Hello, and please meet my very first vegetarian crush - the one and only Sarah Brown

Well I've finally decided to blog, and after watching a Streep incarnation of Julia Child I was inspired to take down my cookbooks and actually use them.  Well, that's what I bought them for, wasn't it?  As I began to pour through them and peruse the mouth watering recipes (and some not so......  I never truly knew how much fat there was in a traditional liver based pate because I never actually made one or bothered to look at a recipe for one before) I realised that there had been moments when cookbooks had ended up becoming some of the most treasured possessions, not only on my bookshelves, but in my life.  Unlike your favourites novels, movies or toys (we'll get into that little aside later), cookbooks are items that you will touch again and again to find comfort and solace when nothing else can quite bring it to you.  

I hope to be able to bring to life for you some of the people that inspired me to create some amazing gastronomical experiences and, of course, some terrible disasters.  Although my temperament (at times!) can be equated with that of the arsiest chef, I will always see myself as a cook and anyway, I lack the proper credentials and possibly the courage and imagination to ever truly do away with the recipes altogether.  I am, after 43 years of living, now able to cook some of my favourite recipes from memory and I can even modify them (usually when I don't have the required ingredients to hand) into something that I can almost call my own - but I doubt I will ever be known as a "chef" and to be honest, I don't think I really care.  My perfect representation of cooking will always be a beautiful smiling woman with a great desire to comfort and please those around her with her delightful culinary skills - as sexist as that sounds, I guess the main reason for that is that I equate cooking with my mother.

I will touch upon my formative years later on in this blog and how much I was influenced by my mother's germanic roots.  I can say with some certainty that the German love of including meat into nearly every meal (seriously, they even have a meat salad.... who has a salad that is made almost entirely out of meat??) is what caused me to decide to become a vegetarian at age 18.  I had wanted to do this earlier, in fact when I was a boy I had wanted to become a farmer, until somebody told me that farmers actually killed the animals that they were rearing.  I switched to teacher pretty quickly after that. My mother had always said that when I reached the magical age of adulthood, then I could truly decide to become a vegetarian.  I waited until my parents booked a trip to Germany and then, left home alone with my own menu's to plan and prepare, I totally gave up the meat.  The day before this I ate my last hamburger, my last half a chicken (or so I believed it to be then), my last pieace of flake (again, I've eaten some since) and I think I also managed to cram in some bacon in there somewhere too (that, along with the hamburger, I have never consumed since).
  
I am now no longer a true vegetarian.  Some people might call me a semi-demi veg or whatever nonsensical name they can think of -  I just tell people I will only eat what I can actually kill.  I've thought about it quite extensively - fish and fowl are fair game, but mammals of any variety are totally out.  I think I could probably still kill a rabbit (we used to shoot them on our Australian property when I was younger) but I'm not sure I could actually ever bring myself to gut and eat it.  I am fairly certain I would not be able to cope with all that blood.  That and the fact that I watched Watership Down and tend to anthropomorphise mammals a little too readily.

So my very first cookbook that I completely fell in love with has got to be Sarah Brown's "Vegetarian Kitchen".  Whereas my Home Economics textbooks were all about ingredients of the meat variety, this was the first cookbook that had a full 20+ pages dedicated to "The Store Cupboard", with the most imaginative color illustrations of every grain, bean, spice, herb, dried fruit and exotic vegetable that a budding vegetarian, especially one growing up in Australia, would need to become aware of.  The picture of Sarah on the front, her radiant smile complete with eighties hairstyle will always be the perfect representation of a happy housewife.  Her book alone taught me everything that I failed to learn from Mrs Jenkins back in my high school days - whereas Mrs Jenkins made me aware of the five basic food groups, Sarah Brown introduced me to good sources of Vitamin A, Calcium and Potassium.  Her charts at the back of the book are still an invaluable resource, although I must admit I now do tend to google like the rest of them.  I think this is why this amazing book is no longer in print, although you can still order it, for a penny (plus postage) from Amazon.  I highly recommend you do.