Recipe overview

Welcome to my blog! We've been doing vegan dinners for a couple of weeks now, and we've had some good ones and some not so good ones. For my first post, I want to do an overview of the meals we've tried and how we liked them. Though we were never huge red meat eaters, prior to trying this vegan experiment we were eating a fairly meat heavy diet, mostly chicken and turkey, so this was a big change! Especially for our two-year-old son Emory, who can be a typically picky kid... but probably most of all for me, lover of all things fat, salt, and carbs.

One of the first meals we tried was a recipe called Farmhouse Fricassee, from a cookbook called Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. We've had this cookbook for a long time, from Kevin's vegetarian days before we had kids (I convinced him he should switch to meat, only for us to switch back a year later), and we've generally liked most of the recipes we've tried.

I probably wouldn't personally recommend this recipe to someone else. I didn't like the taste of the broth very much, and I don't think I like tempeh very much. Kevin, who prepared most of it, said it was a lot of work. This recipe book isn't the type of "fix it and forget it" slow cooker book people might want. There's often a lot of sauteing and adding things at different times involved in preparing the meals. For some, it's definitely worthwhile, but not for this one.

Another recipe from the same book was lentil bolognese sauce over fettuccine (we used penne for Emory for easier eating).

Overall, this recipe was okay. It definitely had a meatiness to it, and lentils have an easy taste and texture to handle for someone like me, who is very picky about textures seeming "right." It called for liquid smoke, and I think it was a tad too much, but otherwise we'd probably make this again.

One cookbook I've really liked is The Vegan Lunch Box. When we decided to cut out meat, I was concerned about what we'd do for lunches. It's hard for me (and most moms I'm sure) to get too ambitious at lunch, because I never know how Iris, my 7-month-old baby, is going to be at lunchtime. She's in a clingy stage right now, and sometimes I hardly put her down all day. I really need lunches that are easy and quick, or at least that we can make in advance and heat up at lunch time. We've tried several recipes with pretty consistent success. One of them was red rice and beans:

Pretty yummy stuff! It tasted like rice-a-roni but much better. We ate it with grilled eggplant.

One of my favorite things we've had so far is a mixed vegetable grill. We have a couple of vegetarian grilling cookbooks, and mostly they're pretty straightforward with their recipes, but there are some delicious sauces and salad dressing recipes in there. This particular recipe had eggplant, squash, zucchini, peppers, and we ate it on whole wheat spaghetti with a balsamic vinegar sauce.

This past week, we've tried a couple of recipes from a website called the Post Punk Kitchen, which is the same person who has done Veganomincon and other popular vegan cookbooks. So far I haven't loved everything we've made, but I'm going to keep trying. I made a couple of mistakes in the sunflower mac recipe that probably contributed to the weird taste of the sauce, and Emory wouldn't eat it. The chickpea cutlets had the same texture problems for me as other things we've made with gluten flour, but Kevin liked them and even Emory ate more of them than I did.

What I've realized from these early experiments is that, for me, meat substitutes probably aren't going to be a great idea. The chickpea cutlets are meant to imitate the texture of meat, but I'm so sensitive to the texture of foods that this has the opposite effect on me. I couldn't even swallow the cutlets because it felt like I had the fattiest, grossest piece of meat in my mouth ever. The sunflower mac called for lemon juice at the end, which I forgot, and for unroasted sunflower seeds, which I didn't have, so I used roasted ones instead. Plus I have a crappy blender, so the sauce was probably grainier than it was meant to be. I don't have a picture of this, but we also tried the Snobby Joe's today, which was sloppy joe's made with lentils instead of meat. They were delicious and we'll definitely have them again.

Anyway, that's a sample of some of the foods we've been trying. We'll have a new round of recipes next week, as well as Kevin's attempts at creating his own. ;-)