Rustic Tater Salad

Back in November, my mom picked me up a copy of Vegan Rustic Cooking: Through the Seasons at the gift shop inside the Rainbow Co-op in Jackson, Mississippi. We were driving home from New Orleans and we'd stopped there for vegan lunch at High Noon Cafe. When she saw this book, she asked if I'd ever heard of it. I hadn't. I thought I knew about almost every vegan cookbook (because I'm a huge cookbook nerd!), but this one passed my radar.

That may be because Diane White's seasonal vegan cookbook was published in the U.K. It's filled with traditional European recipes, like Cottage Pie, Baked Courgettes (that's zucchini in America), Yorkshire Pudding, and Bubble and Squeak. Thankfully, the measurements are in both metric and American equivalents, so I can understand the recipes.

I'm finally cracking the book open. I'm not sure why, but the first thing I made with this Potato & Chickpea Salad:

It's boiled new potatoes (from the downtown farmer's market) topped with chickpeas, radishes, snow peas, carrots, and plain soy yogurt. Weird, right? But delightfully refreshing and tasty. I'm not sure if this is a traditional European salad. There are a few more non-traditional recipes in the book, so it might not be. But it was very different from anything I've ever made.

The cool, creamy yogurt was a great topping for the lightly salted and peppered taters, and I loved the crunch of the radishes and snow peas. I served the salad with crusty garlic bread, as suggested in the book.

What's your favorite (or should I say, "favourite" with a "u") European recipe? I know I have some European blogger friends out there! What do you love to make?