I wish to cook a girl a meal. She’s vegetarian. I know how to cook, I do, but I’m trying to find something interesting and impressive instead of my usual “tortellini with homemade pesto” deal.
I’d like to go for a meal with a few courses. Alcohol suggestions would also be welcome.
As would good luck wishes. 
Well, I’d do a little 3-course meal that would be simple enough to do, but still impressive and delicious.
For a first course, a salad of mixed baby greens, crumbled goat cheese, candied pecans, and a balsamic viniagrette. The candied pecans and viniagrette you can make days ahead and are simple to do.
For a main course, I like the idea of a ratatouille with pasta–it’s more interesting than your basic pasta sauce, and it can be cooking away in the oven/stovetop while you’re boiling your pasta and eating your first course.
For dessert, one of my favorite easy desserts to make around this time is to take a fresh peach and slice in half. Sprinkle the cut edge with a bit of sugar, then put into a hot skillet with plenty of butter. Let it sizzle for a minute or two, then pop into the oven until the peach is heated through and tender. Put into a bowl and top with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Or, you can easily make things such as brownies or a simple berry cobbler and top with ice cream. Heck, anything’s better with a scoop of ice cream.
With the first two courses, a lighter bodied red wine like a Beaujolais, or something along the lines of a Syrah or Pinot Noir would be nice.
Good Luck!
First step, Andy, is to determine the extent of her vegism; nothing w/ legs but fish, eggs, and milk products are alright, or no meat but animals products are alright, or no animal products whatsoever - a VEGAN.
I don’t eat anything w/ legs but I eat animal products; I call myself a vegetarian to save explainig these things to people and being handed a steak at bbq’s.
If she eats fish, salmon filets are very easy to make, especially if you have a gas stove w/ broiler or an outdoor bbq. Throw some asparagus and cubed potatoes on at the same time, buy a cut fruit plate and put it on your own plate for nibbling beforehand w/ cheese cubes, and get one of those caesar salad kits from the grocer as well. Pick up some nice little cornbreads or pitas.
Skip the fish if she’s no meat but ok w/ the products. Add small cut hard-boiled egg and tomatoes to the caesar salad and boil w/ some gnocchi, which are kind of like tortellini but made w/ potato instead of pasta. Broil the asparagus, not the cut spuds. Slice up a red and a yellow sweet pepper and broil them w/ the asparagus.
No animal anything whatsoever? Go on the web and find a recipe for vegan chili; it’s mostly spicy bean soup, and it will still go w/ the gnocchi and salad and veggies and fruit, minus the cheese and egg of course. Instead of butter, use roasted garlic on the bread. You’ll find a recipe for that on the web, too, you can do it right on your grill outside or broiler.
If any of this sounds right, email me and I’ll give you particulars on what to cook how and when. I applaud you for looking for a way to show her you’re listening and trying to get to know her.
To clarify, she doesn’t eat meat or fish but eggs, butter, and cheese are fine.
Thanks so far- I shall ponder my options.
You could try some stir fry tofu:
Get a brick of firm tofu, sesame oil, soy sauce, chili sauce (I like Sriracha), and a selection of vegetables. You might be able to find a stir fry mix in the freezer case, otherwise some good choices are broccoli, snap peas, regular peas, corn, cauliflower, carrots, cabbage - basically stuff that can withstand a bit of intense heat.
Cut everything into bite sized pieces. Heat up your wok on medium-high (if for some bizzare reason you don’t have a wok, use a wide frying pan) with a little sesame oil. When that’s hot, put the tofu in and cook until it’s a little brown and has a firm skin. Then toss in your veggies, add the soy and chili sauces and some pepper to taste, and cook for a couple minutes, depending how crunchy you like your veggies.
My favorite veggie meal: eggplant parmesan.
At least that’s how it worked for me
Personally, I wouldn’t go for tofu. Tofu can be nice if it’s cooked well, but it’s really horrible if it’s not and isn’t all that easy to cook. I still haven’t quite got the knack for it. Also, cooking stirfries as your early attempts at vegetarian cooking is such a cliche.
There are a couple secrets to good vegetarian cooking. The first and foremost is this: You are not making up for the lack of meat. If you do not follow this rule you will likely not achieve better than decent vegetarian cooking. (There are of course exceptions to this, but I haven’t come across many).
Secondly, you need to think more about the flavours of what goes in to your cooking. Unlike cooking with meat, your basic ingredients don’t have quite as strong an inherent flavour, but are instead more subtle (this applies less if you’re using cheese in your food - I don’t, so this advice will be coloured by that). There are two good ways to do this: You can be generous with the spices, or you can use a variety of different flavours which support eachother. The former is easiest, and does produce some rather nice results, but the latter tends to produce the best results when it works.
Anyway, that’s enough with the general advice. Here are some more specific suggestions you can try.
First of all, you can’t go wrong with roast vegetables. Almost every meal you make can be supported with a nice range of roasted vegetables. Peppers, onions, mushrooms and courgettes are particularly good. Also lightly roasted parsnips and carrots have a heartier, less exotic, appeal. (Actually, if you’re doing something which they would suit, do try the latter two - parsnips in particular are underappreciated but really really good). Just lightly coat them in olive oil, mix in a bit of salt and spices. Black pepper is good for carrots and parsnips. A little bit of crushed chilli and sugar is good with sweet peppers.
Secondly, despite what you may believe, salads are not boring. There are a wide variety of salads you can do, and they can serve as just about any course of a meal: Main dish, starters, side dishes, desserts.
Here’s an example of a nice main dish salad:
Ingredients: Wild rice, butternut squash, pine nuts (I’m afraid I cook by eye rather than measuring out quantities), lemon
Boil the wild rice in water or stock until cooked, roast the squash (I tend to cut them in half, scoop out the part you don’t eat, lightly coat the surface in olive oil and roast face down on a baking tray) and lightly dry-fry the pine nuts until slightly browned. When these are cooked, mix them all together and add lemon juice and salt to taste. At a guess you probably want about two cups of brown rice to a butternut squash.
Possible alterations: Sweet potato works quite well in this. If you do add it, don’t bake the potato. Peel it, dice it into cm cubes, and roast as described above. If you add sweet potato you might want to think about adding dill. Cannelini beans also work instead of or in addition to the pine nuts, but from the context you probably want something a bit lighter so I’d avoid those for now.
This also works well as a more traditional seeming main dish (it’s not really a salad any more) if you replace the wild rice with cous cous.
Another type of salad that works well is basically an augmentation of the traditional green salad. Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, whatever else you normally put in a salad (I like mushrooms and chickory for example). Then add anything else you have to hand. In particular add a couple roast vegetables. Peppers are good. Add things like sundried tomatoes, nuts, apple, bananna (no, really. The combination of sweet foods with the other things is great). Feta cheese is a good addition to salad as well, particularly if you’ve also got sundried tomato and bananna in there, although it can dominate if you’re not careful. Avocado and artichoke hearts are good as well. It really depends what you have and what you’re willing to spend on a salad. 
Home made bread is always good, and much easier than one might expect. I’m a big fan of sundried tomato and herb breads.
I’m afraid I’ve never quite mastered the art of matching desserts to my meals, and I don’t drink, so I can’t help much with finishing off the above as a grand multi-course meal. That being said, a simple fruit finishing can often be nice, especially if you include some nice semi-exotic fruits like mangoes and peaches. Served with a good vanilla ice cream this can be just as nice as most fancier desserts.
Oh, not directly related to the cooking advice, but if your homemade pesto has parmesan in it, have you checked that the parmesan is suitable for vegetarians? Parmesan is one of those cheeses that often isn’t. The same applies if you end up using feta cheese.
Do let us know how it goes.
I love tortellini with homemade pesto! Anyway, I don’t have specific recipes to offer, but this vegetarian has repeatedly been pleased by the cookbooks of Jeanne Lemlin (most have “Vegetarian Pleasures” in the title). My wife, who is the cook in the family, discovered Lemlin a few years ago and we’ve been eating very well since.
If you’re into cooking homemade pasta, you could try a squash filled ravioli. I adapted a recipe for pumpkin ravioli and used a butternut squash. The ravioli were served in a butter-sage sauce. It was very delicious.
How about a vegetarian curry? If you already have a decent curry recipe, just replace the chunks of meat with a firm vegetable, like potato or sweet potato…voila, vego cuisine.
Yeah, well I usually include a couple of vegetables called “fish sauce” and “pork loin”. 
Or perhaps a simple meal of redneck vegetarian cuisine: grilled cheese sandwich, side of fries, and a beer.
The secret to using tofu is to use it in Asian-style cooking. Do not ever attempt to use it as a ‘meat substitute’ in Western cooking, because that will make everyone blow chunks.
Recipes? I’ll suggest a chili n leek dish.
Start by cutting half a block of tofu into the usual small pieces, and marinate in 1/2 cup soy sauce (not that dark stinky crap, but a light Kikkoman sushi sauce).
When you’re ready to start cooking, make golden tofu: pour a lot of oil into a pan and fry that tofu (without the soy marinade) until it’s golden brown and a touch crispy on all sides, then remove and throw it on some paper towel. You’ve probably got too much oil in your pan now, so dump that somewhere it won’t catch fire.
Now, because you looked ahead at this recipe, you can put your pan (or wok, why not go crazy) on medium heat and cook half your thumb of finely chopped ginger root along with some sweet-sour Thai chili sauce (or a pair of leetle teeny super hot peppers). When that’s going well throw in one large or two medium leeks, sliced thinly (go ahead, include some of that green stuff on the top for colour) for a couple minutes.
At this point, because you’re prescient and had everything ready, you throw in the soy sauce, to which you added half an hour ago 1/2 cup of white wine or vermouth, 2 or 5 tablespoons honey (didja use chili sauce or a chili pepper?), and a tablespoon of flour and stir everything around until the leeks are good n tender, then throw the tofu back in until it’s heated.
Serve over basmati rice n enjoy!
I posted a delicious (and easy) butternut squash soup recipe here.
Good luck with the meal, and enjoy!
“…take that where you will. You’re on your own with that one; I don’t want to be a part of it.” - Suzanne Westenhoefer
p.s. good luck, sweetums. At least one of us should be getting some at all times.
A fancy-schmancy vegetarian meal? But that sounds so… so… gay!!
Seriously, though, if it wasn’t 1 AM here I’d give some suggestions, but my brain shut down about 15 minutes ago. When are you planning your feast? Maybe I’ll do some thinking tomorrow.
Is there a style/culture/theme/etc that you’re imagining for this meal?
I’m thinking it’ll be next Saturday. I’m going for the advance preparation thing, you know?
By the way, Matt, since this is the girl I’ve been referencing in my livejournal, you might have to be the one getting some. This is possibly the most convoluted romantic situation I have ever been in, and that’s a fairly impressive statement.