Vegan recipes - family and kid friendly

[cakeycakeface]

I'm not vegan (eat fish and veggies) but would love to start introducing more vegan recipes into my family's diet. I genuinely believe this would improve our health and expose us to interesting food. I am hoping vegan parents will share their tried and tested recipes to help me get my fussy DCs salivating!. Anyone else interested in this?

Lots of my vegan recipes are for adults as they are spicy. Family friendly options include:

Sauces for pasta/jacket potatoes/roasted veg: vegan puttanesca, vegan bolognese (lentils instead of mince), peperonata, ratatouille.

One pot dishes: ribollita, borscht, mushroom stoup (Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall), lentil and root veg stew, shepherdess pie (lentils instead of mince), succotash, caponata, dhal, Briam (Jamie Oliver), turlu turlu (Moro), porotos granados (Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall), Spring veg stew (Good Housekeeping).

Other mains: noodle, veg and cashew stir fry, beetroot tarte tatin, root veg tarte tatin, chick pea and sweet potato burgers, onion tart, puy lentil and mushroom pie, peanut and sesame veg noodles, bean burgers, falafel.

Lots to mull over in this thread - thanks for all the contributions!

I'm a vegan and I teach breadmaking - so most of my recipes are vegan. There's the odd cheese and tomato pizza recipe on there, but the rest is vegan.

I'd like to second some of the suggestions on here - the Fry's chicken nuggets, for one; the vegan lemon cake for another - I shall make that this weekend, thanks.

It's very similar to a chocolate cake I make often:
200g s/r flour
200g sugar
25g cocoa pwdr
75g rapeseed oil
250g water

The only differences are: I don't use an extra tsp of baking powder - but I'll try that next time, and I use 75g oil (down from 100g when I first started making it), and I use more water.

The other difference is that I make mine in the m/wave - pour it in a silicon cake former and m/wave for 6/7 minutes. It rises better than when cooked in the oven, IME.

I also do a carrot cake version of this, and a north country parkin.

I use s/r flour a lot, making pancakes, tempura batter, pikelets, soda bread and loads more.

One of the quickest things you can do with your kids, once they're responsible enough to hold a frying pan handle, is fruit pikelets.

S/raising flour + enough water to make a batter + a handful of sultanas.

Mix together and spoon into a hottish oiled frying pan. As soon as the tops are dry, turn them over and brown the other side. They're ready to eat as soon as they're cool enough!

Now I'm off to browse through the thread properly!

Remus, have you come across Nomato sauce?

You may never need to moan about tinned tomatoes again!

Zelda, there are a couple of Quorn products out that are vegan, but they're not on general sale yet. However, both Morrison's and Sainsbury's sell a reasonable soya mince, which even my wife doesn't mind occasionally in a bolognaise sauce!

I make my own seitan, and completely agree with potatoscowls, above, we need some different textures in our food.

And yes to adding coconut milk and Thai curry paste to dishes.

My basic modus operandi for an evening meal, starting on Monday, is (I mainly cook for myself, since my wife is an omni):

Monday - make a rich ragu-type dish which I have with home-made pasta (check out my 10-yr-old GD making it!);
Tuesday - add red kidney beans and curry paste, making a veg curry which I'll perhaps have with pan-fried curried wedges
Wednesday - add chunks of seitan along with a good dollop of WI hot pepper sauce - making a chilli non carne, which I'll have with brown rice;
Thursday - add tin coconut milk, Thai curry paste, ginger paste, lemon juice and soy sauce - Thai chilli non carne . I'll have this with curried wedges or white rice;
Friday - make a pie with whatever's left.

Or, on Tuesday I might decide to make a lasagne, using potato instead of pasta - simply gorgeous!

The first pie I made was filled with ratatouille - there are just so many variations on a theme with a simple veg stew.

I'm a vegan about 98% of the time - and swear by anything you can make off the Oh She Glows blog, particularly the kids love her stuff

CookingOnGas - urgh! Did I really say that?! I apologise. Actually I've now trained myself to be able to eat cherry tomatoes, if not too ripe. It's the tinned ones that I will never be able to deal with.

BreadandWine - that Nomato sauce looks v interesting. Thank you.

Vegan shepherds pie is great. Mixture of veggies, lentils, chickpeas and beans with a sweet potato and ordinary potato topping. I think the original recipe I started with was from the Jamie Oliver website, but I've adapted it s lot since then and it's different every time. I grate in whatever root vegetables I have to the base.

Great topic. I'm omni myself but have been doing Mark Bittman's "Vegan Before 6" on weekdays in term time for about a year and a half now, and think it's done my health the world of good. DH and I both WFH so I've been trying very hard to find tasty vegan recipes for our lunches. He's very meat-and-potatoes but willing to try new things and believes his health has improved as well.

I'm not as faithful a vegan when the DCs are on holidays, but every so often I do a vegan meal for all of us (I refuse to do more than one meal) and the meat has never been missed.

As for ideas, it is worth bearing in mind that virtually any vegetable risotto recipe can be "vegan-ised" by swapping the butter for olive oil, either doing without the parmesan or using a vegan alternative and using a vegan stock (Marigold do a vegan bouillon powder). My DCs cheered this afternoon when I made mushroom risotto for their lunch. As spring turns into summer this will be a wonderful fallback when there will be such lovely asparagus and fresh peas.

I honestly wouldn't worry too much about spice - don't make it super-hot (I wouldn't like that myself) but a little heat sneakily applied may be better received than you think. And if the vegan decision is more about health than principles (either of which is totally legitimate) then a dollop of dairy sour cream, yogurt etc on the DCs' portions to cool things down won't do any harm. Coconut milk also works.

Totally recommend the Jerusalem mejadra - divine!!! Am I the only one who slices and fries double the amount of onions to have something to snack on while doing the rest of the prep??

I have found some great ideas from Hugh F-W's "Veg" book - too many to mention here but about 2/3 of the recipes are either vegan or "vegan-isable" by swapping omni ingredients for vegan alternatives.

Yesterday I made a lovely coconut lentil soup from the "Vegangela" blog which was really nice. The DCs really enjoyed it - I served it with dairy sour cream but it certainly would have been great without it.

And finally Jamie Oliver has a wonderful chickpea curry recipe (I found it on the Sunday Times website) that is totally adaptable to the storecupboard by using frozen, tinned and dried ingredients. That's one of the things that has been such a revelation about eating vegan - while it's great to eat fresh vegetables and fruit, vegan recipes are often very storecupboard-friendly, which can make them very cheap, particularly if you're organised enough to soak beans the night before .

There have been some really great ideas here - can't wait to try the lentil bolognese for one!

This triple lentil soup is gorgeous. Personally I also add some finely diced carrot with the onion/celery mix, and sometimes a handful of diced tomatoes to it too.

It is very ugly though

I can recommend this chickpea stew www.thefirstmess.com/2016/01/20/vegan-seven-spice-chickpea-stew-recipe/.

I just had the Frumpy Minestrone Soup which was very good indeed. I didn't make the parmesan croutons but added a splash of balsamic at the end. It really lifted the soup.

Lots of Mexican recipes too, began burritos, tacos, fajitas and nachos are great with lots of salsa and guacamole

Raymond Blanc's veggie chilli is delicious - leave out the chocolate obvsiously. Tagines are popular here too - roast some veg with Morroccan spices, add apricots/dates & serve with cous-cous, coriander, almonds etc. I'm veggie, but try and limit dairy, DH & DS's are omni so I have to try hard to tempt them. I don't mind meat substitutes and positively love beans and pulses, they don't like any of them at all

That must be hard, jen! There's only me and my DW and we both go our own way in the kitchen.

Do like a tagine, must have one shortly.

Just discovered Morrison's meat-free sausages are back to being vegan, today! They always used to be, then they did a redesign and suddenly they included egg! I've stopped buying Linda Mac's even though I quite like them - but they've got palm oil in them!

Yes, sadly palm oil is everywhere bread

We're in France, so the choice of actual ready made products is more limited - but you get used to it, and I think it makes you become more inventive than I otherwise would be. (but still always on the lookout for new ideas)

Certainly, being vegan forces you to think outside the box - as does intermittent fasting (the 5:2 way of living).

I combine the two and it was a real eye-opener to find that half a dozen veg, simmered for half an hour or so with a tin of tomatoes, is absolutely full of flavour as it is. Add herbs and spices and you need very little else.

My all-time record for a low-calorie meal is this for 75 calories. (Must admit it's a bit heavy on celery, but I love the stuff!)

I live in the US, my mum has brought over some new tesco vegan sausage rolls for me - cue mega excitement!!!

I also have an omni family, one of which is a picky 4 yr old who won't touch most veg but does love beans and pulses thank god, have found this recipe and going to give it a go this week

www.onegreenplanet.org/vegan-recipe/moroccan-chickpea-bake/

Oh, my, Kiki! That looks so good - it's gone straight into my vegan folder.

Thanks.

Hope the sausage rolls don't disappoint!

A good friend has recently gone vegan and DH is veggie, blatant place marking for later perusing at leisure!

Well done Helena! Us vegans need thoughtful friends like you!

I love making vegan food! I become vegan every year for lent and these are my favourite recipes:

Ive put all the links for the recipes below!

• courgette, tomato and pesto tart
• tapenade and sweet roasted pepper tart - this is so versatile you put in any topping you want!

wearesavoury.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/savoury-tarte-tatin/

• savoury pancakes - again so versatile - they are filled with vegan curry or mushrooms

wearesavoury.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/savoury-pancakes/

• congee - something a bit different. This is like an asian inspired risotto and is totally delicious. It is topped with crispy tofu and veggies.

wearesavoury.wordpress.com/2016/02/13/congee-a-savoury-rice-pudding/

YUM

OP if it helps - I just bought this for DS, who loves to cook anyway, and it has tons of great but simple vegan recipes for the family

also just bought this as I was in a rut with family friendly meals, both are going down well so far

Just came across this new blog with these stated aims:

My Blog will be concentrating on Family Friendly Vegan Recipes and " common sense " parenting.

I'm sure we could all do with a bit of that last!