Pepper Rage pairs meals containing meat with equally-exciting meals suitable for vegetarians.
But this is not a vegetarian blog and I am not a vegetarian.
Our aim is to help non-vegetarian cooks (like me) to produce meals for their vegetarian friends and family which are just as exciting as something they would produce for meat-eaters. These meals are designed to be prepared and eaten together, with a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian dish on the table at the same time.
Trying to produce two meals at the same time is not without its challenges: from oven juggling to trying to align ingredients to avoid wastage. I haven’t cracked it yet, but this blog is my personal challenge to try and do so.
Rage against the stuffed pepper
👆That’s the full name of the project. “Pepper Rage” for short.
The project was born from watching the regular occurrence which was my vegetarian friends being served with food which was obviously the unimaginative afterthought of a meat-centric chef.
While the meat eaters would tuck into a hearty meal, carefully matched to side dishes (and maybe even the wine), the vegetarians would patiently suffer through whatever is in the omnivore-chef’s limited vegetarian repertoire. The eponymous stuffed pepper (or other stuffed vegetables), a salad or cheese are common culprits.
That’s the best scenario.
My vegetarian friends advise me that they regularly have to make do with just the sides. They patiently utter the refrain:
“Oh don’t worry about me!”
“I’ll bring my own X”.
– (Nearly) All vegetarians ever
Well, I’m sorry, but I do worry. We should talk about whether you should get better friends if they invite you round but can’t be bothered to accommodate your needs.
“Can’t you just cook vegetarian?”
If you are looking for a vegetarian cookbook, there are many better than this site. If compelling vegetarian recipes alone would have changed the way we non-vegetarians fed vegetarians, Ottolenghi’s books would have solved this problem a long time ago!
If you have vegetarians and non-vegetarians coming round and you have a vegetarian meal that everyone will be happy with, you should absolutely cook that. It will be a lot easier.
However, that sweet spot does not always exist and there continue to be scenarios in which one can’t or doesn’t want to cook a pure vegetarian meal. We all know the family gathering with the relative who doesn’t consider something a meal if it doesn’t have meat in it (looking at you, grandad 👀). We all know couples, one of whom is vegetarian and the other not, the non-vegetarian occasionally craving meat. Or the parents, one of whose children wants to experiment with vegetarianism, but the rest of the family doesn’t want to make the jump. This blog is for these situations and maybe more I haven’t thought about.
Cooking multiple meals at once is genuinely harder than cooking one. We’ll try and make the multi-tasking, oven-juggling and ingredient wrangling as simple as possible and let you know what you can do in advance.
The Pepper Rage Principles
We set ourselves some creative constraints in order to qualify a pair of meals for inclusion here.
- The vegetarian meal and the non-vegetarian meal must be of similar “excitingness”. Yes, “excitingness” is entirely subjective and I am the judge of that. My site, my rules.
- The vegetarian meal is not a non-vegetarian meal minus the meat. If you take a feature piece of the meal out of the vegetarian piece, you must replace it with another feature. I find that often, vegetarian meals are seen as lesser, because they are perceived as “missing” something that the meat meal has. This rule tries to combat that perception.
- No pretend meats. It is not the job of the vegetarian option to pretend to be meat. You don’t need a cookery blog if that’s how you want to play things.
- There should be something which unites the two dishes, like a similar flavour, theme, presentation or preparation technique. I find it weird when guests have drastically different experiences of a meal and here, we are seeking to minimise this.