Cooking: Vegetarian New England Boiled Dinner

Vegetarian New England Boiled Dinner

Every once and a while I get a craving for some beef-related dish that I grew up eating.  My father makes, hands down, the best New England Boiled Dinner I've ever tasted.  He's able to take the cheapest, toughest cuts of beef and somehow make them so tender they fall apart.  I've watched him make this since I was a kid and try as I might I never quite got it right.  I think it's because he has the patience to actually let that beef sit in the pot and just simmer all day.  I've never been that patient.

So the magical mystical ingredients in one of my favorite comfort foods are relatively simple:  beef, onion, carrots, celery, potatoes, and cabbage.  And salt and pepper.  That's it.

I've been having a hankering for my dad's boiled dinner- but
that's sort of out in my current vegetarian lifestyle, so I decided to try making a reasonable substitute.

Last weekend I made a huge batch of fat and sodium free vegetable stock that I froze.  I started with that and added some chopped onions, carrots, celery, red potatoes, and cabbage- nothing out of the ordinary for normal boiled dinner.  But then I broke from the norm and added a half cup of lentils and a quarter cup of pearl barley.

Normally in beef boiled dinner, the beef itself provides enough fat to the dish that you don't need to add anything else, but for my vegetarian version it had no fat at all so I needed to add some.  I could have used my faithful olive oil, but I wanted something a bit diffferent so I went with adding about a heaping tablespoon of Smart Balance margarine.  This had two benefits:  first, it added a little fat to the dish, and second, it has some salt in it and added to the overall flavor.

I simmered this until everything was tender, and served it with a couple of pieces of a chewy whole grain bread.

There is absolutely no substitute for my dad's boiled dinner, but I'm very very pleased with my vegetarian version.  It was filling and very flavorful, and it made a huge amount.  In fact, just prior to writing this I reheated a bowlful for lunch and it was just as good the second day.

(lol on a side note- look at how well my roses are lasting in the pic!  I clipped those off the bush almost five days ago, hardy little things aren't they?