My wife’s doctor put her on a 21-day Vegan-only cleansing diet. Neither she nor I have ever prepared Vegan meals, but I get that no animal products whatsoever can be used. She went out and bought all kinds of veggies and tubers, but we don’t have a vegan cookbook handy to look for recipes.
Is there a website where I can type in a list of ingredients and it spits out recipes that only use those ingredients?
Any suggestions would be appreciated besides “go out and buy a vegan cookbook”. I live in a small town and cookbooks are hard to come by, although I could certainly order one over the Internet.
I’m a vegetarian, I work in the medical field, and I’m… dubious of any doctor who would recommend “cleansing” of any sort other than colon prep prior to a colonoscopy. And that doesn’t involve eating solid food.
I don’t know how well you can use your desired method of searching on any of the veg-centric sites, but the first website has tons of recipes and might work best for that.
I’m curious why the doctor (presumably a medical doctor) would recommend such a diet. I thought that cleanses weren’t really part of mainstream medicine. And while I can see a doctor recommending that a patient modify his or her diet, I’m surprised that this doctor recommended an exclusively vegan one.
Thanks Ferret Herder. These links are exactly what I was looking for.
Dewey Finn- Perhaps the word ‘cleansing’ isn’t quite right in this case. Without being overly graphic, my wife has had gastro-intestinal problems for the past 12 years. Eating a normal diet she is forced to take a large amount of powerful laxatives just to be ‘normal’. Doctors have tested her for lots of possible diseases, but the test results haven’t pointed to anything useful.
I can say that in the week she has been on a vegan-only diet she has completely eliminated all laxatives. So something in her old diet must be causing the problem.
After 21 days the doctor wants to start introducing meat and dairy etc. to see which causes her digestive problems to return…
Google works pretty well. Just type “vegan” first, then each ingredient, and all kinds of recipes pop up. I do this all the time… the Google cookbook than encompasses all cookbooks!
I’m not vegan myself, but I do know that The Moosewood Cookbook is a vegetarian cookbook line - they might have a vegan cookbook that you could check out from the library before plunking down any cash. And it seems (according to the reviewers on Amazon) that the new version has notes about dairy substitutions that will probably be helpful.
Oh that is so cool! I’ve used allrecipes.com before but never realized you could do that! Thanks!!
I wish I had more to offer in this thread, since I’m a vegetarian, but unfortunately most of my cooking relies on eggs or dairy (or both).
One easy thing you can do that comes to mind is cubed tofu* + [rotating choices of] vegetables in a stir fry. One good stir fry sauce that we make at home is 2 or 3 (I can’t remember) Tbsp minced fresh garlic, 2 Tbsp corn starch, 3 Tbsp soy sauce and 2 or 3 (again, can’t remember–probably doesn’t matter much) olive oil. Put everything but the ginger in a small cup or bowl together and the corn starch will mix in pretty easily after sitting for about 5 minutes. If you’re stir-frying frozen veggies (which we usually do, mostly because it’s easier) it takes about 6-7 minutes on medium/high heat, then you add the sauce, and the ginger. Another way, if you’re feeling lazier, is just to buy a bottle of teriyaki sauce and use that. We usually use a third to a half of the bottle for one (3-person sized) pan of stir-fry (which is usually one package of tofu and one bag of frozen veggies). Anyway, you can get a pretty wide variety of options with a stir-fry, so it’s a handy staple.
and you can buy it already cubed! I think it’s even the same price! Not that it’s hard to do or takes long at all. Btw, we usually use extra-firm tofu, but it’s all a matter of personal taste. Some people like the softer tofu texture, some like the firmer.
Fake barbeque! This is so good. Trader Joe’s organic 3-grain tempeh with TJ’s Bold & Smoky Kansas City Style Barbecue Sauce. I spray some oil on the bottom of my cast iron pan, add cut up tempeh and onions, saute it for awhile and then add quite a bit of barbeque sauce. I ate mine on whole grain pita bread. It tastes just like barbeque beef to me.
I feel compelled to say that your wife should be careful about eating any raw member of the Allium family, and possibly cooked as well. I can’t eat raw onions, garlic, shallots, leeks, etc., even though I love them, and many people in my IBS group also can’t eat this stuff. I can eat alliums if they’re well cooked, but many people can’t even tolerate the cooked ones. It’s a pretty common trigger. I was surprised to find that many people share my inability to tolerate black pepper, as well.
And sometimes people can tolerate a little bit of a food, but not a lot of it. So your wife needs to be careful of that, too.
The Post-Punk Kitchen is a great site for vegan recipes. Isa Chandra Moskowitz is one of the best vegan cookbook writers around. She does run on the un-spiced side of things, so if you want some pep you may wish to ramp up the spices.
Edit: Sorry, didn’t read the OP carefully enough, that site doesn’t let you insert specific ingredients. But it still does have a lot of good recipes…
[del]Both Gardenburger and[/del]* Morningstar Farms makes “BBQ riblets” made of vegetable protein. They’re REALLY yummy. They appear to be vegan (check the link). The closest sauce I’ve found to the sauce they use is Sweet Baby Ray’s (which I keep on hand and add in a little extra).
*it appears Gardenburger stopped making them. A pity.
