I’m interested! I became a vegetarian about 4 months ago, shortly after I started doing my own cooking. My abilities are basically limited to pasta, salads, mushrooms in sandwiches or tortilla wraps, and lots more pasta. To learn recipes, Youtube videos were my main sources. I just haven’t gotten around to searching for vegetarian specific foods. What are some more options out there?
Not to knock pasta (and I recommend my signature sauce, as well as putting artichokes through the blender and adding them to cream sauces for pasta), but I’m more of a soup fan. Bean soup, veggie soup (here’s one way to do veggie soup), eggdrop soup, chowder (clam if you eat seafood, broccoli or corn if you don’t), polenta leaf soup, miso soup.
There’s also more things you can put in sandwiches besides mushrooms. I like Tofurkey, but even if you don’t, here are things I put on bread (all of these things include cheese, but you could omit it if you aren’t a huge fan of cheese):
Panfried tofu slices, spinach sauteed with cheese, hummus
Goat cheese, avocado slices, over-easy egg with dill and cayenne
Particularly copious amounts of cheese (melted), with optional hummus, avocado, onion slices
Fried zucchini and eggplant slices, avocado, hummus, fresh mozzarella
Minced garlic, basil leaves, fresh mozzarella
In most of the above cases I make the sandwiches open-faced, and fry them in butter to crisp them up (the last I put in the toaster oven with olive oil, and add the basil and mozzarella after they come out toasty).
Many veggies are lovely roasted. For pretty much all of them, you cut them into bites, put them on an oil-spritzed baking pan, and put them in a 400º oven for twenty minutes. This works for several kinds of squash, asparagus, broccoli, potatoes, etc. You can eat roasted veggies by themselves, or put them in omelets or your pasta or whatever.
I go on Foodgawker for inspiration. For advanced food-related fun, learn to deep fry things—I use my wok and spider skimmer, I don’t usually bother with a thermometer and just flick little bits of whatever I’m cooking to see how it reacts, and then I filter the oil for reuse with paper towels and a funnel.
I recommend getting familiar with chickpeas and tofu. They are both very cheap, very filling, and very nutritious (chickpeas in particular, once you learn how to reconstitute the dried ones). Experimenting with recipes that involve those ingredients is definitely a good idea. Learning to cook quinoa and rice is another helpful skill (wild rice is also nutritious and filling, and quinoa offers a complete protein). Working with those four ingredients and mixing in other vegetables, spices, mushrooms, sauces, etc will offer a very wide range of delicious and nutritious foods that you can make as a baseline.
You can also look into the dishes of different cultures that have vegetarian traditions. For example, Indian food has a very large range of interesting vegetarian dishes. So does Taiwan, and other strongly Buddhist-influenced cultures. In Japan, Buddhism-inspired vegetarian food is referred to as “Shojin-ryouri”, so if you like Japanese food, you might look up some shojin recipes. Those are just some examples =)
Tofu is a good choice, and can be used in many ways. One secret to tofu is to pay attention to the amount of water in the tofu, as that seriously changes the way it tastes, feels, and acts in dishes. For example, when you are making a stew with tofu, such as the spicy and delicious Korean soup kimchi jiggae, you probably want to choose silken tofu, which is soft and will interact well with the rich broth. But if you are making something like McFoo, a tofu sandwich where you marinate the tofu in select spices until it tastes like junk food, then you want a firm and chewy tofu. You can achieve the latter by pressing your tofu for an hour (there are special things to do this, but a towel, cutting boards, and a brick does just fine). You can make it even firmer and more textured by freezing it first, so most of my tofu goes right into the freezer until I need it.
There are also a few veg-specific things that you almost certainly have never had, such as TVP: textured vegetable protein. Despite the unappetizing sci-fi name, it’s actually an amazing thing to include in your diet. The trick to learning to love and use it is not to make the sad mistake of just pretending it’s meat. Most fake meat things don’t taste anything like meat, but instead have a rank and lingering chemical taste and overwhelming profile of salt and sugar, as they try to mimic what you might have liked about meat. TVP and other decent meat substitutes are different, and they just taste good without trying to taste like meat. So TVP chili is hearty and rich and has a great mouthfeel, giving you that chewiness and resistance that’s part of what makes meat good, but it doesn’t try to ape meat.
Other things you can make: veggie shepherd’s pie (lentils and veggies for the filling), pumpkin mac and cheese (add shredded pumpkin when making mac and cheese; if you use a sharp cheese the tastes blend amazingly), filo-wrapped spinach and veggies (you can buy prepared filo dough), loaded baked potatoes, pizza, calzones, quiches, grilled cheese and chard sandwiches, and lots of variations on curries and stews and things.
I’m interested! I became a vegetarian about 4 months ago, shortly after I started doing my own cooking. My abilities are basically limited to pasta, salads, mushrooms in sandwiches or tortilla wraps, and lots more pasta. To learn recipes, Youtube videos were my main sources. I just haven’t gotten around to searching for vegetarian specific foods. What are some more options out there?
Not to knock pasta (and I recommend my signature sauce, as well as putting artichokes through the blender and adding them to cream sauces for pasta), but I’m more of a soup fan. Bean soup, veggie soup (here’s one way to do veggie soup), eggdrop soup, chowder (clam if you eat seafood, broccoli or corn if you don’t), polenta leaf soup, miso soup.
There’s also more things you can put in sandwiches besides mushrooms. I like Tofurkey, but even if you don’t, here are things I put on bread (all of these things include cheese, but you could omit it if you aren’t a huge fan of cheese):
Panfried tofu slices, spinach sauteed with cheese, hummus
Hummus, avocado, shredded cheddar, cucumber slices, sprouts, lettuce
Goat cheese, avocado slices, over-easy egg with dill and cayenne
Particularly copious amounts of cheese (melted), with optional hummus, avocado, onion slices
Fried zucchini and eggplant slices, avocado, hummus, fresh mozzarella
Minced garlic, basil leaves, fresh mozzarella
In most of the above cases I make the sandwiches open-faced, and fry them in butter to crisp them up (the last I put in the toaster oven with olive oil, and add the basil and mozzarella after they come out toasty).
Many veggies are lovely roasted. For pretty much all of them, you cut them into bites, put them on an oil-spritzed baking pan, and put them in a 400º oven for twenty minutes. This works for several kinds of squash, asparagus, broccoli, potatoes, etc. You can eat roasted veggies by themselves, or put them in omelets or your pasta or whatever.
I go on Foodgawker for inspiration. For advanced food-related fun, learn to deep fry things—I use my wok and spider skimmer, I don’t usually bother with a thermometer and just flick little bits of whatever I’m cooking to see how it reacts, and then I filter the oil for reuse with paper towels and a funnel.
I recommend getting familiar with chickpeas and tofu. They are both very cheap, very filling, and very nutritious (chickpeas in particular, once you learn how to reconstitute the dried ones). Experimenting with recipes that involve those ingredients is definitely a good idea. Learning to cook quinoa and rice is another helpful skill (wild rice is also nutritious and filling, and quinoa offers a complete protein). Working with those four ingredients and mixing in other vegetables, spices, mushrooms, sauces, etc will offer a very wide range of delicious and nutritious foods that you can make as a baseline.
You can also look into the dishes of different cultures that have vegetarian traditions. For example, Indian food has a very large range of interesting vegetarian dishes. So does Taiwan, and other strongly Buddhist-influenced cultures. In Japan, Buddhism-inspired vegetarian food is referred to as “Shojin-ryouri”, so if you like Japanese food, you might look up some shojin recipes. Those are just some examples =)
Tofu is a good choice, and can be used in many ways. One secret to tofu is to pay attention to the amount of water in the tofu, as that seriously changes the way it tastes, feels, and acts in dishes. For example, when you are making a stew with tofu, such as the spicy and delicious Korean soup kimchi jiggae, you probably want to choose silken tofu, which is soft and will interact well with the rich broth. But if you are making something like McFoo, a tofu sandwich where you marinate the tofu in select spices until it tastes like junk food, then you want a firm and chewy tofu. You can achieve the latter by pressing your tofu for an hour (there are special things to do this, but a towel, cutting boards, and a brick does just fine). You can make it even firmer and more textured by freezing it first, so most of my tofu goes right into the freezer until I need it.
There are also a few veg-specific things that you almost certainly have never had, such as TVP: textured vegetable protein. Despite the unappetizing sci-fi name, it’s actually an amazing thing to include in your diet. The trick to learning to love and use it is not to make the sad mistake of just pretending it’s meat. Most fake meat things don’t taste anything like meat, but instead have a rank and lingering chemical taste and overwhelming profile of salt and sugar, as they try to mimic what you might have liked about meat. TVP and other decent meat substitutes are different, and they just taste good without trying to taste like meat. So TVP chili is hearty and rich and has a great mouthfeel, giving you that chewiness and resistance that’s part of what makes meat good, but it doesn’t try to ape meat.
Other things you can make: veggie shepherd’s pie (lentils and veggies for the filling), pumpkin mac and cheese (add shredded pumpkin when making mac and cheese; if you use a sharp cheese the tastes blend amazingly), filo-wrapped spinach and veggies (you can buy prepared filo dough), loaded baked potatoes, pizza, calzones, quiches, grilled cheese and chard sandwiches, and lots of variations on curries and stews and things.