In the last blog I covered some of the things one considers when going vegetarian. This time I'm going to look at the food itself and beginning to make yourself veggie meal.
Ofcourse, its entirely possible just to make the food you’re used to eating and just leaving out the meat. Unfortunately, this is where the reputation for vegetarian meals being bland and boring largely comes from.
From the outside it is possible to see that it is usually here where you sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of those converting to the lifestyle. For those who really want to succeed and move forward you will find the new challenges exciting and easy to accommodate because you are living with the enthusiasm for it. Sadly, for those who have perhaps made the choice for the wrong reasons or under duress it is at this point it becomes obvious. Those folks will be unwilling to change their habits and thus use the subsequent dullness of dishes as an excuse to revert back to their old ways. It is not a bad thing. Some folks are simply not suited to it and as much as I like the idyllic notion of a world of vegetarians, I would much rather everyone be happy.
When people ask me if they should be vegetarian then I tell them they can only try. Say you will do it for a month. It is not as if you can never go back if you find its not for you! No, give it a month. That way you will fast approach the point where you find out if you are really ready for it. It is a win/win in many way. For if you get to the end of the month and are desperate to visit your local butcher then at least you can do it safe in the knowledge that you’ve given it a go and need ponder on it no longer.
As I have said, if you go into it with enthusiasm you will enjoy the change and will probably not even realise your month was up ages ago and have been living the vegetarian life for some time now! But at least in the early days you ate with confidence knowing it was ‘only for a month’. If you are making the change as a family rather than as an individual it will also help find out which family members will cope with it best and if necessary it will offer time for discussion over future eating arrangements should it be that not all want to keep it up. It might be a good time to involve older children in cookery, so if they decide to stick with it, and perhaps the parents don’t, then they are capable of making the best of their own food. It will also help mum or dad ease the kitchen workload! Perhaps once or twice a week the whole family can sit down to a vegetarian meal without labelling it as such. It is bad enough having a giant ‘V’ next to your meals in restaurants, let alone being singled out at home too! It is never easy contending with half a dozen different diets if you’re a large family, but it is important that everyone has the freedom to make their own decisions.
Although ‘health’ is frequently brought up in any discussion on vegetarianism, I intend to avoid the subject. It is all rather controversial for me, and as with so many things whether something is healthy or not seems to change week by week depending on what else is in the news. Health is a whole lifestyle phenomenon and can’t be created with a few well prepared meals. I will say that in my 29 years I have been unaffected by nothing more than the occasional winter cold, so for me I like it because it doesn’t harm me. That is the best one can hope for in life as far as I’m concerned. People often say to me ‘oh! You’re a vegetarian! I didn’t know you were health conscious?’ Well, I’m not. Not by a long way. Yes, I enjoy fresh fruits and raw vegetables, but I also am a one man army against low fat diary goods and the vulgar packaging that details how fat or otherwise you’ll be after eating the contents. I’m a bit Victorian when it comes to packaging actually. I am a firm believer that children should be taught to cook when young and be educated into knowing what will harm them and what will heal them. The human animal has survived many thousands of years without calorie counting packaging and it only serves to give the lazy a way offload their responsibility of tutoring their dependants. But, that is a rant I shall not bore you with now – it has nothing to do with vegetarianism!
I also believe that the saying ‘everything in moderation’ is a fair one. For those genuinely afflicted with things that mean their diets are restricted then fair enough, but most of us we get to choose what we eat and how much we consume. I never use low fat anything, but I also don’t make huge mountains of food to be consumed all day long. It is about balance and more importantly the quality of the food you want to consume. When I say quality, I don’t mean ‘expensive’. You can get by quite nicely if you’re prepared to put aside a certain amount of time for the preparation and avoid filling up the cupboards with snacks ‘just in case’ you don’t get time to cook. We all know that if the easy food it sitting in the cupboard we’ll not bother looking for the time to cook and crank up our food bills at the same time. It is also best point out that I have a fairly active lifestyle. To those who know me, you can stop giggling now! It’s well known that I dislike sport and have never stepped foot in a gym, but I rarely spend evenings or days in front of the tv and I do spend a lot of time working out of doors in the garden. Whilst it is not fast paced exercise it works for me and I leave it up to you to find your own balance. The majority of the recipes I speak of in my future articles may seem quite rich in butter, sugar, cream and lots of other things we’re told are bad. Indeed, some of them are bad. But this is where self control comes in and I cannot help in that respect.
This article and the recipes I speak of are about me and my life as a vegetarian. I am rather good at moderation and as such do not fret over calories and ‘balance’. If you eat too much of one thing then the result will be negative, so I leave it to you to employ the common sense and live happily ever after. You must remember that going vegetarian will deny you certain fats, proteins and vitamins which are required to maintain a healthy balance. This is why a little research will benefit you in the long run if you’re going to move past the 30 day experiment. You will need to find a way to include the proteins and vitamins lost preferably through other food stuff, but failing that you can always take an interest in vitamin supplements. I am not fond of pill popping, so I combine the benefits of natural foods with a herbal approach. I also take different herbal remedies to boost my immune system and aid my general health.
I hope that has given you some, vegetarian, food for thought! Next post I hope to move on to sharing some actual recipes!
