help! need a recipe to impress my vegetarian girl

I love risotto with crimini mushrooms cooked in. Fresh, cooked peas are a nice addition at the very end after the cheese. You can saute other herbs in with the onions up front, whatever you like. It's a very forgiving dish.

So I'm going to suggest the thing that I've been making far too often lately, which is pizza from scratch. Here's the recipe I use, taken from the Bread Bible, which I recommend if you're into bread:

Put either a baking stone or an upside-down baking sheet into the oven, preheat it to 475. You want to have this warming up for at least an hour before you put the pizza in.

Whisk 3/4 cup-plus-1 tbs flour with 1/2 tsp yeast and 1/2 tsp sugar. (You want to use "instant" or "rapid rise" or "bread machine" yeast, not "active dry" yeast.) Whisk in 1/2 tsp salt. Then add 1/3 cup of room-temperature water. Stir with a wooden spoon -- it will quickly form a clumpy dough. Mix in the bits of flour that stay at the bottom of the bowl if you can, but you want to work the dough as little as possible. Put the dough into a bowl that has some olive oil into it, and let it sit for at least an hour.

Make out with your girlfriend for an hour.

Then, on either a pizza sheet or another cookie sheet, place the ball of dough and the olive oil. Smear the olive oil out to grease the sheet. The start pressing the dough out into a rough circle. It'll be about 10 inches across. If the dough tears, knead the tear back together. If it won't stay spread out, let it rest for 10 minutes before giving it another go. Either way, let it rest for a while once you get it into shape.

Put the pizza (and sheet) onto the baking stone (or sheet) and cook for 5 minutes.

Then take the pizza out and put basically whatever toppings you want on it. You can experiment with making a tomato sauce, or you can just put olive oil or pesto on. Add maybe some vegetables or some cheese. Whatever you have, whatever you want.

Then pop it back in the oven for 5 minutes. The crust will be golden (might crisp up a bit at the edges) and the cheese should be melted. All done!

It's ridiculously easy to do and you can have it on the table in 90 minutes, with 60 of those minutes devoted to a make-out session (or perhaps to making a small salad or some sort of dessert).

This is a 10" thin-crust pizza, which is just right for two, especially if there's a salad or side dish or bread or whatever.

Here's a classic meal — baked sweet potatoes, a pot of mustard greens, a pan of cornbread. Damn, I just made myself hungry.

Right there with you - I am so craving risotto since I posted that.

DEVILED CORN AND TOMATO PUDDING
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3-3/4 cups fresh corn kernels, cut from 7 to 8 ears corn; or frozen corn, thawed
3/4 cup low-fat milk, evaporated skim milk or plain soy or rice milk
1/4 cup cornstarch
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons brown sugar or honey
Salt, to taste
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1 tablespoon butter or vegetable margarine
1 large onion, chopped
1 large tomato, diced
2 to 3 large leaves basil, finely chopped
Yields 4 to 6 servings.
Preheat the oven to 350 F. Spray 4 to 6 (8-ounce) timbales with cooking spray.

Combine the corn, milk, cornstarch, eggs, brown sugar, salt and pepper in a food processor and buzz to a textured puree. Transfer to a medium bowl and set aside.

Heat the butter over medium-high heat in a large skillet. Add the onion and saute for 4 minutes. Add the tomato, raise the heat and cook until most of the liquid has evaporated, 1 to 3 minutes. Remove from the heat. Stir in the basil.

Divide the tomato mixture among the timables. Top with the corn mixture. Place the filled timbales in a large pan, place in the oven and pour hot water into the large pan, around the timbales.
Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, or until golden and firmed up. Let stand for 5 minutes, then serve.

I used to do one that was very mushroom-heavy, but you could probably substitute a different vegetable - broccoli if it was cut small enough - or beans of some description, I think haricot beans might be best? Anyway, take a tin of chopped tomatoes and add a bay leaf, some oregano and your veg of choice cubed/cut quite small. This is going to reduce down for 90 minutes or so at a low heat till it's very thick (as I said, depending on the veg you might need to pre-cook this). In the meantime, make some mashed potato and add some flour to it. Use this mixture to line a dish and blind bake it (although it doesn't rise, it just crisps up and browns, so you don't need baking beans) for about 30 minutes. You can then add the tomato mixture to the dish and bake for a bit further, 20 minutes or so. I never added cheese, but I suppose you could if you wanted.

I'm really looking forward to her next book, which is about cornbread — not just cornbread-cornbread, but tortillas, tamales, spoonbreads, anywhere corn turns into bread.

One good vegetarian recipe in the DHH cookbook is Eggs in Hell, a spicy thickish tomato-based stew/sauce that you pull indentations into and poach eggs in, serving up one or two eggs and plenty of sauce over rice or pasta.