 The vegetarian diet simply means full abstinence from meat. People go
on this diet for various reasons. It can be for health, for varieties'
sake or for religious purposes.
Just as spices are the mainstay of Nyonya cooking, so wheat dough is
indispensable to vegetarian cooking. As the choice of ingredients is
very limited, the wheat dough or gluten appears in most dishes. It has a
chewy consistency and is versatile. It can be fried with vegetable, with
noodles, cooked in soup, in sweet and sour sauce, in curries or shaped
to look like barbecued pork, roast duck, abalone etc. It can also be
skewered as satay and grilled.
All soya bean products run second to the wheat dough in importance in
vegetarian diet. They range from liquids like soya sauce (light, dark or
thick) to solids like bean curds. Other ingredients acceptable to
vegetarian diet are all kinds of vegetable (dried or fresh), all kinds
of nuts, all kind of flour, all kinds of non-animal cooking oils and all
kind of unusual ingredients like dried mushrooms, dried cloud ear
fungus, lotus seeds, dried water lily stems, water chestnut, gingko
nuts, bamboo shoots and Szechuan mustard stems, to name a few.
In spite of the taboo on meat, vegetarian food is delicious and
fascinating. Today, it is not restricted to the religious orders. Health
enthusiasts seek its nutritious value and hence, we provide a variety of
vegetarian recipes for you to try on.
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