©Ashy Macbean 2002.
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New additions to Ashy's On-line Vegetarian Cookbook 2002
India diary 14 December 2002
- 16 February 2003
1 December 2002
14 November 2002
3 November 2002
23 October 2002
26 September 2002
15 September 2002
9 September 2002
26 August 2002
18 August 2002
5 August 2002
28 July 2002
6 July 2002
I was reminded of a Tommy Cooper joke this week. A guy visits the doctor and the doctor asks what's wrong. The guy lifts his arm and says, 'It hurts when I do this.' 'Don't do it then.' replies the doctor.
A friend complained that many of my recipes contain onions and she doesn't like onions. Leave them out then, I told her. I advised her not to try onion soup, but all the other recipes should work without onions. I've said this in many places on the site, but it's probably worth repeating - you can take a flexible approach to the recipes. They're designed to take a beating. Nothing will go drastically wrong.
Talking of jokes, I've done a few more cartoons, which you'll find below. They're no better than the previous ones but I enjoy doing them. I do think the goldfish one is rather good, but then I drew it.
Over the past couple of weeks, I've been working on recipes using soya products - tofu, soya protein and soya milk - and you can see some of the results below. I've said some horrible things about soya products in other recipes, but I'm actually getting to like them. Maybe I'm just learning to cook them better. I still have reservations. I feel that soya is sometimes touted as the miracle ingredient to replace meat and, for me, that's not what vegetarianism is about. If enough people believe it (enough to create a potentially lucrative market niche, that is) then the same kind of companies which make animal burgers and sausages from any old rubbish will start doing the same with veggie things. A lot of the soya products already available are over processed and contain all sorts of dodgy additives and the GM crew have already targeted soya beans. But enough of the doom and gloom. It's only fair to note also that people in the Far East have been eating tofu and thriving on it for squillions of years, so I intend to keep an open mind on the subject. Check out the recipes and see for yourself. If you're an old hand at the soya-cooking game, write to me and share some of your knowledge.
This will be the last update on this page until I come back from India in February.
I will continue to add recipes and whatever else comes into my head, but I'll
be doing it in a more basic form as I won't have access to my web building/editing
programme (I use 'Dreamweaver'). I'll also be working on-line and paying internet
cafe rates for it so it makes sense to try to do it as fast as possible. Just
before I leave (on the 14th of December), I'll make an 'India' link from the
top of this page and from the front page too. It will take you to a page like
this, where I'll keep a diary and put links to any new stuff. I'll sort everything
out - re-format it and link it up to the other pages - when I come back.
New recipes
Soya chunks
with red peppers and pine nuts
Tofu
cabbage cutlets with honey soy sauce
Cabbage and pine nut bake
Kidney beans and potatoes
Onion soup
New cartoons
Goldfish
Worms
A birding joke
What's new today? Well, you'll probably have seen the mug shot on the front page on the way in. As soon as I get a better photo, I'll change it but at least now people can see who they're dealing with. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. Most of my editing time has been taken up putting photos on the site. I've still got a lot to learn about web-site design, but everytime I do something new, I learn something new. It's a brutal process, though. It's taken me ages to get the photo pages together and that one wee crappy photo on the front page gave me all sorts of headaches. I suspect my problems aren't over yet. When all this is uploaded and I see what it really looks like, I'll probably have to make some more changes.
With all the hassle mucking about with photos, I've only managed to upload a few recipes. I've got a few more already typed on the computer so I'll get them up tomorrow or the next day. I'm going to bed now. Good night.
New recipes
Potato scones
Potato jeera soup
Creamy
mashed potatoes
It didn't take so long this time to get an update together. I was talking about putting some photos up a while back and Holly from Palm Springs, California wrote and asked when I was going to get round to putting a photo of myself on the front page. I suppose it is about time. Some photos here and there would brighten up the site. I'm working most of next week but I should have time to take a selection of photos to get scanned at last and after that I'll get down to putting them on pages.
Our local bazaar is full of persimmons or sharon fruit at the moment - orange things, a bit like tomatoes. Strange fruit indeed. I've never figured out what to do with them. Anybody got any ideas? One time when I was living in Saudi Arabia, there was a big storm during the night and a cargo ship got wrecked at sea. Persimmons were among the cargo along with lemons, oranges, apples and some other stuff including chocolate bars. In the morning when I went beach combing, all the fruit had been washed up and left on the beach when the tide receded. The interesting thing was that, perhaps because of the different density of each type of fruit, they had settled at different heights on the beach. For two or three kilometers in either direction I could see different coloured wavy lines, following the contours of the beach. It was beautiful. I collected a load of fruit and chocolate bars and even found a couple of cans of beer which I managed to bury in the sand before the customs boys turned up and chased me.
Here's the list of new stuff..
New recipes
Observatory cutlets
Quick potato chilli rolls
Salted cabbage
Mushroom noodle soup
Stuffed porotas
Tomato and
coriander raita
New links to other sites
Vegan family
- The web-home of Lucy, Davie, Daniel and Charlotte, a vegan family living in
the North East of Scotland.
It's been a long time since my last update. I got a nice e-mail from Elly in Australia about two weeks ago and it inspired me to start writing up recipes, but I've been a bit slow. I had a dream the other night - someone gave me a bottle of Marmite aftershave as a present. They said it was suitable for vegetarians. The bottle looked just like a Marmite jar. I took the dream as a message to get back into doing the site sharpish.
I've been working on some new recipes and you can see some of the results below, but otherwise I've been a bit sluggish lately. The weather is changing here - we've even had a little snow - and the evenings are getting darker. I feel my body going into hibernation. It'll soon be migration time though. We're off to India around the middle of December, before the Central Asian winter really kicks in. Birds have the right idea.
On the subject of birds... on our visit to the astronomical observatory we saw an Ibisbill. That might not mean anything to the majority of readers, but it means a lot to me. They're rather rare and they don't migrate. The only way to find them is to go into the mountains. There were a lot of other good birds but the trip was interesting for other reasons too. The observatory is a weird place. Lots of strange rusting installations spread over a patch of tundra-like ground in a high valley. The place was off limits during Soviet times and, although it's been open for a few years, Sveta had never been there. She was as impressed as I was. An astronomer from Moscow was there on a working visit and he invited us to look at some stars. He showed us a globular cluster called M13, a gaseous ring left after a star exploded thousands of years ago and the Andromeda galaxy (two million years ago - that's how long it takes for the light to reach Earth). We also saw the spot where a black hole is located but I don't know if that counts for much. You can't see the black hole as doesn't emit any light but we trusted our guide.
Almost as good as the Ibisbill, I saw a huge praying mantis a few days ago. It was about 15 centimetres long and it was crawling up our balcony window frame in slow motion. Good to watch. When I told Sveta she asked if I made a wish. I didn't know you could do that. Everytime you see one you can make a wish and it's almost guaranteed to come true, and I missed it. Still, you can't look at life as a series of missed opportunities. It's better to concentrate on watching for the next ones - make sure you don't miss them. I'll be ready next time I see a mantis, I can tell you.
Part of the reason I haven't written much in the last couple of weeks is I've spent a lot of time playing computer games. Old stuff like Hexen, Heretic and Doom. We have an old desktop computer and most modern games won't run on it. We take turns each, one of us playing until we get killed while the other navigates and offers advice. It's great fun and we played well into the night a few times, but I think I'm over it now and I can get back to work. Let's hope so. In the meantime here are the new recipes. I won't promise a date for the next update, but it shouldn't be too long.
New recipes
Walnut stuffed cabbage leaves
Mashed chickpea fry
Uzbek plov
Cauliflower and chickpeas salad
Rasolnik (salted cucumber
and rice soup)
Chappatis
I just got back from Uzbekistan so this is a short update. The recipes are ones which were on my computer but I didn't have time to finish and upload them. As I predicted, I didn't have much time for anything else but work in Tashkent. I did however manage to nose around some of the street food stalls and I had a chat with a guy who was making plov. This is the Central Asian version of steamed rice with vegetables which goes by various names in other parts of the world. Biriyani, pilau and pilov are made in a similar way. Central Asian varieties nearly always contain lamb, but I reckon we can do a nice vegetarian version. The guy I spoke to was a bit fazed at first when I asked about making it without meat. 'It's possible' he eventually conceded, but I think he was wondering why anyone would want to do that. Making plov is traditionally a man's thing in Uzbekistan and everyone has their own secret. The basic principles are fairly simple however, so I'll give it a bash during the week and report on how it goes in the next update. There will, of course, be somebody out there who says, 'THAT'S not how you make real plov!' but then we're used to that here. Water off a ducks back.
Talking of ducks, I'm going into the mountains tomorrow with Sveta to do a bit of birdwatching. Sveta isn't interested in birds. She just watches me watching them and enjoys the scenery. We're staying at an astronomical observatory high in the Tien Shan range and they promised to cook some vegetarian food for us, so I might come back with a couple of recipe ideas, who knows. We'll be back on Monday and I'll get on with some stuff for the next update. Expect it around the 6th of October.
I got a nice new mutiple-entry Kazakh visa in Tashkent, by the way.
New recipes
Cauliflower
cheese cutlets
Spicy cheese and onion
cutlets
Russian salad
Summer vegetable
sandwiches
Summer vegetable
and beans soup
New links to other sites
Veganline
recipes - This is a new veggie search engine that trawls 1500 pages
of recipes (some of them mine) and indexes them by keyword. It is hosted and
sponsored by a vegan shoe shop. You can also find information on buying vegan
shoes and stuff on-line from this link.
I was in a cafe run by a Lebanese family the other day. We often go there for their falafel sandwiches and I sometimes practice a few words of Arabic with the owner. We were sitting outside, under the sun canopy and there were quite a few other diners. There was a big group of Chechens having what looked like a birthday party and at the next table to us there was a Georgian family eating and at a further table there was a Kazakh family. Behind us there were some Chinese people. During our meal a group of Americans came in and there was I, a Scotsman with my Russian wife. Everybody was speaking different languages in their little groups, but we all used broken Russian to communicate with each other. Isn't that wonderful?
There weren't any puffballs at the bazaar this week. A good opportunity missed. I've put another wild mushroom recipe up - wood blewits and celery. Wood blewits should be in the forests any day now. On the subject of gathering wild mushrooms I've added a page with some sensible advice for those new to the game and I've also completed a short story, 'A cautionary tale about mushrooms.' There's no need to be paranoid about the dangers of collecting mushrooms but you really do need to know what you are doing and I can't stress that enough. Read up and learn what's what and how to make absolutely sure you've found it. It's the only way.
On the BBC web-site this week they said that astronomers think they may have discovered a new moon around the Earth. Did you know that that would make three? I wonder if this one's made of green cheese? Would that mean vegetarians could eat it? I started 'the milk issue' , an essay on some of the issues surrounding being lacto-vegetarian, a long time ago. I kept looking at it and doing nothing, occasionally even wishing I hadn't started it. Nevertheless, the other day I sat down and bashed away at it until there was something which could provisionally be called 'finished'. It's a bit of a mess - the structure's terrible and the arguments could be better thought out and more fully developed. Don't let that put you off though. I think there are some valid points there. If anyone reads it and responds to it, I'll do some more work on it as necessary. If no one reads it there's no point in doing any more is there? What an attitude. No wonder nobody pays me for this.
The only other thing I've got done this week is a recipe for mashed brinjal with red peppers and green peas. Don't know what brinjals are? Go have a look. It tastes as good as it sounds.
I've been settled in Almaty for a few months now, but tomorrow I'm off to Uzbekistan. I don't know how long I'll be there. It depends if they let me back into Kazakhstan. My Kazakh visa expires soon and that's one of the reasons I'm going out of the country - to try to get a new one. I hope they do let me back as Sveta's waiting here for me. The reason I'm going specifically to Uzbekistan is to do some work in Tashkent. That's the horrible 'pay-the -bills' type of work, so I don't know when I'll have time to write new stuff for the next update. It won't be too long though.
I went to see Transglobal Underground last night. What a concert. Absolutely superb. They played outdoors in the 'Old Square' in Almaty. A Kazakh group was supporting them and towards the end both groups played together. The mixture of traditional Kazakh instruments and electronic effects produced some scary sounds.
There were giant puffball mushrooms in sale at the bazaar this week. I didn't buy any as I was already laden with stuff at the time. If they're still there next time I go, I'll get some and tell you how I cook them. There are some nice things you can do with them. A few weeks ago I was talking about wild mushrooms and I gave Richard Maybey as a reference for readers in the UK who are interested in gathering edible mushrooms. For those readers in the USA, "Wildman" Steve Brill is your man. Go have a look at his site. It's brilliant. I'll get some more mushroom stuff up in the next few days - there's a recipe and a story, both unfinished, on my computer.
I've been doing a lot of cooking this week, testing out recipes before writing them up. Our fridge is full of plastic containers of cutlet mix, salads, stuffed tomatoes, leftover sweetcorn and other odds and ends. We'll have to have a party.
I just finished the second part of 'Nessie' this evening but I did it on my laptop and when I transferred it to the desktop, I realised it would be a bit wide for reading comfortably on some screens. Some people would have to scroll from right to left, which I know can be a complete hassle. I adjusted the size but I'm drawing directly on the computer as I don't have a scanner and it took me ages. I use the mouse or even the touch pad on my laptop for drawing and it really is a laborious business. I've got a lot of ideas for cartoons but they'll be slow in coming. I saw a great little device for drawing advertised in a magazine. It was a sort of electronic board with a pen (which is really a mouse). I'll get one sometime. That would make life a lot easier. I would also like a digital camera to take some more photos to put up on the site. It's all cash though, isn't it? Both will have to wait a while. At the moment I'm saving to finance another trip to India in January and February.
On the subject of photos: I've already got a lot of interesting prints to put up and I found a place where I can get them scanned for a fairly reasonable price, so I'm going to start a photo gallery in the next few weeks. I haven't decided on the format yet but I'm thinking about it. I've got some nice pictures of Pushkar (where my Pushkar sandwiches recipe came from).
I'll be doing another update very shortly, as I have a few things which should have been up today but I didn't get finished. The beer-drinking before, during and after the Transglobal Underground gig knocked my schedule sideways a little. In the mean time, have a look at this lot. Not a bad week's work.
New recipes
Hot stuffed tomatoes
Cold stuffed
tomatoes with cheese
Cold stuffed tomatoes
with mushrooms
Cabbage and sweetcorn
salad
Sweet
vegetable cutlets
Potato
and leek soup
Cauliflower
and green peas salad
Spinach
and cheese cutlets
Tomato and sweet red
pepper sauce
New contents pages
Tomato recipes
Spinach recipes
Sweet pepper recipes
New stories
Gordon
A boating adventure
New cartoons
Nessie part 2
Rabbits' feet
New links to other sites
Foraging
With the "Wildman" - this is Steve Brill's site
Wahey! What a week. I finally got something written in answer to all the questions in the 'About Ashy and the cookbook' section. It's not complete. The idea is it never will be. As people ask questions, I'll put them in there and answer them and I'll update and expand on the existing answers as need be, but at least now there are no empty spaces. It doesn't look like a building site any more. I think I'll pour myself a beer.
I got a letter from Melony who wanted advice on doing vegetable barbecues. I've meant to do a bit on that for ages but never got round to it. Now's not the ideal time I suppose as the summer's almost finished (here in the northern hemisphere it is anyway) but after replying to Melony's letter I got inspired, so the page is up. She also gave me a brilliant name - vegetable skewers. So we don't talk about 'vegetable kebabs' here at Ashy's. We say 'vegetable skewers'. Brilliant, huh?
Another letter I got was from Linda in Salem, Oregon. She brought to my attention the fact that the names of the vegetables I use (British English) are sometimes different from the American names. Now, it's not good if my terminology confuses readers so I've created two infant dictionary pages and would welcome any suggestions for words to include in them.
As usual, I've got a load of half-finished stuff on the computer but while I'm waiting for a bit of inspiration to finish it off, I'll stick these bits and pieces up. I plan to have a productive few days starting from tomorrow so check back in a weeks time and see what's new.
Dictionary pages
British to American
English names
American to British
English names
New recipes
Mutabl
Vegetable skewers
Foil-baked vegetables
New contents pages
Outdoor
cooking/barbecues
I've been out of action for the past couple of weeks with a virus so this update is a bit later than it might otherwise have been. I haven't done as much as I'd hoped but as you can see there are a few new bits and pieces.
You'll have noticed too, that I've redone my front page. Now it will expand and contract to fit any browser size. It took bloody ages, so it did.
Last time I said I was going to work on my question links on the front page. I've added a few more lines here and there but not a lot. I think I'll have more inspiration in the coming week. I've got a few ideas for stories and cartoons too so lets see what happens.
I went out shopping for the first time in over a week today. I'm living not far from the Chinese border at the moment and lately in our local bazaar Chinese soy bean products have started to appear. I'm not a great fan of soy stuff. I know it's supposed to be really good for you and I don't doubt that it is, but I don't usually like the taste much or the texture. One thing which I bought today and which turns out to be rather good, is soya mayonnaise - no milk products in it at all and, of course, more importantly for me, no eggs. You might see some new salad recipes in the near future.
Here's what I've done since last time:
New recipes
Cheese
and beetroot salad
Pasta
with fresh tomatoes
Aloo
muttar
Spicy
lentil and vegetable soup
Steamed
veg with yoghurt and coconut
Beans
paneer
Green
beans and potatoes
New cartoons
Nessie part 1
I've done a lot of work on my links this week. I've been through every one, so they should all be working and leading to the right places. I say should because I was on automatic pilot by the end so I might have missed something or pressed the wrong button somewhere. It happens - especially if you're me.
I went to the dentists at the beginning of the week. One of Sveta's fillings came out when she was cracking pine kernels on the train to Boravoye. I decided to go to the dentists with her as I had a tooth which a couple of little pieces broke off of and I thought it was time to get it fixed. It wasn't painful but it was rather rough and seeds kept getting stuck in the holes. The dentist looked at my teeth and said she could only see one hole. Okay, I said, fill it anyway. She gave me an injection and went to work. When she had finished I felt her handy work with my tongue and guess what? It was another tooth she had filled. I guess she's the expert.
I got seriously hammered on vodka on Thursday - not something I do very often these days. It was at my friend Olga's birthday party. I spent all day Friday with a hangover and gave in to three beers in the evening. I felt a bit more human after that. Human but sick.
At the party, when things were well under way, Olga's husband Kostya and I arranged to go climb Pik Pioneerskaya at the weekend and we actually did it. Isn't that amazing? We left early on the Saturday morning and started climbing at eleven o'clock and got back to the car at five in the evening. It wasn't technically difficult but very tiring. The last three or four hundred meters of ascent were killing because of the altitude. I brought some edelweiss back for Sveta who thought that was really romantic. I think they were edelweiss. Kostya said they were.
All in all, I think I've had a fairly productive week, considering. Have a look at this lot.
New stories
Down among the Daniel O'Donnel
New cartoons
Chameleon
New recipes
Aubergines
stuffed with walnuts
Tarka
dhal
Mung
dhal
Laghman
New recipe categories
I've rearranged quite a lot of the existing categories plus added these
- same recipes, more sense (I think).
New essays
Why I don't have a food-processor
New links to other sites
Ashy's
webhome - no, not mine. I found this
when I was checking my listings in the search engines. It's a really nice site.
I might start a category of 'sites by other people called Ashy' but only if
I find some more good ones, not just because they're by people with the same
name.
Next week, among other things, I'll be trying to get on with my F.A.Q.s. I thought it was a good idea when I first started them. Maybe it is, but they've been lying unfinished, gathering dust, for a while now. I don't think they'll ever be finished. I envisioned it as a kind of ongoing thing, but some of the pages have nothing on them at all. Things could be 'ongoing' a bit faster. I'll try to get on with it.
If you live in the UK and you're new to gathering wild mushrooms but fancy giving it a go, I would recommend Richard Maybey's books (I think that's how you spell his name). 'Food for free' has a lot of mushroom recipes in it with details on how to go about finding the mushrooms. 'Mushrooms and toadstools' is an excellent identification guide which also tells you which mushrooms are edible and how to spot the dodgy ones.
Another recipe I found is also very simple - the best ones always are. The train journey back from Baravoe took 28 hours and we were buying food at the stations we passed through. It was interesting to see how the food on offer changed according to the location. Near Lake Balqash for example people were selling smoked fish and in Chu the biggest watermelons I've ever seen were on sale. The Chu valley is famous throughout the ex-Soviet Union for it's watermelons (it's equally famous for it's marijuana but unfortunately there didn't seem to be any on sale at the station). At one stop we bought a bowl of delicious boiled new potatoes with a simple garnish and that was the inspiration for my train potatoes recipe.
The third recipe is for green chilli preserve. Just before we left, I was clearing out the fridge and found a pile of green chillis. Rather than let them all shrivel up while we were away, I smashed some of them up with garlic and spices. This recipe involves sterilising but it only takes about twenty minutes from start to finish and the resulting preserve will keep for a long time.
What else is new apart from recipes? Well, I've done some more categorising and linking and we now have a Sandwiches page. There are also two new stories:
A quiet pint
A short hitch-hiking conversation on Skye.
The next update will be in about a weeks time.
New recipes
Courgettes and coconut
Yellow pea dhal
Stuffed green peppers with
cherries and pine-nuts
Potato
and tomato salad
Greens with potatoes and rice
Green peppers with potatoes
Aubergines and potatoes
Falafel
Chilli sin carne
Fried
aubergine slices
Georgian recipes
Red beans Georgian-style
Red beans with walnuts
Aubergine
Chanakh
Other new pages
Cartoons
Short essays on vegetarian related themes
New links to other sites
Hippyland
- Good forums with discussions on being a vegetarian and a lot more.
I'm off wandering tomorrow and I won't be taking my lap-top so the next update will be in 3 or 4 weeks. I'm going hiking in the forest on the Siberian-Kazakh border so I don't imagine I'll be bringing back any new recipes, but I've got a backlog of stuff that needs typed and uploaded anyway so check around the end of July if you're interested in the next update.
Ashy