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.

Vegan ready meals. Not cheap, but no way near £40 for a few days! Most are complete meals especially if she needs to be on a diet, but for some you may want to add a bread roll or side salad. This is the sort of stuff I feed DC when I can't be arsed to cook.

But also, the good old mainstay of pasta and pesto and salad. Loads of bottled pestos out there are dairy free and so fine for vegans.Or easy enough to make you own. My DMum (who would probably choke with surprise if you told her this was vegan, as she is very 'anti' veg and vegan) has a staple pesto she makes that is just roasted red peppers, walnuts and garlic blitzed in the blender. She either uses the jarred roasted red peppers in oil or roasts them herself.

Yum.

Also (I appear to be on a roll) - jus roll ready made pastry is vegan. So you can make pies, tarts etc easily enough.

Feeling inspired now! [wanders off to look in fridge]

So lady you think vegan ready meals would be preferable to homemade meat ones ? Am genuinely surprised and then of course I'll have to make something else because gob smacking as this may be I know my kids, I've known them for 16 years and they will not eat what they will not eat. They have years ahead of them to try stuff but when I'm cooking and paying I want it eaten

So that was in reply to Nobody.
My friend owns a food processing factory and if you knew what was in processed food, everything from biscuits to pastry you'd never but it again

uinoa is another good protein source but we're still working on finding recipes where it tastes nice

Try this quinoa burrito PeaceOfWildThings. Note I don't bother with the green tomato salsa and either make or by regular salsa.

So lady you think vegan ready meals would be preferable to homemade meat ones?

If it means you don't lie and feed your vegetarian daughter beef, yes they are better.

Obviously homemade vegan/vegetarian meals would be better than ready meals but you haven't really seemed willing to try that.

Thanks whois

What in the world are you cooking for her which is more expensive than steak?!

My food costs about a third of what the carnivores in the house eat

OP, stop being goady.

No, I don't think ready meals are preferable to you cooking home made food cooked carefully from scratch every night, packed full of veg, fruit, grains, seeds, nuts, protein, good oils etc........... But you've already said that "I have neither the inclination nor the time" to do that and that you've fed her pasta and cheese (or whatever you said) for the last month. So if you're not willing to cook healthy home made meals (which I would recommend) then yes, I'd say feed her something like [below] instead.

And if you really think that feeding her nothing but pasta and cheese (or whatever you said) for a whole month is healthier than the occasional ready meal of things such as pic below then .

lentil chilli or bolognaise are really easy and freezes. you can even hide a few sesame seeds in there freeze in portion sized boxes.

humous? (homemade) (whizz up sesame seeds with some water in the blender, then add chick peas and garlic/fried onion and juice of one lemon. she can do that)

ds went veggie aged 7 not so bad as a lot of the food we eat is veggie anyway. he wants to go vegan when he is a teen. this will be harder but he wants to learn to cook and we are not starting from being massive meat eaters in the first place.

is it that everybody else will reject the vegan food?

The issue is Nobody I could and have cooked from fresh for years, they won't eat it. That gets very old very quickly.
It's all very well but I'm a single mum, I work, so the other kids have to eat what I cook. Veggie pants will have to get googling because I agree pasta and cheese is not good enough, but I take exception to being told processed shit is preferable to my home made cottage pie evening we ate it 7 night a week, which we don't !

YY slim to home made Pesto!

To whoever asked about Quinoa / getting more protein, I quite often I just add extra grains to whatever 'standard' grain I'm using. So if I'm following a Cous Cous recipe for example then I'll often throw in a bit of Quinoa or other similar sized grain. Or if cooking rice for curry I'll just throw some lentils into the rice (I can rarely be bothered making Dahl).

Not protein related, but I always think Pearl Barley is a really underrated grain! I adore it in soups.

OP, I never said processed shit is preferable to your home made cottage pie - it isn't!

What I did say is that ready meals such as the BOL above (boiled grains and mostly raw veg) is preferable to pasta and cheese every day for a month (which I would argue is actually more 'processed' than the 'processed' BOL ready meal).

I'm the only (mushroom hating) vegetarian in a house of (fussy) meaters. Well Dh isn't fussy, dds are.

There aren't that many things that fit into the category Things we will all eat

So, we sometimes have those things and sometimes I'll do a meat thing for them and a veggie variation for me.

Veggie things:
Omelette/ Spanish Omelette with salad, veg etc
Veggie chilli with rice or pasta or jacket potatoes
Jacket potatoes with various toppings, or baked beans
Veggie spag bol
Risotto or paella
Spanakoppita (filo pastry pie with spinach and Feta) I usually do this with new potatoes baked in the oven with some olive oil and rosemary
Various soups - carrot soup with cumin and coriander, Moroccan soup with chickpeas, Lentil, tomato and lemon soup, Minestrone

• all with bread and cheese

Veggie curries or dahl with naan bread or rice Roast veggies with couscous, salad leaves or spinach, goats cheese and harissa ( though one won't eat the couscous, one won't have the cheese) Mexican - one meat thing, various veggie things eg beans, salsa, guacamole plus tortilla or tacos salad grated cheese Tabbouleh with baked new potatoes Veggie lasagne Pasta puttanesca Pasta with spinach, fresh tomatoes and chillies Something on toast

Or a meat thing with veg variation
Beef stifado with pasta I'll just have the pasta with spinach tomatoes maybe pesto stirred through
Meat and veg/ Glamorgan sausage or Mexican beanburger and veg
Roast dinner/ veggie sausage and veggie gravy with all the same veg
Paella - make it veggie, take out a portion and add prawns in at the end for everyone else
Lebanese takeaway or Wagamamas!

I'm not that organised and don't really meal plan, but try and do a few things in the slow cooker and freeze some of it, or make twice as much soup and freeze half - so there's always something to defrost rather than cooking two separate meals.

I try new stuff occasionally - we tried fregola recently in a veggie sauce and everyone liked it. Gnocchi had one fan and one hater

Fruit and yoghurt for pudding, sometimes with a meringue nest - although one will only eat the meringue nest

Well you did, you said if I didn't have the inclination to provide them with healthy diets I could hardly complain about DD not eating healthily and then suggested vegan ready meals. Perfectly healthy options are provided, if one person doesn't want to eat them, that takes nothing away from the meat options which are perfectly acceptable.

I'm not a big Quorn fan either - I'd rather have chilli or bol made with lentils than Quorn. I do keep some veg sausages, veg hotdogs, Glamorgan sausages and Mexican beanburgers in the freezer.

OP But you're NOT providing perfectly healthy option for her!! You fed your vegan DD pasta and cheese for a month, then decided as a healthier option to feed your vegan DD meat without her knowledge. Sorry, but that's pretty poor. The same 5 meals on rotation for the rest of the family isn't ideal either.

Then, you are appalled when I say that if you can't be bothered to cook healthy home made meals (or even anything better for DD than pasta and cheese for a month) then perhaps you try some healthy ready meals (such as the BOL pictured) instead, and you say My friend owns a food processing factory and if you knew what was in processed food, everything from biscuits to pastry you'd never but it again....... Except apparently you would buy processed food, judging from your comment yeaterday at 16:58: And we do eat a lot of ready meals which should make it easier for her to just choose something else !!?

So which is it OP? You'll happily feed all the family ready meals except for DD who cannot eat these appalling processed ready meals because she needs to be fed your wholesome home made pasta and cheese for an entire month followed by some meat you tricked her in to eating?!

Are you for real?

^ps. And you told us the Bolognese you tricked her in to eating contained meat and Quorn; she can't eat Quorn mince either as that contains eggs.

Equally I don't let them go to bed hungry either so I hope that clears that up for you.
Where in my post did I suggest you send your kids to bed hungry?
You don't seem to be taking any advice that's offered to you on board and I'm struggling to understand why you bothered posting this thread at all. If you're so uninterested, lack the lime and the inclination then don't waste everyone's time by asking for advice that you're going to ignore. Vegetarian/vegan diets are typically much cheaper than eating meat and fish regularly so you're either lying about how much you spend or buying ridiculously overpriced items.

It's genuinely hilarious to me that so many people think that cooking without meat or fish is practically a military operation.

Indeed. Beans on toast/jacket potato. Peanut butter on toast. Guacamole and plain corn chips/vegetable sticks. All pretty mainstream. French onion soup. potato wedges. Loads of veg curries.

People always seem to think veganism is so weird and strange and out there.

(Ps- not a vegan myself. But DH finds dairy hard to deal with, and is not that fond of meat so we try and avoid that alot of the time).

However healthy they are, the meat options aren't perfectly acceptable, because they contain meat. If you want to keep offering her healthy options, you need to start cooking vegetarian healthy options. If you don't want to do that, she needs to cook for herself and you need to stay out of it.

^^^ they are for the 4/5 of us that aren't vegetarians