Food

Five Helpful Tips for New Vegetarians

(Or vegans, or those who eschew labels and want to eat less meat)

I’m not a great cook, and I don’t have a huge amount of willpower, but even I have been able to follow a vegetarian diet by making choices that simplified my cooking and helped me find tasty alternatives to meat-based dishes.

Let me add here that nobody’s perfect. Although I was vegan in the past, I’m not currently following a strict vegan diet. My diet is largely plant-based. By avoiding animal products, I feel better about doing less harm to animals; my overall health is better (including fewer migraines, which used to debilitate me for several days per month); and I save on groceries by not buying meat.

Here are a few tips that have worked for me and have made my life easier when it comes to eating vegetarian foods. I’m an English teacher, not a chef, and I’d love to hear what works in your home kitchen, too.

Start with Your Favorite Recipes, and Adapt

To transition into vegetarian eating, start with what you already know and love. Find ways to eliminate the meat in your favorite recipes. This way, your meal looks and tastes pretty familiar, and you already know how to cook it.

Sometimes you can leave the meat out entirely without substituting anything else, like when I stopped making chicken pot pie and started making veggie pot pie. Other times, you can take a meat-focused dish and swap something else for the meat, like when I learned about the deliciousness of using diced, oven-roasted potatoes instead of meat as taco filling.

Try These Two Seasonings

Experiment with smoked paprika and nutritional yeast when you cook. There are other delicious seasonings you can add to your food, but these two are the most savory (in my opinion!) and can evoke flavors that remind you of meat and cheese.

If you’ve ever had nutritional yeast on popcorn (the most common way it seems to turn up), you know it has a flavor that’s not quite nutty and not quite salty but just right when you want a snack that has a certain richness but is lighter than dairy. Nutritional yeast, when added to sauces especially, can be surprisingly cheese-like in flavor, without the fake-cheese texture of flavor of processed cheese alternatives.

Smoked paprika has a — you guessed it — smokiness that makes beans and soups taste almost like you added a sausage or two to the pot. It also can be sprinkled on greens as you cook them, instead of using bacon. You can make a meat alternative for breakfast sausage or burgers by mashing up some beans, adding some smoked paprika and a little bit of bread crumbs, and then shaping patties to heat on the stove top.

Take a Chance on Beans

Try different kinds of beans to find the ones you like best. The easiest way is to buy a few cans of beans to try with rice or other recipes. Mark Bittman has some easy bean recipes in his books and online.

Black beans and pinto beans are great for tacos, rice bowls, breakfasts, soups, and more. Garbanzo beans can be roasted for a snack, or chopped finely to make a sandwich spread that’s pretty close to tuna, or blended to make hummus. Black eyed peas are delicious as part of a meal with collard greens and cornbread; as a northerner, I was missing out until someone from the south cooked this for me.

Beans are cheap in the can, and even cheaper if you buy them dry to soak and cook them yourself: I find they taste better this way, too, as they take on more of the seasonings of your choice like cumin (ideal for black beans) and the aforementioned smoked paprika.

If you have trouble digesting beans, soaking them can help, and taking a digestive enzyme with your meal can also help your body break them down. I found that I was able to digest beans more easily over time as my body got used to them.

An Important Tip about Tofu

Unless you want soft tofu for a specific recipe, be sure to press your tofu. When you press the water out of the tofu you buy, the cooked texture will be firmer, and the tofu won’t fall apart on you so easily in stir-fries, etc.

Wrap the tofu in a thin towel (a flour sack towel is perfect, and you can also use paper towels). Then gently but firmly press on each side of the tofu block to let the water transfer from the tofu to the towel — don’t press so hard as to break up the tofu, but press hard enough to get the moisture out.

You can also use a tofu press. My mom bought me a tofu press for Christmas the year I went vegan, and it was a game-changer as it presses more water out while saving time and effort.

I love pressing and slicing tofu, then coating it in breadcrumbs to make nuggets, strips, or patties — pressing the water out makes the tofu firm enough to hold up like chicken would.

Don’t Worry about Being a “Junk Food” Vegan

Don’t get down on yourself for leaning on processed foods sometimes, especially at first. You’ve probably seen a lot of articles that criticize vegans for eating unhealthy, pricey food. My advice is to prepare what you can yourself, and don’t worry if you’re heating up frozen veggie burgers some nights. You’re doing your best to make a big change, and you don’t have to be the Bobby Flay of vegetarian cuisine, cooking anything and everything yourself.

You can also take a page out of the “semi-homemade” cookbooks by creating meals that combine convenience foods with whole foods you make yourself like serving veggie burgers with baked sweet potatoes and green salad.

If you want to expand your repertoire in the kitchen, you can learn recipes to make your own vegan/vegetarian convenience foods or meat alternatives over time. YouTube is a great resource for all kinds of meatless recipes— you can even find challenges where creators make inexpensive vegan dishes with food from the dollar store.

There’s so much joking and criticism directed at people who choose to eat fewer animal products, but you know in your mind and heart what you want to do. There are a lot of resources to help you online, from videos to Facebook groups to recipes. Thanks for reading this, and please let me know in the comments what has helped you in eating more plants and fewer animal products.