Becoming a vegetarian

Over the past few months I am becoming more and more uncomfortable with eating meat.
Apart from the odd pasta dish I eat meat at every meal. Are there any good sites for receipes etc? Are quorn products good alternatives?

There’s plenty of recipes on STW, for a start.

Quorn is a good source of protein, but that’s not really the issue. Some vitamins and minerals can be more problematic for some people. Dark green leafy veg is a good source of iron, how do you feel about spinach?

Quorn in a reasonable substitute in some dishes. Cottage pie, lasagne, spag bol, chilli, all work well with Quorn mince. It’s not as ‘robust’ as meat mince though, so any recipes that call for it to be boiled for two hours will just turn it to mush. Adding an earthy flavouring (soy sauce, Marmite, veggie Worcester sauce, stock, gravy granules, etc etc) can help make for a beefier taste if that’s what you’re aiming for; Quorn adds texture and nutrition, but in and of itself doesn’t taste of a great deal.

Quorn chunks and fillets can be used in curries and suchlike, anywhere you’d use lumps of chicken.

the first step is to make really delicious meals from good ingredients. Move away from the meat and 2 veg system, and get all your nutrients in one dish.

Any recipe book or site will give you plenty of ideas, however I like home made pizza (including the dough), veg lasagne, chilli, thai stir fry and loads of other things.

Morrisons do the best veggie sausages, I don\t really like quorn stuff but you might.

Quorn is the devil’s spawn. Avoid at all costs.

Redwoods are so much better and you can pick them up from holland and barrett.

The vegetarian and vegan society have loads of ideas for cooking on their sites. Check em out on line. Just google veg recipes and you’ll come up with loads. The BBC and Channel 4 have decent stuff on thier web sites.

http://www.redwoodfoods.co.uk/

I ate a vegetarian meal for lunch last week, by accident. I forgot to add the tuna and didn’t even notice. I only realised when I came home from work and found the unopened can on the kitchen side.

Kev

Loads of books out there. Jamie Oliver has got a few good ones in his.

Some good “grown up” ones in this, but the kids turn their noses up at them.

Remember what we’ve learnt over the last week. You can make sausages out of vegans. And apparently they taste like cows

Quorn is the devil’s spawn. Avoid at all costs.

Eh? You might not like its derivation much, but it tastes nice, is sustainable, low fat high fibre and AFAIK not linked to any health scares. It’s an easy gateway drug for the conversion process too 😉

It really doesn’t restrict your diet as much as you might worry. If anything it’s likely to improve your diet, as you tend to search out novelty and variety after a while.

Look to pulses, Quorn, TVP, soya for your protein. Iron is a bigger issue as Cougar says, though I wonder whether we really that much worse off than most meat eaters diets, see this CLICKY

Mrs B supplements with Spatone, as it’s more of an issue for women.

google Quorn allergy.

for a ‘manufactured’ food it’s amazing they can sell something known to cause;

“unsavoury gastrointestinal symptoms, or even potentially life-threatening anaphylactic shock”

I’ve had the former and managed to launch a Quorn meal across 6ft of bathroom from my mouth and with some force from the other end.

Tofu’s ok if you get the smokey stuff.

Where do you live? Can’t you just buy more ethically sourced meat? From farmers markets etc. I think nowadays its not difficult to do. There’s an alternative to supermarket shite. You don’t necessarily have to opt for full on tree-hugger.

Omelette? 😉

I’m eating less and less meat these days, but not just switching to a meat substitute. I love spicy food so cooking a lot of Indian subcontinent recipes – lots of lentils, veg, rice etc and getting the spinach in there too. Get creative.

The newish Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall veggie cookbook looked pretty good from a quick flick through. Else BBC Food and lots of the other recipe websites have vegetarian filters.

It does help if you approach it with new recipes rather than trying to just remove meat from stuff you currently cook. There’s loads of great Indian veg cookery which works great with pulses and most veg. Likewise most italian cooking is very easy to skip meat with.

I’ve been with a veggie for nearly 5 years – I still eat meat away from home, but everything we cook at home is vegetarian. It’s not that hard a transition really.

Was it on here that I read this:

Quorn == ‘Athlete’s foot with good PR’

Dave

Becoming a vegetarian

I’m not a professional so apart from suggesting you’ve contracted Bad AIDS I’d suggest you get yourself down the GP’s… they must have some sort of cure for this disturbing ailment.

+1 for the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall book, got it for xmas and has loads of great ideas.

Amazon linkage

As for quorn etc you should really just VTFU and avoid stuff pretending to be meat.

I attempted to become a vegetarian, because I was uncomfortable with the cruelty associated with mass farming. I don’t have anything against eating meat, in fact I believe it’s perfectly natural, although maybe not in the quantity and frequency with which people consume it nowadays.

My intention was to give it a break for a while then eat more ethically sourced meat as a special treat. I lasted 6 months and ate a lot more varied diet and lost a bit of weight too. I eventually returned to my carnivorous ways at the end of a drunken night out, I went to KFC and had two Zinger Tower burgers 😳

Same at home. Basically the SO will only eat poultry. I have managed to change her habits as for food. She only shopped at supermarket. Including fruits, veg, fish and meat (her son does eat meat). Now fruit and veg are purchase fomr local producers at local market, and the increase of saving done (they are so much cheaper than the shit you can buy in super market) funds the organic meat we buy at my riding buddy shop. Same goes for fish, we do buy less of it, but we try to get it from fishmonger. As said if you are concern about animals welfare why not get concerned about how they live rather than how they die 😉

it’s amazing they can sell something known to cause;

“unsavoury gastrointestinal symptoms, or even potentially life-threatening anaphylactic shock”

Scaremongering much?

An ex of mine was allergic to kiwi fruit. Even the juice was sufficient to cause anaphylactic shock. I was out for dinner with her once, she ordered melon which turned out to have been cross-contaminated with juice from other fruits (despite “no kiwi, I’m allergic”). That was enough to make her mouth and throat swell up to a point where she could barely breathe. Is it amazing that ‘they’ can still sell kiwi fruit?

Shall we ban everything “known to cause” allergic reactions? Not quite sure what’d be left that we could eat.

why not get concerned about how they live rather than how they die

+1

by all means eat more vegetarian meals, but to save turning into a yoghurt-knitting-bark-kissing islingtonista, enjoy smaller quantities of better sourced meat a few times a week.

Im very lucky in that I can walk across the yard, point at Flossy the Lamb or Porky the Pig, and in a week’s time or so have the carcass on my kitchen table ready for me to butcher.
For other meat, any one of the three local butchers get the Spanish Inquisition treatment until Im confident they’ve been on first name terms with the ex-livestock before I order.

The newish Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall veggie cookbook looked pretty good from a quick flick through

Ooooh. Must have a look at that.

I’ve not eaten meat for years, still eat fish although less these days. Iron is definately an issue for me – i tend to get run down and need to take an iron supplement on a fairly regular basis. I like tofu – usually marinade and roast it. Only use quorn in chilli – tend just to use veggies in lasagne. quorn sausages are minging – cauldron sausages are yum. Staples for me include: eggs, beans (kindey beans, chickpeas, lentils, black eye beans etc) sweet potato, butternut squash, pasta, cous cous. Deadlydarcy is sending me through a recipe for cauliflower cheese with sweet pot and celeraic which sounds yum.

My current favs are:
stuffed peppers (stuff with brown rice, kidney beans and some cheese)
winter veg cous cous (butternut squash, carrots, chickpeas, sweet pots, bunch of spices, apricots, parnsip, shallots and cous cous)
fritattas – current fave is cheese, mush and pots or feta with courgette.
butternut squash and chickpea soup
quesadillas to use up leftover chilli.

Hugh fernley-hair’s “Meat” book is one of my favourites. Just as a non-fiction read, let alone as a recipe book.

Is that the one with the amazing pork pie in it Stoner?

Didn’t Hugh Fearnly-Twattingstall go completely veggie as one of his ethical campaigns? IIRC it was the campaign to be confirmed as the most sanctimonious, hectoring, smug, annoying Guardianista **** on the planet, but I could be wrong

I think so. I havent tried it yet as it requires cured pork.

His roasting technique is a winner, every single time.

But the best bit is the first half of the book where his emphasis is on livestock husbandry. As an ex-farmer, it’s what I take most seriously and it was nice to see it presented so sensibly and pragmatically in a mainstream book.

His veggie campagin was particularly smug and rather made him look a hypocrite given his emphasis on meat and fish in his previous two big books.

for a ‘manufactured’ food it’s amazing they can sell something known to cause;

“unsavoury gastrointestinal symptoms, or even potentially life-threatening anaphylactic shock”

Pretty sure I had a massive allergic reaction to Tangerine Tic Tacs. Never been near them since, no sirree.

As for quorn etc you should really just VTFU and avoid stuff pretending to be meat.

I don’t see it as a meat substitute. It’s convenient, tasty in most forms and hasn’t made me projectile vomit 😉 – it’s just something else to eat. Wasn’t even around when I started.
I use tofu, beans, pulses etc. but sometimes after a long day of being pious I just want to wang something in the oven and watch the One Show with a double Jamesons like everyone else.

A hypocrite? Hugh? Surely not. I loved his “from now on I am going to live entirely off the land” campaign

Yes Hugh… just the your privately owned land (which incidentally we’re all blessed with oodles of), your inherited family fortune, and the proceeds from your last TV series and associated book deal – serialised in the Guardian of course

What a nob!

I so wanted to like hugh’s last series, but it was v dull telly.

There are so many veggie cook books out there IRS just not worth repeating recipes here. Go and experiment. There’s so much tasty food out there its ridiculously easy

Hugh Fearnley-Burnley is, without doubt, loaded and well enough connected to have gone from aspirant chef (he was sacked by the River Cottage) to well heeled back-to-the-lander.

But, leaving aside the finger pointing, his book on veg roughly reads as:

“We eat too much poor quality, badly raised meat in this country. We’d be better off eating less of it, but higher quality and with better welfare.”

Not sure how that doesn’t square with his approach on meat, TBH. Seems bloody sensible to me.

Stoner – Member
…made him look a hypocrite given his emphasis on meat and fish in his previous two big books.

Eh?!

ourmaninthenorth – Member
…his book on veg roughly reads as:

“We eat too much poor quality, badly raised meat in this country. We’d be better off eating less of it, but higher quality and with better welfare.”

Not sure how that doesn’t square with his approach on meat, TBH. Seems bloody sensible to me.^this^

The River Cottage veg book is superb.

I know ^ that, I read much the same in the guardian, but he went 100% vegetarian, not 90%.

The book of the series – River Cottage Veg Everyday! – is already out and at the top of the bestseller lists but he has been amused by the “one or two letters in the Guardian that have sniped about how the great meat eater has suddenly turned vegetarian”. To him, he suggests, there is nothing Damascene about it. “I mean the opening line of my 500-page book about meat was ‘We all eat too much meat’. My point was always that we need to treat meat with far more respect and approach eating it in a holistic way. It is something we all know, I think, in our heart of hearts. We know that the scale on which we are killing animals and pushing them through factories and turning them into burgers is wrong on some basic level. And we probably feel it in terms of our health. It is odd that it is so easy to change that, but that we resist doing it. The change is a simple one: eat more veg.”

but:

The new series of River Cottage is vegetarian and he has been meat and fish free for three months, so it is tempting to think his almost palpable healthy glow is down to the new diet. But he thinks it actually goes back a bit further than that.

“I’d love to be able to say that in three months I have lost a stone and have boundless energy and can now run the 100 metres in 11 seconds,” he says, between mouthfuls of scone and sips of rooibos tea. “But it’s not quite as simple as that. At the beginning of the year I had a cholesterol test and was concerned it was on the up. I’m someone who loves good cheese and who isn’t shy of chewing the fatty bit off a decent chop, and I felt I had to rein it in a bit. And I also did something that I do once in a while which is to stop drinking. So I’ve had a bit of a cleansing year. And I lost some weight and then I went into the veg diet and continued to feel good.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/oct/14/ofm-awards-2011-fearnley-whittingstall?INTCMP=SRCH

The more veg, less but better qaulity meat message was central to his meat book. His vegetarianism was marketed as eschewing meat.

His vegetarianism was marketed as eschewing meat.

Fair enough. Not what he writes in the book itself.

I eat meat far less often. I only eat decent meat from the farm shop across the road (meat is from a farm in the next village).

Next stop for me is sorting out the fish I eat: I probably eat fish two or three times a week. This needs to change, and also needs to become better quality/more sustainable.

I saw it as a ‘stunt’ for the TV show, to prove to meat-eating sceptics that it it’s no great hardship to cut back on the meat & fish a bit.

Fish eating ‘veggie’ here (20 yrs now) but thinking about adding some meat back into the diet this year.

my brother got me this. the recipes aren’t easy but they are great. 😀

We never use substitutes like quorn. There doesn’t seem to be much point if you make proper vegetarian dishes.

The newish Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall veggie cookbook looked pretty good from a quick flick through.

+1, it’s got some great recipes in it.

Anyway, I shall be having a Hugh veggie dish tonight – quinoa, onion and courgettes.

Mrs North has dozens of recipe books in the house. This is the first one I own.

Fish eating ‘veggie’ here

Pescetarian.

As for quorn etc you should really just VTFU and avoid stuff pretending to be meat.

Point the first, you should do what makes you happy and get used to ignoring sanctimonious comments.

Point the second, I’ve never understood this argument. Sausages, burgers, mince etc are all just convenient ways of packaging protein. Whether it contains animal-based or vegetable-based protein is irrelevant, surely; they’ve traditionally been meat but they don’t have to be. Doesn’t mean we’re somehow in denial or longing for meat, it’s just a useful shape.

Doesn’t mean we’re somehow in denial or longing for meat, it’s just a useful shape.

exactly. just like if i made a mushroomed shape burger i wouldn’t be a veggie in denial. weird yes. 😀