A Veggie Delight

About 10 years ago I picked up a recipe booklet at the checkout stand at the grocery store. You know – those ones that are the size of a piece of paper folded in half. It was Betty Crocker’s “Easy Vegetarian: Classics Go Meatless”.

I’ve made quite a few of the recipes, and most of them have been quite good, and surprisingly creative — they’re not just meatless versions of recipes that normally have meat in them. They also don’t use exotic ingredients, so often you’ll find most of the ingredients already in your house. The recipes do tend to rely a lot on canned or frozen ingredients, but then the point is for them to be easy and relatively quick. If you want to substitute home-cooked beans for canned beans, or fresh salsa for a jar of salsa, you could certainly figure that out easily enough.

As it turns out, many of those recipes are available online at the Betty Crocker website. Here’s a link to their vegetarian dinner recipes.

I think many of the recipes would be quite appealing even for non-vegetarians, so they’re great if you’re cooking for a mixed audience. The Artichoke Spinach Lasagna has long been one of our favorites. Several of the recipes give suggestions on how you can add meat if you want to serve both – for example, adding chopped cooked chicken to the Caesar Salad Wraps, or serving the vegetarian entree as a side dish for the meat eaters, and as a main dish for the vegetarians.

Last night I tried one of the recipes that I’ve never made before – the Southwestern Pot Pie. We both declared it a big winner, and I’m sure I’ll be making this again. It’s a thick stew of sweet potatoes, garbanzo beans and corn, simmered with salsa and a touch of cinnamon, and topped with cornbread dumplings. I used a can of corn rather than the frozen corn. I also used a different corn muffin mix – if you use something other than the Betty Crocker mix, take a look at the instructions on the package for mixing, as mine only used 1/3 cup of milk instead of the 1/2 cup indicated in the recipe. I, of course, did not notice that until I realized that my dumpling mixture was much too thin. I rescued it by adding some extra flour, but it was still on the thin side and took longer to cook.