Hazelnut patties -- engh, okay.

Well hello there. I'm writing twice in the space of a couple days. Imagine that!

So, Fredrik's announcement that he now believes it's unnecessary for us to kill da widdle baby aminals in order to eat, I was actually quite pleased. I've never been a stranger to such thoughts myself, and as a matter of fact, I ate vegetarian for about a year before marrying my carnivorous ex-husband a decade ago. I actually believe that pairing up causes the world to have far fewer vegetarians than it would have otherwise.

But I also was a little pissed off, in a playful sort of way. Here I've spent a good long time trying to find recipes that both he and I like and that contain plenty of vegetables, balanced nutrients, and all that other blah-de-blah. And it happened more than once that, when I asked him what he thought of a new recipe I tried, he could comment "It's okay, but there's no meat in it!" Indeed, an entire series of "All-meat parties," a potluck gathering that entailed very specific rules about the dishes people brought, was spawned because Fredrik and another friend joked about faintness and iron-deficiency when presented once with a meatless meal. On top of that, I'm the shopper and usually the cooker in this family.

What this means is that I welcomed his new-found interest in vegetarianism with both a sort of inner "yay, new project!" excitement as well as a desire to get him to work for it! First I suggested that we start by cutting back on the mammals rather than attempting to entirely quit meat cold-turkey (ha.). I think I could easily adjust to life with beef and pork, but I'm not quite ready to give up cheese, even though I know that a little baby cow has died for my cheese...

I also said he'd best have picked out at least 2 vegetarian recipes that he wanted to cook this week, before I made my weekly trip to the store.

I noticed a trend when he started sending me recipe ideas and I compared them to my own ideas: I was attempting to come up with recipes that simply didn't contain meat -- indeed, that perhaps never were intended to contain meat in their natural form -- but Fredrik seemed to be finding recipes that contained meat-replacements -- spaghetti "meat sauce" made with soy-based fake meat and a recipe for hazelnut patties were his first offerings. :)

He made the hazelnut patties last night, along with a very good tsatziki (which was our best guess as to what might taste good with hazelnut patties...). I won't share the recipe with you because, quite frankly, we weren't impressed and decided not to make it again in the future. It's possible that we could turn it into something good, but we'll have to come back to it later.

In the meantime, I'm very excited about a cheesy spinach pasta I'm going to try!

I'm also pretty jazzed about pumpkin. I just made about 2 kg of pureed pumpkin after following the directions in these videos: Processing pie for pumpkin. I used a big jack-o-lantern pumpkin, but it turned out just great for cooking purposes. I've got a couple small pumpkins that I'm going to process for baking, and I'm looking forward to playing around with cooking with the rest. And Bennie thought it was tasty just as it was!