Catering for a vegetarian?!

[Magenta3]

My brother's gf is a vegetarian. We're having everyone over next weekend for a get together. My family eats a lot of meat and I feel a bit unsure of what to cook her, and if I'm being honest I don't see why we should change our catering for one person.

I asked my brother to bring along some of their own food for her (he eats meat so will be fine, it's literally only for her) and he seemed annoyed at me. He obliged but I could tell he wasn't happy. When we've been to theirs she doesn't cook meat for us so it feels one sided. She jokes she'd probably poison us as she doesn't know how to cook meat but realistically she doesn't want to cook it, so why should we for her?

Speechless.

Lol, I bet you're popular!

Is it fun being so intolerant and closed-minded? Strikes me as a pretty miserable way to go through life, but each to their own!

No, I don’t care how much or little my guests eat.

Wow, some people are very closed minded. Maybe if you tried some vegetarian, or even vegan 😱😱😱 food, you would actually like it? A lovely vegetable Thai green curry, spinach and ricotta cannelloni, lentil dhal etc?? Do some people really not eat anything like that? Each to their own I suppose 🤷‍♀️

@CountryStore , the pp probably have eaten plenty of food that is suitable for vegetarians and vegans. It's the 'vegetarian food' label that is off-putting. I have been a strict vegetarian most of my life and even I think 'yuk! at the thought of 'vegetarian/vegan food' .
Just cook food that doesn't have meat or fish or their by-products in it.

I think @PenguinRainbows may be slightly over-egging the pudding now.

Don't be silly, her pudding probably has bacon sprinkled on top

“Yeah, eggs!! Loads of em!! Got a problem with that, vegans?!”

I'm imagining OP is also the kind of person who doesn't like foreign food, cyclists and either her neighbours or people who live further away than that.

She defo makes her pastry with lard, and cackles as 'vegetarians' unwittingly eat it.

@BardRelic , there are people who have no idea what lard is and think it's some sort of margarine. There are people who won't eat junket because it's made with an enzyme from a ickle baby calf but will eat cheese. Someone once told me that vegetarian cheese was lower in calories than regular cheese because it had no animal fat in it.

@KirstinBlest There was a vegan thread on here recently in which someone who thought she was vegan was complaining about how she was served an egg on top of a pasta dish and how this was wrong as she was vegan and the egg wasn't listed in the ingredients. It did sound as if the manager was very rude to her, to be fair. But during the course of the thread it emerged that she didn't realise that egg is an ingredient of some pastas, especially fresh pasta, and it's a good idea to check that too.

Admittedly I struggled when I first became vegetarian, trying to work out what was in what, but I was 13 and Google hadn't been invented.

There's some real stuck in the mud cry babies on this thread. Vegetables? The horror.
Maybe if they were invited to more dinner parties they could think of a more imaginative menu.

You can't expect a veggie to cook meat. You also can't expect someone you've invited to dinner to bring their own food.

I bet you have a lovely veggie meal when you go there but there's also nothing wrong with your brother cooking meat as I assume he is the one that cooks it when he eats it.

Do you enjoy what she cooks you? Does your brother cook his own meat?

Make a veggie/lentil soup to start followed by mac&cheese, pasta or whatever. I'm not a veggie so I don't know what a fancy veggie meal is but I'd go out my way to find out to make a decent meal. Mac&cheese was just a suggestion, it's up to you to do the research.

@BardRelic please go onto that thread and state that pasta sometimes contains eggs. Not enough people said it cancel the cheque.

Having become too interested in this thread because I am good at procrastinating instead of working, I think that if someone came to my house with a very different diet to my own, I'd take it as an opportunity to learn something new. Knowledge might come in handy for future- I'd ask them what they liked, ask for a few recipes etc. But that's me.

Yup that'll be a great way to make sure she feels wanted.

A vegetarian is being catered for hardly a chore.

So many unwelcoming people on MN. Maybe you could all learn a thing from the cultures who embrace visitors.

I haven’t eaten meat for over 30 years. There would certainly be a medical issue if I attempted to at someone’s house as I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to digest it.

I could do. I mean one of my favourite parts of MN is when, after 20+ pages and about four days, someone bobs up and says 'haven't read the thread, but have you tried [blindingly obvious idea]?' Which has been mentioned consistently throughout the thread, the last time about three posts up, so it's not like they had to do anything but flick through the last page of posts.

That’s not how physiology works! Otherwise we’d never be able to try new foods, would we?

@BardRelic yes 🤣
OP: "Husband hasn't come home!!"
Random poster 3 days later "Have you tried ringing him?"

Anecdotal, I know, but I have heard vegetarians say that, eating meat after years of being vegetarian made them sick, @KingsleyBorder. This was in cases where they had been tricked into eating meat, if I recall correctly.

Presumably if someone is introducing a new food, and it makes them feel ill, they can either avoid it, or can keep on trying, until their system accepts it.

Best ever one of those was a thread started by a woman seeking recommendations for a pushchair or similar. Years later somebody else bumped the thread and the OP posted without noticing it was her own thread, recommending whatever they'd bought in the end, so effectively she was advising her younger self, a thing I expect many of us have often wished we could have done, on a range of issues.

You would be fine, because your digestive organs are well adapted to eating meat. They don't lose the knack!