Get yourself some decent veggie cookbooks and try not to think of meat as what you base a meal around with everything else as accompaniments. A good veggie diet isn't about taking away the roast and replacing it with a lump of cheese (or even tofu
). When I was a teenager the advice used to be that you had to have two types of veggie protein with every meal - lentils and rice, peas and beans etc but now the thinking is that as long as you have a variety of types of vegetable protein across your diet as a whole, it's ok.
If you want to try the meat replacements, some of the Quorn products are ok but can give some people stomach problems. I don't like much Quorn, but I do quite like the ham. I've never been a fan of the textured vegetable protein stuff but it can make a convincing spaghetti bolognaise.
My experience is that vegetarianism is easy, veganism much less so. I've never considered veganism because I'm just not prepared to make that much effort, or to be that limited in options for eating away from home. And fruitarianism just seems unhealthily extreme to me, although I did once have a fruitarian as a patient and she was about [comedy exaggeration] 200 years old [/comedy exaggeration] so it obviously wasn't harming her.
As an example of what I eat, for dinners since we came back here after Christmas, bobb and I have had pilaf on Thursday, (rice, peas and nuts cooked with spices and stock - he loves it), spaghetti with leeks and blue cheese on Friday, (while the spaghetti is cooking, cook one sliced leek per person in olive oil and a few minutes before the spaghetti is cooked, stir into the leeks 35g dolcelatte and 50g Philadelphia per person), last night we went out for a curry, but if we'd stayed in we'd have had potato & aubergine curry with brown rice made by me, tonight we're having butternut squash and goat cheese lasagne, tomorrow we're having aubergine and chickpea tagine with brown rice (tagine has lots of peppers, a leek, an aubergine and two tins tomatoes in it, and the chickpeas and rice add protein) and on Tuesday we're having a brown lentil stew which sounds minging but is very tasty. It's more or less chop an onion and put it in a pan of water with bouillon powder or a stock cube, bring it to the boil, add chopped potatoes, sweet potato, butternut squash, carrots and brown lentils, cook till the lentils are soft, add watercress, peas, tamari and dill, cook a bit longer, eat. For lunch the other day I did a very tasty warm green lentil salad with rocket, goat cheese and walnuts and I think we'll have that again today as there is rocket and goat cheese to be eaten. Sometimes I do risotto, sometimes I do barley casserole. Sometimes I just get a Tesco veggie pizza and add lots more veg and an egg. During the working week, in winter I make soups and freeze them in portions and take them in for lunch, with oatcakes and hummus or peanut butter or a cheese sandwich, and in summer I make different salads - barley & avocado, tabbouleh, Greek salad etc.
Good cookbooks are Cranks, Linda McCartney, the Hamlyn all colour vegetarian cookbook, Delia's vegetarian collection, various curry books and the New Covent Garden soup company books.
