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Dining the 'flexitarian' way |
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Written by Amy Culbertson, MCT
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Tuesday, 26 June 2007 |
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 "Mixed company" at the dinner table used to mean the gents couldn't tell off-color jokes because the ladies might be offended.
Today, it's a little more complicated. These days, "mixed company" is likely to mean a dinner table that includes a couple who eats seafood but no red meat or poultry, someone who eats no animal protein at all and a few old-fashioned garden-variety carnivores. They might all be your dinner guests, or they might be members of your own family.
The problem: How to make a meal that accommodates them all, doesn't make anyone feel like the poor stepsister and doesn't require you to spend three hours and five pots to prepare three different meals.
Enter Peter Berley, chef, cookbook author, food author and cooking teacher. His brand-new book "The Flexitarian Table: Inspired, Flexible Meals for Vegetarians, Meat Lovers and Everyone in Between" (Houghton Mifflin, $30) deals directly with this ever-more-common dilemma.
"The book's about options," the Brooklyn-based Berley said in a recent phone interview. "Providing freedom of choice without judgment about what anyone's dietary preferences are." The working title, he notes, was "Sharing the Table."
Berley's not a strict vegetarian, even though he cooked for seven years for New York City's acclaimed organic vegan restaurant Angelica Kitchen and has written two highly regarded vegetarian cookbooks. But one of his daughters is a strict vegetarian, while he, his wife and his other daughter consider themselves "flexitarians" - folks who eat meat or fish on occasion as part of a vegetarian-inclined diet.
To Berley, who's planning on opening his own flexitarian restaurant on Manhattan's Lower East Side this fall, it's a global issue.
"The planet simply will not support the (current) level of meat production forever. It'll become an issue like global warming," said Berley, referring to the burden that livestock production puts on the planet's resources - including water pollution, deforestation and more greenhouse gases than all the world's cars and planes put together, according to a 2006 U.N. report.
"We can eat a plant-based diet while not necessarily sacrificing our need for protein. There are options, and there are cool options."
That's what he's set out to prove in his new book, organizing it by seasons and menus.
The central question behind the book, he says, is "How do you consider someone different from yourself without making a lot more work for you?"
Berley has three approaches to making a meal for a mixed group of eaters:
1. The "picnic or mezze - the Middle Eastern term for an assortment of little appetizers - or tapas strategy, where you have lots of little dishes, like a grazing meal. You might have stuffed eggs, sauteed baby artichokes, chickpeas, tapenade - but then you can grill a lamb chop and throw that in there, too." Diners can pick and choose among the options to create their own customized meal.
2. "Or you can make a slam-dunk totally vegetarian meal that the meat eater's totally happy with," such as his summer menu of cannelloni with ricotta, Parmesan and mint; summer vegetable ragout; and chopped salad with sherry vinaigrette.
"After all," he says, "at Angelica Kitchen we had an incredible following, and 60 percent of our guests were meat eaters. They came in; they put down good money to have a "vegan" meal, not just a vegetarian meal."
3. The approach he most often employs in his book is the flexible, or "convertible," meal, in which you cook a vegetarian and a meat element simultaneously without doing a lot of extra work - quickly searing a tuna steak as an optional add-on to a salad, along with hard-cooked eggs and beans, or using two dishes to marinate kebabs of lamb and the soy protein tempeh in the same Moroccan-style herb mix before grilling them.
The secret of this approach, Berley says, is to "think about the entire meal and not just a main dish. Otherwise you're just leaving the meat out."
Cooking for vegans, he admits, is harder than cooking for vegetarians who will eat dairy products and eggs. "But look to Mediterranean or Asian cuisines, cuisines that are not butter based."
To get you started, he advises finding a vegetarian cookbook - "there's a million good ones" and going through it for ideas. Look for recipes that "make you hungry."
And you need to "get a sense of what season you're in and what locale you're living in; what's the good stuff there?"
"In Texas, tofu and soy products are not going to come naturally. So think about pasta, polenta, bean dishes, chili, rice, grains, vegetables."
This might not be as foreign as it seems, especially to those Texans who grew up enjoying traditional summer meals of pinto or field beans with cornbread and the garden's freshest vegetables - fried okra, sliced tomatoes, green onions, long-simmered green beans. All you'd need to do to adapt that meal to vegetarian tastes would be to cook the beans without any smoked pork.
Or, for a more contemporary meatless meal, "you might make a green-bean salad with extra-virgin olive oil and Parmesan, roasted asparagus, a frittata or other egg dish - that's not that far out," Berley says.
"And you'd say, `Oh, I just made a meal and I didn't make any meat! And it was delicious, and it was not that hard to pull off.' "
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CUSTOMIZING STRATEGIES
"The Flexitarian Table" author Peter Berley offers these strategies for success in creating "convertible" menus that will feed diners of varying protein preferences:
1. Choose a common vegetarian base that everyone will eat. This could be the main dish, in the case of Berley's menu of penne with beets, beet greens, goat cheese and walnuts with chestnut apple soup. Or it could be the base for two different versions of the main dish, as with the French lentils that Berley tops with either baked fish or ricotta dumplings in another menu.
Even - especially - if you have two different proteins in your meal, keep the side dishes vegetarian. If you're cooking risotto, say, use vegetable broth, not chicken broth. "Two risottos_that's too much to make," says Berley.
2. Choose animal and vegetable proteins that share similar characteristics.
"Look at what you like; if you like duck, you have a feeling of the texture, the weight," Berley says. Then look for parallel qualities in your vegetable protein. He often uses the chewy wheat-gluten product seitan for the vegetable counterpart to duck or lamb, for example.
3. Find a common sauce or marinade. In one menu from the book, Berley tops soft polenta with white beans, for the vegetarians, and shrimp, for those who eat seafood; but he serves both shrimp and beans in a brown-butter and herb sauce. "The sauce bridges the two proteins that go with the starch," he says; "it would be two distinct dishes if I didn't have the brown-butter sauce. It wouldn't be sharing the table."
4. Find a common cooking technique for the two proteins. Berley points to a menu organized around pressed chicken and tofu: Cooking chicken thighs under a brick in a cast-iron skillet produces "supremely crispy skin," he says in his book, and "pressing the water out of the tofu results in a similar crispness."
"You're using the identical marinade" for both, he notes; "just split it up into two bowls. And the technique for cooking them is identical."
5. To make vegetarian dishes more appealing to meat eaters, look for ways to deepen flavors: browning butter, toasting nuts and spices, caramelizing onions.
For foodie types who have a stovetop smoker, "smoking satisfies that Neanderthal instinct," Berley says. "You can smoke anything."
Or use smoked paprika, chipotles or smoked sea salt to add a deeper smokiness to foods such as dry beans or green beans that are traditionally cooked with smoked pork in the South.
And, Berley suggests, "a little soy sauce gives a meaty flavor."
THE FLEXITARIAN PANTRY
Good items to have on hand for unexpected vegetarian guests:
Tofu: "You can saute it real quick," says Berley, who suggests buying firm tofu for the greatest versatility. "Or smoked tofu; it will last a long time."
Canned beans - pintos, white beans, garbanzos and others: "Open a can of beans, open a can of tomatoes, saute an onion and you've got a garbanzo-and-tomato ragout that can go with either a rice or a pasta."
Eggs: Berley thinks egg dishes such as frittatas, omelets and the like are underused. With the above ragout, to up the protein quotient, "you can fry an egg and put that on top."
Pasta, rice and other grains; couscous is especially quick cooking and seems more special than rice or noodles.
Canned coconut milk for a quick Asian sauce such as a Thai curry sauce.
ADAPTABLE GRILLING
Even though summer may be the best time of year for cooking vegetarian, those who avoid meat often get short shrift at grill-outs. Hosts often don't think beyond burgers, dogs and chicken.
"Grilling fish is obvious," Berley says, especially if your guests are the kind of demi-vegetarians who will eat seafood.
But he points out that "pizza is the most popular vegetarian meal in the world.
"You just throw your dough on the grill, or par-bake it maybe two minutes, or in a fry pan, so it's easier to manage and handle" on the grill.
"Grilled vegetables are not a meal," he says. "Grilled pizzas are."
A CONVERTIBLE MENU FOR THE GRILL
This menu can be customized for vegetarians by topping the polenta with fried, poached or hard-cooked eggs. If everyone at the table eats shrimp, you may want to increase the amount of shrimp.
You can buy harissa, a spicy North African condiment, in a jar, but Berley notes that homemade is far superior. He also recommends buying your spices whole, toasting them in a skillet over medium heat until fragrant and then grinding them in a coffee or spice grinder for the most intense flavor.
Berley also suggests using a grill basket or skewering the shrimp to keep them from falling through the grill.
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GRILLED SHRIMP IN HARISSA
Serves 4
2 teaspoons ground cumin, preferably toasted and freshly ground
½ teaspoon ground fennel, preferably toasted and freshly ground
½ teaspoon ground caraway, preferably toasted and freshly ground
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper, or to taste
1 teaspoon sea salt or kosher salt
5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
¼ cup fresh lemon juice
2 large garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 pound large shrimp, peeled, leaving the tail section on, and deveined
1. Light a grill if grilling the shrimp.
2. Make the harissa: In a medium bowl, stir together the cumin, fennel, caraway, cayenne and salt. Whisk in the olive oil, lemon juice and garlic.
3. Toss the shrimp in the harissa and marinate for 10 to 15 minutes.
4. Preheat the broiler if not grilling the shrimp.
5. Broil or grill the shrimp, turning once, until cooked through, about 3 minutes per side.
Nutritional analysis per serving: 282 calories, 19 grams fat, 4 grams carbohydrates, 23 grams protein, 173 milligrams cholesterol, 640 milligrams sodium, trace fiber, 61 percent of calories from fat.
"The Flexitarian Table: Inspired, Flexible Meals for Vegetarians, Meat Lovers and Everyone in Between," by Peter Berley (Houghton Mifflin, $30)
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FRESH CORN POLENTA WITH SAUTEED CHERRY TOMATOES
Serves 4
3 cups water
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 teaspoon sea salt or kosher salt
1 cup medium corn grits
1 cup corn kernels (cut from 1 large or 2 small ears)
1 scallion, trimmed, green part thinly sliced, white part chopped and reserved for the tomatoes
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 pints cherry tomatoes (combining different colors makes for a vivid presentation)
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
½ teaspoon red-pepper flakes
¼ cup chopped mixed fresh herbs, such as oregano, tarragon, basil and flat-leaf parsley
Sea salt or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Fried or poached eggs, optional
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese, for serving
1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.
2. In a medium ovenproof saucepan, bring the water to a boil over high heat. Add the butter and salt, then stir in the grits and the corn and continue to stir until the water returns to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the polenta is thick, 5 to 7 minutes.
3. Stir in the scallion greens. Cover the pan and transfer to the oven to keep warm.
4. In a 12- to 14-inch skillet or large enameled cast-iron casserole dish, combine the oil, tomatoes, garlic, reserved chopped white part of scallions and the red-pepper flakes and cook over high heat, stirring, until the tomatoes soften and begin to release their juices, 3 to 4 minutes. Stir in the herbs and cook for 2 more minutes. Season with salt and pepper and remove from the heat.
5. Divide the polenta among four shallow soup plates. If serving with eggs, slide them onto the polenta. Spoon the tomatoes on top. Serve sprinkled with Parmesan.
Nutritional analysis per serving: 386 calories, 20 grams fat, 47 grams carbohydrates, 6 grams protein, 16 milligrams cholesterol, 523 milligrams sodium, 8 grams dietary fiber, 46 percent of calories from fat.
"The Flexitarian Table: Inspired, Flexible Meals for Vegetarians, Meat Lovers and Everyone in Between," by Peter Berley (Houghton Mifflin, $30)
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GRILLED ZUCCHINI WITH MINT OIL
"Salting draws out moisture and firms up the zucchini, but if you're short on time, you can skip this step and allow for a slightly longer cooking time. Leftover mint oil is great for grilling fish. Or use it in a salad dressing, brush on crostini, or drizzle over fresh mozzarella or warm pasta"
Serves 4
3 medium zucchini (1 ½ pounds), sliced lengthwise ½ inch thick
Sea salt or kosher salt
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
¼ teaspoon red-pepper flakes
2 tablespoons coarsely chopped fresh mint
2 teaspoons red-wine vinegar
Freshly ground black pepper
1. Sprinkle the zucchini slices all over with salt. Lay them out flat on paper towels to drain for 30 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, combine the oil, garlic and red-pepper flakes, bring just to a simmer and simmer gently until the garlic is golden, 5 to 7 minutes. Add the mint and take the pan off the heat.
3. Light a grill or preheat the broiler.
4. Pat the zucchini dry and lightly brush the tops of the slices with mint oil. Place them oiled side down on the grill or broiler pan and lightly brush the tops of the slices with mint oil. Grill or broil, turning once, until softened and nicely browned, 4 to 5 minutes per side.
5. Transfer the zucchini to a platter. Drizzle with 3 tablespoons of the remaining mint oil and the vinegar and season with salt and pepper.
Nutritional analysis per serving: 266 calories, 27 grams fat, 6 grams carbohydrates, 2 grams protein, 0 milligrams cholesterol, 6 milligrams sodium, 2 grams dietary fiber, 89 percent of calories from fat.
"The Flexitarian Table: Inspired, Flexible Meals for Vegetarians, Meat Lovers and Everyone in Between," by Peter Berley (Houghton Mifflin, $30) | Only registered users can write comments.
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