the buggy. Eleanor was getting grizzlier and grizzlier, refusing most food bribes (even Quavers!) and finally climbed out of her buggy outside the library and would not get back in. At all. So I had to carry her and the shopping home while pushing the buggy and trying to keep Rosemary in sight and safe.

The afternoon was then pretty pleasant, with Chris putting Eleanor to sleep, Rosemary watching some TV and me cleaning up the kitchen a bit, followed by a lovely walk to the shop with Eleanor (she walked most of the way, and helped pick the shopping and also bought a treat for herself and Rosemary), where I marvelled out how easy one child can be to look after. The girls played together while I chopped salad and made cheesy pasta, coming through now and then to steal some cheese.

Dinner went well and Eleanor didn’t attempt to climb out of her highchair until she was properly finished. Rosemary only had a very minor meltdown at being refused ice cream and a few vitamins were ingested by them both (though Rosemary’s were in the form of some tomatoes she’d nicked while I was cooking rather than either the salad or the fruit salad that was on offer). 

Bath and bedtime went like clockwork, with Eleanor going to sleep perfectly for Chris and Rosemary and I reading about spiders (ewwwwwwww! and arrrrrrggggggh!!!!) and then a couple of story books, followed by a chapter of (? Can’t remember) with Chris.

And I came down to tidy the living room. You can tell it was a busy day, and one where the girls were here for most of it:

Even Wesley thought it had been tiring, and so he nabbed the cosy book corner while there was nowhere else to lie down:

Fortunately, it didn’t take long to set it straight (now that it’s all nicely organised):

And Wesley has is place on the sofa back:

This is a day in the life of a parent (well, this one, anyway) – mostly bobbing along, getting stuff done and keeping the children safe, healthy and stimulated, with the odd awfulness and screaming and stomping thrown in (and the occasional tantrum from one of the children, too) and now and then a moment of perfect, soaring happiness and love for the children.

What do you think? Are you consistently happier with children than you were before? Is your mood since becoming a parent a huge rollercoaster? Was our day something like your typical (weekend) day or did it sound like something from outer space?