Pumpkin: It’s not ok

This is a guest blog written by one of my friends while procrastinating on her Masters.

I should probably begin this blog by acknowledging that I’m not a vegetarian – although my boyfriend is. However, I don’t eat a lot of meat and I generally try and eat mainly organic meat.

Because of my semi-vegetarianism, I buy a lot of vegetarian food in cafes and restaurants. When I do this I almost always find that the dish I have ordered contains pumpkin. Cafes and restaurants put pumpkin in the weirdest things when the dish is for vegetarians – dishes that meat eaters would never expect to find pumpkin in.

I have found pumpkin in vegetarian lasagna, fritatas, burritos, paninis, pizzas (why?), pasta dishes, salads and so on. I’ve even had pumpkin in a burger. Sometimes, they advertise the presence of the pumpkin, which is marginally ok. But lots of the time they just pop it in.

I feel very strongly about this issue because I hate pumpkin and have always done so. In fact, in general, I’m not a big fan of sweet, starchy foods such as kumara, taro, pumpkin and corn.

However, even if you like pumpkin, you should be annoyed about it’s incessant presence in NZ vegetarian food in cafes and restuarants. Why? Because it’s presence represents a larger trend in vegetarian food in New Zealand which is that it’s typically very poor value. This is because most NZ restaurants and cafes clearly think that when you’re serving a vegetarian meal you can just take the equivalent meat meal, remove the protein (which is almost always the most expensive raw ingredient) and replace it with either a) nothing or b) some really cheap vegetable.

The vegetable of choice is often pumpkin which is (I assume) because it’s really cheap and it’s also fairly bland. Kumara also gets heavily used for the same purpose. But this practise is NOT ok.

I still remember how annoyed I felt when I went to a pub (my brother chose the venue, he eats more meat than me) in Wellington a few years ago. My brother ordered a steak and it looked great. He paid about $25 for his meal and the steak looked as if it would have cost him $8 in the supermarket at least. It also came with chips and some veggies – fair enough value then, after all they have to pay the chef’s wages, the waiters etc as well.

I ordered the vegetarian pasta because it was the only veggie option on the menu. It cost $20 and what I got was a bowl of bog standard pasta (raw cost $0.50) and some tomatoey sauce which had clearly just come out of a Watties can (cost $1). They had added some onion and a few dried herbs (cost $0.50). There were no other vegetables in the sauce. The nutritional content of this meal was minimal. There wasn’t even cheese! I had to go and ask for some.

So repeat after me, it’s NOT ok to charge meat eaters $30 for a meal with meat, in which the meat cost say $8 and the other raw ingredients cost you another $5 (cost $13, surplus which goes to restaurant $17), and then charge a vegetarian $28 for a vegetarian meal in which all your raw ingredients cost just $5 (surplus to restaurant $23). The vegetarian is getting ripped off and, what’s more, they’re going to end up with serious nutritional deficiencies if you keep on feeding them pumpkin instead of protein.

Instead you should replace the meat with a vegetarian alternative of similar value and taste. So, for example, if you take out the steak then add haloumi! If you take out the chicken, then add eggs. If you remove the lamb then put in chickpeas AND some nuts instead. And NZ cafes – stop making vegetarian dishes that are intended to be savoury (like, not sweet) with pumpkin and kumara and other god-awful things in them! Shell out a few extra dollars and chuck in some cheese, or feta, or put some pine nuts in the salad on the side.

Because vegetarians know that you’re ripping them off and they eventually will find the one cafe/restaurant in their area which does good vegetarian food and never visit your premises again.

Vege Burger here again. Reading this reminded me of a time I went to dinner with a friend and the only vegetarian main was a vegetarian tart, which consisted of a sheet of pastry smothered with creme fraiche with a dull salad on top. More recently with that same friend I went out for dinner and the only thing listed in the menu that was vegetarian was a side dish of “white fungus”, what an age we live in.

Handmade Burgers

I was in Auckland yesterday with some friends who are locals and in the know about where to get a good vege burger. After hearing about my blog idea, they suggested a visit to Handmade, a snazzy, hip joint at 455 New North Road, Kingsland. Check our their website here.

This wasn’t just a good vege burger, this was an INSANELY good vege burger. I thought, screw the blog, I can’t comprehend anything ever topping this burger, it was that good, and I wasn’t even especially hungry.

Handmade had a range of vege burgers, I followed the Aucklanders in choosing the Vegan Falafel:

          “Panfried falafel with hummus & plum sauce, avocado, handmade salad & vege relish, all on             a fresh toasted bun”

Okay, the burger was $11.90, which is perhaps going to be one of the most costly burgers I will review, but keeping in mind this is a gourmet burger not your average fish and chip shop job. As I ended up in Auckland not intending to sample a burger I was without scales, but fair to say this burger was pretty hefty.

The only things that fell out of the burger while eating it were parts of burger, bits of falafel and salad. A bit of sauce even fell out of my friend’s burger and got her right down the leg. No fat or grease dripping out of this one.

Were there any downsides to this burger? $11.90 is kinda steep, that’s more expensive than the vege and vegan burgers from Burgerfuel, but this burger was pretty damn amazing. Furthermore, being a Hamilton resident means that Handmade Burgers will remain a novelty for me, something to sample and savour when I’m up in the big city. Needless to say, this burger gets a 9 out of 10.

For many of my friends at least, Hamilton etiquette dictates a visit to Wendy’s when in Auckland, but to the vegetarians, vegans and omnivores alike, you should try to check out Handmade Burgers, I’m sure their meat burgers are pretty sweet too. They even had a squeezy bottle of spicy sauce you could take back to your table to drown your burger in. Awesome.

Hsin Hsin Takeaways

An unglamorous cross-section of the Hsin Hsin vege burger.

My first review is of the vege burger from Hsin Hsin Takeaways at 117 Clyde Street. This is one of the two takeaway shops within a hundred meters of my house. I have actually had this burger before and on this occasion one of my friends bought the vege burger too, so I’ll include his thoughts also.

I have no idea what the opening hours are, but I do know that they are open by the time I am out of the house and stay open late into the night.

This burger was $3.20 and weighed 320 grams.

While waiting for the burger I skimmed through a copy of Interiors magazine, this was not at all exciting.

My initial impressions were surprisingly disappointing as half of the burger was cold.  My friend’s burger was thoroughly hot as was the previous burger I’ve had from here so I’m willing to let this one go as a random fluke. I did order chips with the burger, but surely this shouldn’t make a difference to whether what I receive is hot or not.

The burger was a bit drippy at the start but not overly soggy.

Ingredients from what I could work out were: cheese, tomato, egg, lettuce, sauce and pineapple.

My friend who usually doesn’t eat vege burgers, when asked for a comment replied “It tastes like a burger from a takeaway shop.” I suppose that was the most apt description of the vege burger from Hsin Hsin Takeaways. There was nothing special about this burger, but receiving a half cold burger wasn’t especially great either. It was adequately filling and I didn’t need many of the chips afterwards.

I would give this burger a 3 out of 10.  It would have scored higher if not for being half cold, that said, they do make good chips.

$4.99 Kitchen Scale

This is my first post in what I hope to be a fantastically delicious journey paved with vege burgers from takeaway restaurants across Hamilton.

Being both vegetarian and a fan of fish and chip takeaways, other than chips I will often buy a vege burger. I never really thought about the variation in what constitutes a vege burger until I recently moved house to within a hundred meters of two different takeaway stores. My previous local made an amazing vege burger and unfortunately for me, my new locals aren’t as substantial, albeit they are much cheaper. So I decided, what the hell, I’m going to continue to shop around, even travelling far from home around the city as I exhaust my closest ones, and better yet, I will record and blog about my experiences, the pros and cons, the yum and the yuck.

I must add at this point that my writing of this post was interrupted as I joined two of my flatmates in investigating a strange, almost ticking sound in the house, after some time of walking around room to room, inside and outside. Not sure what exactly it was in the end, but agreed we think it is coming from the fuse box.

Anyway, back to the vege burgers.

So earlier this afternoon, for $4.99 from The Warehouse I bought a small set of green kitchen scales, the words “Kitchen Scale”  aptly placed smack dab in the center of the unit. I aim to weigh each burger as I go to see if there are any interesting variations, and if not, to at least pad each post with inane statistics about the mass of burgers.

Well, that’s it, now I’m set. The next post will be the first vege burger review.