I am a vegetarian and have been since around 2012. Back then it was not quite as popular as it is today which made food get-togethers sometimes a bit uncomfortable. Holiday invitations were awkward at times. When you don’t eat someone’s special recipe, they tend to take it personally. But I persevered, tried to explain that it was not the food but only my preference, and hopefully remained friends with perplexed relatives and others.
Since I have eaten meat almost all my life, my recipe box was filled with little cards demanding meat as an ingredient so when I suddenly became a non-meat eater, I had some weeding-out to do. Not even all the vegetable recipes one would assume appropriate were acceptable since many called for things like chicken bouillon or bacon or other meat-based ingredients. I was left with meager pickings!
At first I loaded up with frozen vegetarian dinners especially those made by an outfit known only as Amy. Did I mention I continue to eat cheese, eggs and seafood? Amy has the best macaroni, broccoli and cheese, salty and creamed to perfection. And her Pad Thai remains my special treat when I go grocery shopping. I continue to eat Amy’s comfort food but not as heavily as at the beginning of my vegetarian path. Shortages at the grocery store have narrowed my selections and rising costs have made me think twice about the relatively cheap ingredients in vegetarian pre-made food.
Over time I have found my own “special” recipes by searching the Web and specifically YouTube. There are entire YouTube channels devoted to vegetarian and vegan fare. My favorite is the Whole Food Plant Based Cooking Show. I almost want to sing that as their theme song trickles through my brain! Jill Dalton is the host and also calls herself the Chief Flavor Officer. She hooked me and often I follow along as she makes some very mouth-watering recipes. Some I make, some I keep, and some I discard. It is a trial and error process for me.
As a youngster, I was never big on vegetables so the transition has been difficult and a little astounding as I think about it. If your mom was anything like mine, potatoes, peas, green beans and carrots were standard vegetable fare. I could even throw applesauce in there and get away with it. Fancy cooking and “unusual” vegetables were strangers to our table. Tomatoes should be included but everyone now says they are fruits, right?
If someone had told me back then that when I was in my seventies, I would be eating avocado toast or spicy Thai eggplant, I would have said, “No way!”
And hummus? I am positive I would have turned up my nose at that! It has been amazing to me to find the many many things that now taste good, things that the taste of meat, in my opinion, obliterated. When your taste buds are “addicted” to bacon and ham and grilled steak, the lowly lentil does not seem very appealing. Meat to me is like sugar and salt, the more you eat, the more of it you crave.
I have to admit that my shunning of meat slowly came about after reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. If it has never been on your book list, Mr. Sinclair gives a very vivid account of the meat processing industry in the early 1900s. The author uses the life of a poor immigrant family to highlight the social and economic inequalities of work in the food system. The descriptions are graphic and intense. The scenes in slaughterhouses and animal pens and the conditions in packing houses of diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat truly shocked me.Those images began to pop into my brain every time I picked up my meat-laden fork, and eventually I could not make myself eat meat anymore. And these big businesses treated their workers as harshly as the animals. Meat was no longer for me.
I now have hundreds of new recipes and of course I kept some of my old ones that did not require meat as an ingredient. I am contemplating giving up the cheese, eggs, and seafood and I do not anticipate it being that difficult. I enjoy the taste of so many things now and hardly ever hesitate to try something new, which I never did before. Avocado mousse, zucchini zoodles alfredo, Thai spicy eggplant, and African peanut curry are standard go-to recipes. You may find all of them on YouTube by putting the recipe name into the search bracket. There are even some variations so be adventurous and try them all. You may be surprised at how good they taste with no meat whatsoever.
