Hug-a-vegetarian week.

I felt a little guilty at WIP last week at The Age when i went on a tirade about vegetarians being the scum of the earth, well, not quite the scum, but certainly tricky to cater for, and then found out that half of my clients were vegetarians! One said her boyfriend was generally a vegetarian but was exempt on holidays because he didn't think it was right to deprive himself of goodness on vacation. My lord. 

Anyway, last weekend i made a conscious effort to make something fantastic sans meat to impress the Age crew. It was damn hard. I spent a good hour scanning the Gourmet Traveler indexes and found a colourful looking number with pomegranate, walnuts, pistachios, parsley, spring onion and green olives. Sounds amazing but god only knows what abuse i would cop from the hardcores who insist that a vego requires chick peas, lentils or some other grain or beany bit to ensure they don't get faint and pass out, so i improvised. I doubled the quantities and cooked up 1.5 cups of course burghul. The perfect dressing combo of pomegranate molasses with walnut and olive oil and lemon juice tasted even better the day after. I even considered being becoming a vegetarian for 4 seconds. But then i thought about lamb back straps and spaghetti bolognese and shark fin dumplings and i thought better of it.