If you are vegetarian or vegan - what do you eat ?

[Pisssssedofff]

DD 1 has gone veggie and gone up a dress size, basically because she's having pasta at every meal, cereal for breakfast and nothing for lunch, far too much fruit juice and scoffing 6 apples a day too.
She won't eat eggs - any suggestions it's driving me insane, I don't think she really likes vegetables if we are honest.

Buy her a cook book?

What you did was really mean. Meat after being vegi for a while can make you feel ill you shouldn't just give it.

Won't hurt you all to eat vegi once a week. Meat free Monday and all that.

You can both experiment with ideas then of meals you can all eat.

How about those ready meals for stand by?

Bean burgers?

Wraps?

Squash and chick pea curry?

Vege "meatballs"?

Falafel?

She does eat a lot of nuts to be fair, I'll try that in cakes, great idea !

Try tofu. Silken scrambles well and makes good cheesecake.
The Couldron foods variety is great baked, with spice sprinkled on top.

I'm not veggie/vegan now, but I was vegan from 16-20 and veggie for a few years after that. If it makes you feel better, I was a very very picky eater as a child and my palate widened considerably when I went vegan.

A typical day would have been:
Breakfast - one or more of: fruit/soya yoghurt/toast and vegan margarine/cereal and soya milk

Lunch - vegan sandwich (mushroom pate, marmite, peanut butter), or houmous and breadsticks, or a vegan pasty from Holland and Barratt. Or chips and mushy peas from the chippie. I often used to cook something like fried rice with tofu and veg in the morning and pack it in a thermos to take to college.

Dinner - when I lived at home my mum would cook, either something vegan for everybody (vegan shepherd's pie, nut roast and veggies, vegan curry) or if she was cooking meat she would do something meat-free for me (like lemon and pepper tofu) and I'd have the same rice/potatoes/veg as everyone else. When I lived on my own it would be stir-fry, falafel, curry, veggie sausage mix... all sorts of things. Lots of vegetables.

If you can't be bothered to cook vegan just for her that's understandable, but tell her, and she can choose whether to fill up on easy carby things and feel crap or to cook for herself and feel good. If you're willing to buy special ingrediants for her to cook, ask her to tell you what she wants to try. Put the responsibility on her.

In a non-veggie household it's worth having a stock of veggie meat substitutes like glamorgan sausages, beanburgers or quornburgers, veggie sausages. Mexican beanburgers are a favourite here.

Beans - refried beans with tortillas, or any fajita type meal can be done with a tin of chick peas or beans. Haricot, butter beans or pinto beans are all fairly innocuous.

Curry or dahl. A good basic dahl is comfort food.

I would also recommend Hugh FW's veg book. A lot of the recipes involve combining veg and cheese but it gives a new way of thinking, basing the meal round a main veg flavour or doing a tapas style thing. I found it very helpful when DD was veggie, so it suited me to feed us all veggie 3x per week or so.

A field mushroom and halloumi makes a good burger substitute. But I think at 16 your DD needs to be part of the solution, it's not just your "problem" to solve.

Op buy her a vegetarian cookbook or get her to print off some recipes. She can't decide one day to change completely and then expect you to fit this in especially if she can't be bothered herself. She's 16 and old enough to take some responsibility for this decision.

Tuna's out the question too
What did she used to eat, same as us. Chicken curry, spag Bol, cottage pie, roast dinner, pizza and salad, tbf we are creatures of habit due to being flat out. And we do eat a lot of ready meals which should make it easier for her to just choose something else ... But the something else doesn't seem to be doing her any good

I think those criticising the spag Bol thing are being harsh. This is about a 16 year old who is acting like s three year old about food

I'm NOT having a go at veggies or vegans and neither is OP. She's frustrated that her near adult child has announced she's a veggie but given no thought to a varied diet but expected OP to cater for her. Vegan who doesn't eat rice or many vegetables is going to be hard to cook for!

Is she concerned about the weight gain herself?

Can you ask her does she honestly feel her diet is healthy and balanced at the moment

At 16 I think she should be old enough to cook simple meals now and then but things you could try

Spag Bol etc with red lentils instead of meat they give a nice texture

Use quorn mince and chicken replacement

Cous cous and roasted veg salad

Quorn nuggets or frozen veggie burgers with home made sweet potatoe wedges won't hurt now and then

Jacket potatoes with various fillings

Veg pasta in a nice home made sauce

Veg lasagne

Risotto

Veg fajitas with guacamole

Quorn/tofu and veg stir fry with noodles

Chilli made with chickpeas, kidney beans, peppers, onion, butter beans and any other beans you like instead of meat

Veg tagine

A lot of veg curry recipes out there ( my favourite is chickpea, spinach and sweet potatoes)

you can do great tasty dishes with halloumi cheese.

Take a look at the vegetarian society website and BBC website have some good recipes to try out

I'm not veggie but only eat meat once a week so 6 days are veggie dinners

I did say she needed to get involved. I'm trying to support her but she's not making it easy with the fussiness tbf

Brilliant suggestions,
Thank you x

MadamDeathStare try the recipe from the 'two peas and their pod' blog from quinoa chilli, it's fab - you should be able to find it with a quick Google.

OP I second what everyone else has said, she needs to replace the meat protein with some other protein. Where possible just cook the same veg etc as you are for everyone else but her sausages, burgers etc are replaced by veggie versions. For bologonaise use all the same ingredients except put two pans on the hob, hers has quorn mince or lentils yours has meat the rest of the ingredients are split proportionally between the two. Things like this you can also batch cook and freeze so she could have it on nights where it's more difficult to sort hers out.
Yes, at 16 she should take more responsibility for her own cooking and eating but you need to nudge her in the right direction to be a healthy veggie and frankly lying to her and giving her meat is just awful and a massive breach of trust.

If she's fussy then that's her problem. At her age she's completely capable of taking responsibility for her meals. She can't shoot down every suggestion and provide nothing in return. It sounds like a fad more than a well thought out decision.

This thread is making me hungry

Oh she is very concerned about the weight gain, especially when I said I'm not buying a whole new wardrobe and I'm not, I wouldn't do it for me if it was self inflicted. Obviously when little ones grow you expect to be buying a whole new wardrobe every season but when we are talking women's clothes prices, I'm sorry but no you can get back into a size 12 like everyone else would have to

Do you know it's the pasta though? At 16 I'm just wondering if she might have more money to spend on crisps and full fat coke at school, that kind of thing

Give her a vegetarian cookbook, a food shopping budget, a kick up the arse, and tell her to sort her own fecking meals out.

This is not a 16 year old that's had a good think about it and decided to go vegetarian, this is girl on a whim.

She doesn't eat at school, at all again that pisses me off tbh, the school caters for vegetarians, I e put money on her parent pay thing and I think that's led to the weight gain, her bodies gone into starvation mode

I love it chickrock 😁

Why do you think it's a fad or that she is being fussy?

If she wasn't veggie would you be cooking for her? I ask because if she has never had to cook for herself and you as a family tend to eat the same things all the time it's not surprising that she isn't branching out much or that she doesn't try different things.

So, you used to eat Chicken curry (just put quorn chunks in whatever sauce you normally use), spag Bol (use veggie mince), cottage pie (use veggie mince), roast dinner (get a nut roast / quorn roast or just have the veggies), pizza (get cheese and tomato) and salad (no change).

I don't get what is so hard about it, I also don't get what possessed you to put meat in a vegetarian's dinner - I'd go fucking ballistic if someone did that to me.

The soy worries me too Madam, I'm sure I've read it's not good

Soy (as in tofu and tempeh) is perfectly safe to eat and very healthy too. Here is a quote from the abstract of a scientific study:

'As reviewed, the evidence indicates that, with the exception of those individuals allergic to soy protein, soyfoods can play a beneficial role in the diets of vegetarians. Concerns about adverse effects are not supported by the clinical or epidemiologic literature. Based on the soy intake associated with health benefits in the epidemiologic studies and the benefits noted in clinical trials, optimal adult soy intake would appear to be between two and four servings per day.'
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257705/

She fucking eaten for weeks that's why user !!!

Hadn't obviously