I spent a few days in Lisbon in spring. It's a difficult city for vegetarians when you first arrive and don't know your way around. Most of the restaurants specialise in seafood. There are traditional Portugese seafood dishes. The Italian restaurants do seafood Italian-style, the Chinese do stir-fried seafood and so on. I found a cafe that advertised a tourist menu. On closer inspection all it offered was a range of seafood dishes served with chips. I asked if they could knock up something vegetarian. Salad and chips?
The supermarkets are great for self catering - lots of fresh fruit, olives, cheese, crusty bread and stuff like that, but sometimes it's nice to eat out, especially in a new city. Luckily, I stumbled on Mega Vega cafe on the second day. It's in Baixa, right in the centre of the city in downtown touristown.
It was good to find some good fresh veggie cooking and we went there a few times for lunch. This is an example of the kind of simple but tasty dishes they did.
Coriander has a very strong taste when it is fresh, but as soon as it is cooked it looses a lot of its flavour. In this recipe we combat that by adding an extra large pile of coriander.
Any potatoes will do for this recipe really, but it is best with small new potatoes.
1.5 kg of small new potatoes
1 large onion
400g of feta cheese
A large bunch of fresh coriander
2 cloves of garlic
Black pepper
Salt
Olive oil
Scrub the potatoes, cut them in half, throw into a pan with salted water and boil until they are soft enough to stick a fork in easily, then drain. Slice the onion and fry gently until golden brown before adding the chopped garlic. Remove from the heat after thirty seconds or so. Chop the coriander roughly and cut the feta cheese into cubes. Put the potatoes and cheese cubes into a shallow baking dish and sprinkle the coriander on top with a little black pepper. Pour over the onion, garlic and oil mixture and bake in a fairly hot over for fifteen to twenty minutes.
In Portugal we ate this dish with a salad and that's how I would recommend serving it. How about a spinach and pistachio salad or rocket, pine nut and red pepper? Or maybe just a simple green salad made with lettuce?