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Add MSG to all your veg to make them taste good. 😛
The secret to good vegetarian food is MSG ... try it ... that's what they use in the far east. 😛
Recipes: Curries !! Herbs & spices become more important, fresh produce too. A lot of meat based cooking is lazy just having the meat as the star of the show. So much great Italian too.
I would echo what Jambalaya says above. Rather than trying to find substitutes which will mimic the flavour and taste of meat, focus on cooking and eating really good food which just happens not to have any meat in it.
It's no accident that Italian and Indian cuisines have really good tasting vegetarian food. Meat was/is expensive and most great cuisines are based on peasant cooking, which has always made the very best of what is both available, e.g. in season, and cheap.
As Jamabalya also says, good quality fresh produce is even more important when you strip out meat and are often relying on fewer ingredients to provide the flavours and taste sensations. For example, buy the best quality tomatoes, especially if they are the main part of a dish, and use fresh herbs rather than dried (except for oregano).
[tedious]1 reply before someone said bacon 🙄 [/tedious]
Yes I'm aware of that thanks.
I included it at end of what I wrote, because that's what literally everyone used to say to me for the seven years or so that I didn't eat meat (hardly)
🙄
most great cuisines are based on peasant cooking, which has always made the very best of what is both available, e.g. in season, and cheap.
And some great stuff is based on the exact opposite.
Old/bad wine, stale cheese and stale bread.
Mix it up and have a traditional Tyrolean fondue, delicious ! 🙂
I'm a part-time veggie. When I am at home it is easy, Mrs BGL is committed. When I am travelling for work it is harder, if pushed I tend to go for fish but sometimes there really isn't much choice if you want to eat a decent meal.
Since its only every once in a while I don't worry about it. The main benefit is I very rarely (like once every 6 months) eat cheap processed meat.
I don't miss bacon at all; a decent fish dish is what I will cave in for.
The two books by Anna Jones are brilliant. Never had a disappointing meal from them.
Interesting discussion and also some great advice, cheers all!
Must explore with more spices. Veggie curry sounds nice.
Tend to ignore meat substitutes. I do like humus and falafels though and other Moroccon style food.
Curries are great fun. And can be extraordinarily tasty and varied. My current favourite is cauli and coconut curry served with a killer rice dish (premium basmati, caraway seeds, crispy caramelised onion, cinnamon stick, clove, saffron and cardamom)
On the subject of 'satisfying' veggie food - I've been bugging Mrs MR to furnish me with a recipe for her esteemed puy/dark-green lentil and mushroom casserole/bolognaise-y thing. It gets used in a number of subsequent recipes, ie topped with mustard/horseradish mashed taters as a pie, or with spaghetti, etc.
Disclaimer - I eat meat, fish, cheese. She's veg(g)an.
Saying that, I must eat on average 70-90% vegan food these last few years and enjoy it massively. Love food, love cooking. Have learned a lot. Us Brits often have a weird thing against veg/wholefoods. I was raised on soggy tasteless veg, everything boiled. Meat was the only tasty thing on the plate. Took me a long time to learn that you have to love cooking veg, buy (or better still grow) good stuff where available, not rubbish, value it and prepare with care to combine bring the flavours out, just as with good meat dishes.
She still won't come up with That Lentil Thing recipe though - stating it was 'different every time'. I know one thing - it tastes plate-licking good, and hearty. I will make a supreme effort to get it and post it up here next week. There's also a vegan 'parmesan' on the agenda, made from processed cashews and some other stuff.
When someone asks 'what does she eat?' - you can more or less guarantee the enquirer probably eats variations of just few different meats, potatoes, cheese, supermarket bread etc with some obligatory peas or carrots for a bit of colour at the side of the plate.. I understand that irony as was raised on just that. Everything was grey and beige. When a diet/cooking repertoire is already so narrow you may of course imagine that a veggie/vegan's repertoire must naturally be limited to the same tiny range of foodstuffs - yet minus meat! 'Who can survive on peas and carrots'? Lettuce even?
Don't all leaves/shoots/fungi/beans/roots/grains/fruits/nuts/brassicas/bean-curds/vegetable/oils/seeds/etc etc etc all taste the same? Well - no they don't. And they also taste differently when cooked in differing ways. Does coconut taste like chestnut? Does pearl barley taste like rice? Does walnut oil taste like sunflower oil? Do sprouting beans taste like beansprouts? Yams taste like new potatoes? Bombay potatoes taste like cauliflower bhaji? Does roasted purple carrot and fennel taste like (frozen) boiled orange carrots and peas? No.
OP - once you start combining selections of the thousands of foodstuffs and spices available to a veggie- you can access more different recipes than you could cook in a lifetime! We have some older veggie friends who cook mostly old-school seasonal veg wholefood recipes, majority of imgredients British/locally sourced. And it is good. Simple and hearty. They taught me how nut-roasts from a supermarkets are deservedly scorned . It's like a kind of Paxo stuffing! The real home-made nut-roasts can be addictively tasty and filling with excellent texture and moisture. A staple. A bit like haggis if I had to describe it.
Today was lazy and gobbed a Morrisons 'The Best' cheese and onion pasty and a Subway salad bowl
Mmmm food.
*Edit*. Gulp, sorry for the essay 😳
I was starting typing a lengthy reply to that but really, it's just *applause* from beginning to end.
Marry one - then the decision is made for you
Ha, I did. Not an idealogical veggie though, I'm still omnivore, I just eat meat out rather than cooking it at home. Have gone for weeks/months as veggie though, usually a January or lent thing.
Indian food is key, a huge proportion of India is pure veg and there's a massive variety across the country. It's not all spicy curries. Look for Middle Eastern recipies too, lots of good veg ones that work well.
What was good for us at the time was the wife signing up for Gousto meal box things, we got two new veg recipies a week with the ingredients, so no faffing about or remembering to get that special thing needed in the weekly shop. We stopped after about 6 months as the veg ones were getting samey but we have a dozen great recipies that we cook regularly now.
Marry one - then the decision is made for you
About to marry one..
I've been vegetarian (well pescatarian as I convinced her to eat fish) for about 4 years now. Had a couple of slip ups from not reading the ingredients on a few things which caught me off guard (gelatin in store bought cake!?!).
Highly recommend Ella's cook books/website for "special" meals, the ingredients come across as a bit pompous/expensive BUT they're used across the book as base ingredients : https://deliciouslyella.com/
Favourite ones are:
[url= http://www.lakeland.co.uk/r80971/Deliciously-Ell a's-Black-Bean-Burgers]Black Bean Burgers[/url]
[url= https://deliciouslyella.com/sweet-potato-and-chickpea-stew/ ]Sweet potato & chickpea curry stew[/url]
Being vegetarian is easier now than it's ever been with supermarkets producing their own brand vegetarian stuff (burgers/sausages etc) plus quorn & Linda McCartney have really upped their game over the last year or so. For instance Linda McCartney do a pulled pork burger, hard to distinguish between it and what I remember from my meat eating days.
When in uni (12ish years ago now), in the context of geography/demographics studies we were taught that eating meat helps reduce our (detrimental) environmental impact. This was based on a comparison of the square hectares needed to feed an individual if hunter-gatherer or vegetarian or meat-eaterEither you went to a really shit uni or you didnt understand what they were telling you that day!!!
Or he forgot what they actually said.....
(well pescatarian as I convinced her to eat fish)
Why? Out of interest
Get into cooking Indian food, there are loads of brilliant ways to not eat meat that way. Veggie samosas, chana gobi, tarka dahl... om nom nom.
Lentils are a really good way to thicken a sauce and make it satisfying too, sometimes purely veg-based stuff can taste a little bit 'thin' so I'm starving again in half an hour! 😆
Marry one - then the decision is made for you
Definitely easier if the whole household is doing the same thing. I was veggie for years before getting together with Mrs B, she was omnivore. Lasted about a year before I went back to omnivorism. A few years later she went veggie and is now vegan. I'm now veggie again and going vegan (there was an awful lot of dairy in my diet so that's needed a fair bit of thought.)
Get some good cook books and do some research. It's a great opportunity to think a bit more about the stuff you shovel down. There's a whole new world of different ingredients that you've probably never even heard of to explore which likely far outweighs the stuff you now don't eat.
Find it amusing when people question whether I'm getting enough protein/calcium/whatever yet have not a clue as to the nutritional content of their own diets 🙂
Vegetarians- how did you make the transition? How long did it take? Any tips and guides?
Do your research. Plan your meals. Just stop buying stuff that isn't veggie/vegan. It's so much easier with the choices available these days than it was 20 years ago!
It's no accident that Italian and Indian cuisines have really good tasting vegetarian food. Meat was/is expensive and most great cuisines are based on peasant cooking, which has always made the very best of what is both available, e.g. in season, and cheap.
+1
And Malvern Rider's post is bang on the money.
I should add, after reading the pescatarian comments, that I eat fish too (although that may soon stop). I stopped eating meat for ethical reasons, but worked around the Med and in European mountains for a few years; getting non-meat food was pretty difficult if eating out. Even now we only eat fish once or twice a week, but I do appreciate the irony or still eating it, especially with certain breeds being over-fished.
When in uni (12ish years ago now), in the context of geography/demographics studies we were taught that eating meat helps reduce our (detrimental) environmental impact. This was based on a comparison of the square hectares needed to feed an individual if hunter-gatherer or vegetarian or meat-eaterEither you went to a really shit uni or you didnt understand what they were telling you that day!!!
The uni I went to is well respected. Perhaps I did misunderstand.
I've had my morning coffee so am happy for you enlighten me.
I've had my morning coffee so am happy for you enlighten me.
At the most simplistic level of thinking of course the vegetarian diet is the most calorifically efficient (what has the greatest calorific value - the 18 month old beef cow or the food it ate over it's lifetime) but obviously it's a bit more complicated than that as what we choose to eat instead of meat does not have the same environmental impact to be grown and delivered as the food fed to the animals. Apparently there has been some research in the states recently that claims a vegetarian diet has more impact than the average American meat eaters diet but it's been widely criticised by others.
[quote="cokie"]I think it's just the protein aspect I'm still working on. Rather easy to get fat and carbs in your diet. I've noticed my muscle recovery is suffering a bit.Massive red herring, unless you are training [i]hard[/i] for 10-12 or more hours a week you'll get all you need in your diet. And if you are doing that sort of training, I'd hope that diet was on your list of "things to think about".
It's more likely the change in your diet rather than a lack of available protein. One bonus of changing to veggie, is you will look at your food more carefully and eat less shit.
[quote="kerley"]Thought a few more people would have cared by now.Whut? Care enough to get free range meat, eggs, bacon, fish and so on. Eat a fair bit of veggie food anyway (probably half our weekly meals are veggie).
what has the greatest calorific value - the 18 month old beef cow or the food it ate over it's lifetime
Ah yes, but - cows and sheep can eat grass, which we can't - and that grows happily on its own.
Which goes back to the question of how the beef is raised in the first place. Comparing intensive corn fed US beef is one thing - hill raised Welsh lamb is another.
Not all land is the same and can produce the same stuff.
[quote=convert ]At the most simplistic level of thinking of course the vegetarian diet is the most calorifically efficient (what has the greatest calorific value - the 18 month old beef cow or the food it ate over it's lifetime) but obviously it's a bit more complicated than that as what we choose to eat instead of meat does not have the same environmental impact to be grown and delivered as the food fed to the animals.
More to the point, you'd have to eat an awful lot of grass in order to get the same calories as in that steak (probably a lot more than the cow processed in order to make it). Less the case for cows as you could grow things other than grass on the land they normally live on, but plenty of lambs grazing on land which isn't good for much else.
Back to the OP - have you told everybody you're a vegetarian yet? I understand that is a vital part of the transition 😉
nickc
(well pescatarian as I convinced her to eat fish)
Why? Out of interest
No real reason to be honest 😆
but - cows and sheep can eat grass, which we can't - and that grows happily on its ownAh yes,
And most cows that we eat are the waste product from the diary industry. Its what happens to all the calves that are either not required for milk or are male so no use to the diary industry.
So for veggies who still eat dairy what would you do with all the cows produced by the diary industry?
Less the case for cows as you could grow things other than grass on the land they normally live on
Not just the grass on the land they stand on but the use of the land currently used to grow their feed. An big percentage of the palm oil imported into the UK is used to feed UK cows. Palm oil production in Brazil is mostly used for feeding their home grown cattle with the devastating effect it has had on the rain forest. If palm oil production was just for human consumption it wouldn't have such a bad rep.
Less the case for cows as you could grow things other than grass on the land they normally live on
Which is why I've always been slightly conflicted and on the fence.
Less the case for cows as you could grow things other than grass on the land they normally live on
Like what? Not sure large scale lentil and bean production is viable in this country? Or is it? Genuinely not sure.. don't seem to see much of that being grown but is that simply becauese meat is more profitable?
So for veggies who still eat dairy what would you do with all the cows produced by the diary industry?
Suspect a lot of veggies would be vegan if they knew how the dairy industry operated...
Ashamed to say that despite being veggie for many years, I'd never given dairy much thought and was largely ignorant of how the industry worked.
Yes, there's an argument that vegetarianism whilst eating dairy doesn't make a lot of sense.
ethically it makes zero sense. It's cruel to eat chickens, but not to throw them live into a macerator https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ee6_1391310852
I woke up one day and couldn't face the idea of being responsible for death anymore and haven't eaten meat again since that day.
Probs best not to think about all the animals that die and the habitats that are destroyed in vegetable production then.
Personally I think veganism is totally admirable - can't help thinking vegetarianism is a bit of a halfway house that's an easy way of feeling more virtuous without having to really think too much. That's not meaning to sound trolly though I can see how its going to be perceived as such.
I watched this with a class last year, well worth a look
And most cows that we eat are the waste product from the diary industry. Its what happens to all the calves that are either not required for milk or are male so no use to the diary industry.
Is this true? I don't think it is.
Is this true? I don't think it is.
It isn't true.
the diary industry
Seems legit.
It isn't true.
No? What happens to all the bulls then?
No? What happens to all the bulls then?
http://www.thedrum.com/news/2012/05/31/channel-4-receives-58-complaints-over-graphic-calve-killing
"The practice is common in the industry, 90,000 male calves shot dead each year because there is no market for them "
90,000 out of how many?
Where does the beef we do eat come from?
No? What happens to all the bulls then?
I believe you are half right. Some enter the food chain. Some shot within hours of birth. Not sure that's any better to be honest.
The most low impact (environmental & ethical) way to live your life is to not and end it all. If that's not your bag you are going to have to compromise somewhere. I guess we all have our personal reasons for being where we are on that long grey scale. I suppose the important bit is we find our location in an informed way.
Yes, there's an argument that vegetarianism whilst eating dairy doesn't make a lot of sense.
Depending on why you're vegetarian.
ethically it makes zero sense. It's cruel to eat chickens, but not to throw them live into a macerator
Depends where you get your eggs from.
The only correct one size fits all answer is 'it depends'. It's alays a question of degrees too... I tried veganism but the shoes .. the horror...
Why is it meat eaters always seem to wade into conversations about cruelty free diets asking the same dumb gotcha questions and demanding answers about the meat industry. Bruv google it and enjoy your dead animal sandwich, whatever. If someone eating cruelty free did the same in a chat about bacon they'd be the first to start yelling about preachy vegans.
I tried veganism but the shoes
how are they different to vegetarian shoes?
It was ever thus - substitute vegans/meat eaters for 29"/27.5", electric bikes, etc etc. IRL nobody ever asks me dumb questions about my morals... only on here.Why is it meat eaters always seem to wade into conversations about cruelty free diets asking the same dumb gotcha questions and demanding answers
Why is it meat eaters always seem to...
Why do veggies always seem to go on about eating 'dead animal' as if a meat eater will suddenly go "OMG that's what I'm eating? Ew!"
We know what we are eating 🙂
(tongue in cheek post)
Btw I am not anti veggie, not trying to prove a point about animal welfare. Food supply and economics interest me that's all.
Because eating cruelty free is usually an ethical choice and that makes it hard to detach from seeing an animal as a living being not a meal. No one is expecting a meat eater to stop because someone told them 'hey, that's a dead cow you know'. That's on their conscience not mine.
how are they different to vegetarian shoes?
Plastic work shoes - they were more or less the only 'acceptable ' work wear at the time (can get away with Converse / Vans most of the time now) and they essentially gave you trench foot from your own sweat.
I accept moral veggies probably should consider the provenance of any leather they wear, but I don't think it happens much. To be vegan you don't really have an out at all.
^ I was wearing synthetic steel toed boots at work as far back as the early 90s, Doc Martins even made them, and don't remember having sweaty feet. These days, like with saddles and cycling shoes, it's not even an issue to find synthetic footwear. Like the protein thing, why is there so much perpetually recycled cheap stereotyping and misinformation following veg*ism, even in 2017?