My Foray into Vegetarian Cooking

I'm not a big meat eater. I'm not vegetarian, per se, but I prefer to keep my meat servings quite small. My husband is the opposite as he enjoys larger servings of steak, chicken, anything with protein. However, as I was cooking only for myself one evening I thought I'd give a vegetarian recipe a try.

I started with some chopped peppers. Look at the beautiful colors in this dish. I love how pretty the yellow, orange, red, and green peppers look all chopped up and intermingling.

To the peppers I added some chopped onion and garlic. I also chopped up a jalapeno pepper. The majority of heat from jalapeno peppers resides in the seeds and membrane so I scraped most of those out before dicing it up and adding it to the mixture in the pie pan.

I then drizzled on a little EVOO (extra virgin olive oil), added some kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, and tossed them all together. Then the pan went in the oven for about 10 minutes to lightly roast the vegetables.

Ta-dah! These were lightly roasted... barely a hint of brown on the edges of some of those onion pieces.


I topped these with a semi-drained 14 oz can of diced tomatoes. The recipe called for them to be drained but I just did the "open the can, hold the lid on, and tip the can over" system to drain the tomatoes. Next time I'll use a strainer or colander to drain them properly as excess water is a bad thing here.

I then topped the tomatoes with some chopped feta cheese.

Then some rolled out puff pastry went on top and it all went back in the oven for another 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes it looked like this. The puff pastry was done to perfection.

Then the whole she-bang got flipped over onto a plate and in many ways resembled a pizza.

And the result?.... meh. With some changes it could be quite good but as it was, not so great.

Lessons learned or changes I would make include:

1. The aforementioned draining of tomatoes. I didn't drain them as fully as I should have so after a few bites I noticed a pool of tomato-water on the bottom of the plate so I tilted it over the sink and let quite a bit of water drain away. It would have been best to get rid of this before it soaked the puff pastry.
2. Garlic. I chopped the garlic as the recipe called for but next time I will mince it. Some pieces were too large to eat and I ended up picking them out.
3. Feta cheese seemed like such a good idea when I was reading the recipe but as it turns out it was the weakest part of the dish. The feta did not melt. Instead it heated up and became the consistency of scrambled eggs. I do not care for scrambled eggs but even if I did I don't think they would go very well in this dish. I would definitely substitute another type of cheese for feta... preferably one that melts well or is a little smoother.
4. Flavor-wise this was a little bland, even with the jalapeno pepper. The only spices called for are salt and pepper. I'd kick it up with any number of spices or herbs. Any spices used in Italian cooking would go well. Or how about some chili powder? Vegetarian cooking shouldn't equal boring.
5. A note about the puff pastry. The box includes 3 methods for thawing... 2 hours at room temp, 4 hours in the fridge, or 2 minutes in the microwave. I used the microwave method for this recipe and I was not impressed with the results. It thawed unevenly (warm/cooked on the outside while still cold/frozen in the middle). This made for difficulty in rolling out and working with the pastry although the taste in the end was fine. Given the option, thawing in the fridge or at room temperature yields the best results.

So, would I make this again? Probably not. I could do so with the above changes but there is a whole world out there of vegetarian dishes I'd like to try. I would make any number of those before coming back to this one.