Broccoli and stilton roulade

I love buying new vegetarian cookery books and recently I bought The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook. It’s big and heavy and glossy and each recipe is accompanied by a big colour photograph. On the downside, the first 129 pages (out of 384) are hints and tips about vegetables, kitchen appliances, nutrition, etc. Plus the index is a bit crap and I haven’t been over-impressed with the recipes I’ve made from it so far. The first recipe I tried from it (sorry, no photo) was baked eggs with mozzarella and fresh tomatoes, which was very easy to make but NO WAY was it going to serve four people. It barely served two.

Next up was pasta with spinach, shiitake mushrooms and tofu.

Upon reading the ingredients (tofu, shiitake mushrooms, spinach, soy sauce, sesame oil and garlic), I wasn’t keen on having it with pasta, feeling it was more of an oriental dish and I had to restrain myself from having it with rice or noodles, but the blurb assured me it went perfectly well with pasta, so I thought I’d be brave. Wrong choice. It didn’t really go with pasta (especially not the big shells I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to cook for a few weeks) and the leftovers will be served with rice.

Last night’s meal wasn’t much of a success either. I don’t usually make fancy or fiddly food but it said preparation was 10 minutes. Was it heck. More like 30 minutes. Still, it looked pretty.

Unfortunately The Meat Eater wasn’t keen and although I said he wasn’t getting tonight’s potato-based meal unless he finished his dinner, half of his roulade went in the bin. I thought it was ok, but the soufflé-type texture got a bit boring after a while. Thinner slices as a starter or as a side to something more substantial would have worked better.