A Vegan Called Bacon

I’m pleased that spring has started to gush green things at me, because it gives me a chance to do more foraging. In the field, I’m using Richard Mabey’s classic book Food for Free, which I now own in handy pocket format.

hawthorn

My foraging season started a couple of weeks ago with a hunt for Saint George’s Mushrooms, but it was too early, and the weather had been too dry. All I got was a handful of hawthorn leaves, which, according to Mr Mabey, are commonly called “bread and cheese”, and are “the first wild vegetable a country child eats”. Apparently Food for Free was written in the twentieth century, but I suspect this was in an alternate dimension. For the record, “bread and cheese” tastes like grass-flavoured parsley.

We’ve also had some very nice nettle soup, which led me to wonder how people collected it before gloves were invented.

The prettiest and tastiest stuff so far are ramsons (wild garlic), which were in full flower last week down by the river. It makes for a wonderful, radioactive green soup, and the flowers are a pretty addition.  However, making fritters with the flowers, as suggested on one website, seemed like a fairly pointless idea to me.

Kim is not quite as eager as me to eat wild food, mainly due to potential unwanted urine-related garnish. When picking blackberries as a child, my mum always used to advise us to “stay away from cocky height”, but unfortunately this sage wisdom is hard to follow with low, ground-covering perennials like ramsons.

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It was fish that turned me.  When I was about eight years old, my mum served up fish that had eyes and a tail.  For the first time, I realised that fish fingers were made out of the same things that eat and move and people own as pets.   It sparked a series of nightmares involving swallowing living, wriggling goldfish.  Luckily, I didn’t get nightmares about eating fingers.

(It took me a few more years to get my head round the linguistic tricks used to disguise other edible animals, and fully appreciate the link between pork and Pigs, beef and Cows, and so on.  I must have been a very literal child).

Ever since my fishy nightmares, I’ve had Fish Paranoia.  Especially in Thai restaurants, where my explanations of how I-don’t-eat-fish-sauce-and-it’s-really-important-and-please-write-it-down get met with a wholly unconvincing nod (”yeah, yeah, no fish, whatever”).  Then I’ll spend an hour forlornly pushing things around my plate, tasting fish in everything I put in my mouth (including water).  It’s strange that I don’t get meat-broth paranoia in the same way, considering I’ve probably ended up eating some every other time I eat in an omni restaurant.

But while we were in China and Japan last year, I learned to like the flavour of the sea.  In Japan, the liberal amounts of seaweed are only matched by liberal amounts of fish broth, fish flakes, and fish innards, which really foments fish paranoia.  But still, I persisted in eating seaweed.  In China, we ate mock fish a few times, which was usually gluten faux meat wrapped in seaweed:

In an effort to conquer the paranoia, I recently decided to veganise Cullen Skink.  I have a long-standing plan to veganise traditional Scottish foods.  So doing a traditional Scottish fish soup lets start my Scottish project off, and chase away that fish paranoia, all in one go.

It turns out to be really easy. Veganised, it’s basically onions and potatoes boiled in soy milk, with some flavourings. It tastes of smoke, with a hint of the sea. I’m not sure it’s for everyone, but it’s definitely a bit different.

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When I was little, my favourite soup was my grandma’s "Bin Soup".  Bin Soup is made with leftovers that you might otherwise throw out. 

Ever since I started working from home, I’ve been on some sort of soup frenzy during my lunch breaks (I actually work in the kitchen, which is a bit dangerous).  Usually, Bin Soup means a slightly floppy old carrot, a sad, wizened potato, and a handful of lentils, chucked in a pan and simmered in between checking out blogs and emails.  The furthest I’ve ever taken the concept is this dodgy-looking gloop, which was an entire plateful of the previous night’s dinner, blended; surely the most bizarre Bin Soup ever made.

It’s pilaf rice, roasted vegetables (including garlic), cauliflower "cheese" sauce, and a garlic/lemon/tahini dressing (the roses are just there for decoration, but they might as well have gone in too).

It could definitely have done with a bit more water, as you can see.  But oddly enough, it tasted pretty good. 

I suppose if I’m going to take this to its absolute logical conclusion I’m going to have to start using an actual bin.

I was staring at the fridge at lunch the other day, and an aging broccoli and a tatty old cauliflower were staring back at me.  I was reminded of a soup we got in Hong Kong made of two sub-soups of contrasting colours, carefully poured into the bowl to make a Ying and Yang shape. 

A friend recently gave me a spare old hand blender, and anyway, chunky soup is so last month.  So I thought I’d make a blended, novelty patterned soup

It seemed a good idea to try for a very dark green bit, and a very light, white bit.  So, on the right, we have half a cauliflower, half an onion, half a celery stick, a small handful of cashews, and some salt.  In the green corner, a bizarre mixture of purple sprouting broccoli, onion, a bit of potato, some black mustard seeds, a bit of seaweed, some spinach, and some red peanuts (just because I’d put cashews in the white bit). And some stock.

I boiled them both for 20 minutes, and blended them both until they were really smooth.

The broccoli bit was nothing to get too excited about.  Despite all the strange ingredients, it just tasted of salty broccoli.  The cauliflower bit, though, was amazing.  It turned out thick – presumably thanks to the cashews – and tasted creamy and delicate and kind of cheesy.  In other words, it was basically a vegetable-flavoured, fat-free roux, so as a side experiment, I popped some into the oven to see how it would fair on the top of something like lasagne:

(I think I can safely say that this application of my newly discovered sauce needs more research)

Then came the really fun part.  I gave up on the Ying and Yang idea before I even started, and after a couple of experiments, for some reason I ended up making patterns that reminded me of kitsch 1970s curtains.  Because the white bit was thick and the green bit runny, it meant you could get some pretty interesting effects.

It reminds me of children’s birthday party food when I was very small – of Battenburg Cakes, Cheese and Pineapples on Cocktail Sticks, and Musical Chairs.  With the significant difference that when I was five, I think it’s very unlikely I would have gone anywhere near broccoli and cauliflower soup.