Hi,

My wife and I really want to become vegetarians and maybe vegans sometime later and would like some suggestions on where to start. We've read a few books but never can seem to find enough good menu items.

We're not big fans of the pre-made foods that try to imitate meats and look like chicken breasts, hamburgers and things like that. We like regular skim milk, and have tried different soy milks but find that they're sickly sweet and much heavier than the skim we're used to. We like tacos made with meat crumbles, but we can't quite get a taste for soy cheese, preferring regular cheese.

In the summer we do a lot of grilling, but we hardly eat red meat and don't really like the taste of chicken. I saw some posts about not necessarily liking the meat itself but the flavorings that are on it. That's exactly how we are. We use chicken as the "base" to hold the marinades, spices and other flavorings. In reality, it's those that we like and not the meat itself. Are there any good "bases" (tofu??) that can be marinated and seasoned and then be grilled?

My personal weakness is soda and sugared drinks such as sweet ice tea. I prefer to go as natural as possible and don't like to drink diet drinks, not liking the sweetners that are added, though sugar isn't healthy either.

Also, we have a 6 year old son, so we need to make foods that will be exciting for him. Any suggestions/advice anyone could give would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mark

Hi, Mark! Welcome. I've been vegetarian for a while, and am trying to go vegan. I don't really like meat analogs or fake cheese, either. I try to eat whole foods, though I do like some pre-made veg stuff. My first piece of advice would be to look at the recipe forum, there's a lot of variety there. I also have a lot of links to sites with veg*n nutritional info, meal planning, and a few with menu samples. If you are interested, just PM me.:bow:

For tacos, or anything that needs some chunk, you can always use beans. For grilling, you can use portabello mushrooms, or any variety of veg. (You can even make "burgers" using large mushrooms). I have yet to master tofu, but it is meant to be marinated and seasoned! I'm not sure if it works on the grill, but I'm sure someone else can help there.

To have a varied menu, you really just need a variety of ingredients. You said you want natural foods, so buy a variety of vegetables, nuts, beans, grains, and other whole foods. Try ones you've never had before, than google it to find a recipe. I've been doing this almost every day. I would definitely invest in a good, healthy cookbook. It seems you want variety, so maybe you could try something different like Asian or Indian food. (You can find a ton of recipes online. A lot are veg*n already, and the ones that aren't can easily be substituted with vegetables.) As far as sugary drinks, to cut down on them, you can try switching some sugary drinks for all natural juices. Maybe brew your own iced tea and slowly decrease the sugar? That's what I did, and now I usually just drink it unsweetened. Anyway, I never post, and now this is really long. I hope I helped. I know you'll get a ton of good advice on this forum. Good luck!

BTW-That is so great that you and your wife are doing this together with your son, congratulations!:pibo:

Hi and welcome.
It sounds like you guys are moving in the right direction. I personally didn't like any of the meat analogues until I had been veg for about 6 or 8 months, but I still use them sparingly. I would concentrate on whole foods like slaite advised. There are lots of tasty and interesting veg dishes without mock meats, like pasta dishes, polenta, stirfries, ethnic dishes like curries etc.

For grilling, I would recommend making your own veggie burgers. Don't think of them as mock meats, but rather as vegetable or bean patties in a convinient circular shape to fit in a bun. You can make black bean burgers or lentil patties, or chickpea patties, or whatever. I can't direct you to a particular recipe right now, as all my books are loan to my friends. But do check through the recipe section here.

I also think that just hanging out on VB, especially in the food discussion forum will give you lots of good ideas.

Oh, and check out this thread:
http://www.veggieboards.com/boards/showthread.php?t=53688

Ahimsa, I know you won't mind if I pimp your thread, even if I can't post in it today too many frozen blended drinks ;)


Good luck !

Hi!:hi:
Do you not like things that like meat tastewise or do you not like the visual/texture? Tofu is a nice base and is quite bland on it's own. You need to marinate it. Grilling, I don't know. It's quite soft and sticks easily. Seitan can be flavored quite easily too and might grill a little easier. Seitan tends to have more of a meaty feel though, depending on how you cook it.
Goveg.com has some vegan meals (especially some kid friendly ones like "beef"aroni) You also may be able to find some vegan cookbooks at the library.At worst you can buy a few if you can spring for it.
Alternative cheeses and milk, a lot of people swear there's a milk out there that's palatable but, personally, I don't think so. On this note, I'm just trying to learn how to do without. In the recipe section there is a very good "nacho" type cheese you make with nutritional yeast (can be found in the supplement section of health food stores or online) you may be able to use with your tacos. I just leave the cheese off. There is a fake sour cream and cream cheese put out by Tofutti. Those are decent.
With your son, give him time. My 5 year olds are still adjusting to the change (it's been 2 years). Sometimes in typical kids fashion they turn up their nose, sometimes they gobble it right down (like the tofurkey much to my surprise). If you haven't been serving much vegetable wise until now he's going to be in for a shock. I would sit him down ahead of time and tell him what you're doing and (sorta) why. Buy him some of the fake meats at first if he wants chicken nuggets or hot dogs or whatever. He'll be pleasantly surprised that veggies can taste like junk food too. :lol: Offer him ketchup or mustard to dip the offensive veggies in (my kids even take ketchup on their stir fry. blech), make the one bite deal (one bite and if you really don't like it you can have a peanut butter sandwich or the like), let him help you out in the kitchen. Be patient! Also if he doesn't drink any alternative milks, I would be very careful with his calcium. You may want to keep a small amount of whatever he does drink around for a while until he's reliable about eating all his veggies and getting what he needs from what he eats. You also might want to consider a multi vitamin. My kids still eat dairy and take a vitamin because they're really not reliable with eating everything they should.
I'm no help with soda. I don't drink diet either because I think it tastes like garbage. lol I have no intentions of giving it up though. I already gave up chocolate and cheese. I draw the line at Coke. ;)
Mary

We like regular skim milk, and have tried different soy milks but find that they're sickly sweet and much heavier than the skim we're used to.
In my experience medium to large grocery stores have a selection of soy milks, including unsweetened.
We like tacos made with meat crumbles, but we can't quite get a taste for soy cheese, preferring regular cheese.
I tried soy cheese. Biggest waste of $5 ever. :lol:

Cheese tastes so good because it has bad stuff like saturated fat and cholesterol. Fake cheese doesn't taste as good because its currently impossible to make plant food that bad for you.

In my opinion the best way to get over cheese is to not eat things that remind you of it.

Are there any good "bases" (tofu??) that can be marinated and seasoned and then be grilled?
Yes! Tofu is a culinary blank canvis. I reccomend the Giant Book of Tofu Cooking. It has an amasing variety of recipes and does things to tofu I wouldn't have thought of in a million years. And it tends not to have lots of ingredients you've never heard of.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&isbn=080692957X&itm=7
Also, we have a 6 year old son, so we need to make foods that will be exciting for him. Any suggestions/advice anyone could give would be greatly appreciated.
Trial and error? Don't really know, I don't have kids. :)

In general, don't feed young kids tons of fibery foods. They can't digest it very well and it can cause them to not get enough calories (they get full too fast). Also make sure he gets a few good sources of fat a day, such as soymilk, nut butters, oil in cooking, etc.

Aside from food, think about household cleaning products which are notorious for horrible animal testing. Try "Method" cleaning products which are sold at Target stores. The products are not tested on animals and almost all of them are of non-animal ingredients. They have from dishsoap, detergents, body washes, hand soaps, etc.

Good luck with the start of your new life style and welcome to VB!

:hi: First on, welcome to VB!

I've tried several analogs, too and don't like but maybe one or two of them (mmmm.... LightLife Smart Bacon :drool: ). My favourite "analogs" are beans and whole grains mostly but I'll go to tofu, seitan or tempeh every now and again, too (mostly to change things up). Making your own burgers is also a very spot-on idea. They make up in a flash, freeze like a dream and deliver "fast food" fast cookup without the excess sodium and funky ingredients like their commercial counterparts contain.

I like Rice Dream for cereals and I love Vitasoy chocolate, Chocolate Almond Breeze or Kikkoman's Chocolate Soy Milk for drinking straight up (the Kikkoman's one tastes more like skim with cocoa in it than anything else I've tried). It took me a while to find the ones I like so it's possible that it will take you a while to find the ones you like but definately keep trying.

Let me save you some time, money and frustration and tell you there is no good soy cheese out there. There are some less repulsive than others but imo, your best bet with the cheese is to remove it completely and bring in things like avocadoes instead. If you can access nutritional yeast, you can also make your own cheese sauce that's as good or better than any nacho sauce out there (punkmommy's NY sauce recipe in the recipe section is a primo example of this :hungry: ).

For grilling, we love making a spice oil for our portabellos and we'll typically use spices like cumin, corriander, lemon pepper, ceyanne pepper and chili powder in a base of olive oil or canola oil but you could also use your favourite marinade or favourite oil-based dressing, too. But portabellos aren't the only thing we grill. We've also been known to grill potatoes, zucchini, crook-neck squash, chayote squash, avocados, tomatoes, asparagus, corn on the cob and even fruit. If it can be roasted, it can be grilled.

IMO, both types of sugar (fake and real) aren't healthy, but I feel that real sugar is less problematic than the fake stuff is. It's good that you want to get away from both types of sugar, though. I find a gradual change is less overwhelming than a straight on change. Perhaps start out with a 3:1 ratio of sweet tea to non-sweet tea, then gradually increase the non-sweetened levels until you're drinking unsweetened tea only.

For your child: there is a thread round here called "what did you feed your children today". In it, you might be able to find some good ideas or tricks others have used to get their children to eat certain things. I have no children of my own so I don't know what will work or not work but I do remember that when I was a child, I loved to dip things and the stranger the combination, the better. :D

Hope this all helps (and sorry it's so long). :)

If you're starting with just vegetarianism, maybe don't worry about the dairy analogs until you are used to the meat-free lifestyle. It may be a lot for you at once, and a successful vegetarian does more good than someone who jumps straight to veganism then gives up all together because it was too drastic of a change all at once. *waits to get beaten down by the vegans*

I grill mushrooms, summer squash/zucchini, eggplant, pineapple, cherry tomatoes, that sort of thing. I've never really successfully grilled tofu, but I'll also admit that I'm better versed in Tofu now than when I last tried. I would think Seitan would grill well as it holds up better than tofu, can be marinated and all that jazz too.

I am relatively new to vegetarianism. The cookbook that really got me on my way (I used it for months before I finally went vegetarian in January) is The Vegetarian Family Cookbook by Nava Atlas. They really are family friendly recipes. I also like the way she gives "make it a meal" suggestions with each recipe.

Although I am a pretty good cook and mostly put together my own recipes from what is on hand I really found this to be a great resource for me. You could try checking it out of your local library to see if it is something you like, or you can order it online.

BTW, most of her recipes are given with vegetarian and vegan options.

I cant address everything in long posts-- but I'll give my opinion on 2 things in the original post. I find that the main problem in the meal/barbeque question is that people assume the entre needs to be the main part of the meal. The sides are usually small in a omnivore diet. In a vegan/vegitarian diet, what an omnivore would consider the sides become the main part of the meal. It is simply cutting the pie in different size slices. For a vegan, non-anologue meat barbeque, I would have olive oil brushed, herbed or marinated large slices of vegetables like pepper, onion, potato, corn, eggplant. Some kind of bean casserole or pasta salad, and then some fresh salad. The main fun of grilling is cooking over fire anyway-- you can cook anything, even bread, on a grill.

As far as the sugar-- sugar is an aquired taste. I find sun tea made with green tea is naturally sweet. If you can, buy a few stevia also called sweet leaf plants and when you make sun tea, throw in a few leaves. To cut your sugar use you can also use sun tea and go half and half with apple or white grape juice-- make sure that they contain natural juice (fructose) not corn syrup.