About this collection of recipes. And why?
Here is the place where I should write something deep about love, home, nature, or something like that, but let’s keep it real. Boredom is the genesis of The Shoddy Vegetarian. That and the wish to learn some HTML. And what better way to do it than by building something? The choice fell on a cooking blog because it’s what first comes to mind, but also because I like cooking and spend a fair amount of time doing it.
From a practical point of view, I hope to profit from this collection of recipes in a few ways. First, I often end up cooking the same things over and over, and I keep having to look for recipes, hoping to find again the one I liked last time. At the same time, I forget what I cook, and I am often out of ideas. Then, often, recipes are written in a way that doesn’t fit me. I’m not very well organized, and it doesn’t come naturally to me to front-load all the work. So, I find myself often in the situation where the recipe asks me to do something right now, and I’m not ready to do it. I want to write these recipes in a way to minimize that risk.
Since a long time I have been interested in food from all over the world, but for a long time, most of what I cooked was Spanish/Western. Then, in 2019, I became a vegetarian (for silly ideological reasons), and it became very fast clear that if you are vegetarian and Spanish then you are dammed to eating prodigious amounts of pisto, salmorejo, tortilla, and a couple of other things. Nowerdays I cook a lot of middle eastern, Indian, or Asian food. But I am Spanish. So, please don't be horrified if I commit all sorts of sacrileges. I guess that one could say that there is a lot of cultural appropiation here, but this is not anything I can be bothered to think about.
By the way, the picture in the background is from a tree in my garden, in Rennes.