Calling vegetarians

Former Member

Hello!

I went vegetarian for a month a few weeks back, with the occasional meat treat once a week. I did it for health reasons to see how my body reacted to the reduced amount of meat I was eating. It was a positive outcome. But then I ate meat again for just over a week and everything went back to being worse (health wise). I suffer from hives, and I think meat is the bigger culprit for me to have breakouts so I've gone back to cutting meat out from my diet. The past 10 days I've lived completely meat free.

Now I'm back home I'm not sure what I can do meal wise, for at home and when I'm in work (I normally have sandwiches, with a yoghurt or something, nuts to snack on, and lots of fruit and water. I don't do cooking/hot meals for work)

Can any vegetarians recommend books with simple recipes, or websites like gojee, suited to being vegetarian? I'm ideally looking for something that will outline my meals for X days, like a food diary that I can simply follow while I'm starting out. I followed a PDF from some website that outlined meals for a month, everything I needed to buy. Anything I didn't like I just omitted from the recipes.

Thanks

Former Member

I just follow normal recipes and substitute meat for quorn or another alternative. Or just look up veggie recipes online. It's usually pretty easy to swap meat for an alternative. I've never used a food diary website though, but I'm sure other veggies will know of some!

Former Member

Moose wood cookbooks are pretty good.

Former Member

There's 57 sandwich fillings here: http://www.vegansociety.com/lifestyle/food/recipes/sandwich-fillings.aspx

They are vegan (sorry I'm vegan! Not veggie) but you could change all the vegan ingredients for dairy ones... so if it says "redwoods bacon rashers" or something, quorn do a veggie version (that will be cheaper!). There's also lots of super healthy salady sandwiches too.

I'm sure you've realised, but supermarkets do loads of awesome veggie stuff nowadays so it should be fairly easy to find everything Quorn stuff will have a more meat like texture from what I remember, it has egg in. A lot of redwoods/linda McCartney/cauldron stuff is vegan so might be less meaty (for example, Quorn sausages will be slightly more realistic than any others!)

If you're going for less lazy meals then here are some mains: http://www.vegansociety.com/lifestyle/food/recipes/main-meals/
(again, omit vegan things for normal eg soya milk for normal milk)

or here: http://veganvillage.co.uk/recipes/mains.htm

Finally: http://www.ivu.org/recipes/index.html there are over 3000 recipes on there that people have sent in, so I'm sure you'll find some stuff you'd like to cook

EDIT: Just found that the vegetarian society have recipes too http://www.recipes.vegsoc.org/ I've never looked through them though so don't know how good they are.

Former Member

Thanks, I'll give those a gander later on and go shopping sometime this week. I'm trying not to eat Quorn because it's quite salty, but I've had the sausages and mince before and it wasn't bad. That might be my once a week treat

Former Member

There are lots of other "meat substitute" brands that would probably be healthier if you do start to fancy some, but Quorn is probably the most realistic.

You can get natural, unprocessed, dry soya mince that are a lot lot healthier. They have nothing but soya in, and you have to soak them. They are tasty in place of the junk food versions! But not so "meaty" in texture.