Harumph. I’ve still got a third of a package of Gimme-Lean soysage in my fridge; I’ll finish it off sometime this week. Yum!
I’m vegetarian for ethical, environmental, and health reasons. I love how meat tastes and how it smells, but my ethics trump my belly. It’s a personal decision I’ve made.
But if I can get something greasy and proteiny and chewy and spicy without violating my ethical concerns, I’ll do it. That means I’ve eaten road-kill venison, bacon that was about to pass its expiration date (and therefore was donated to our group by a grocery store), and leftover turkey sandwiches from a meeting at work that otherwise were going to be thrown away.
And I’ll also eat meat substitutes if they’re tasty to me. Some of them are nasty, but others of them satisfy my greasy-protein-cravings quite nicely. Especially if I marinate them in hot sauce and liquid smoke.
Not that I eat them regularly: I buy a meat substitute about two or three times a year. But those two or three times, they sure hit the spot.
As a vegetarian ('cept I eat fish), virtually all my cooking is meatless. Occasionally my fiancee’s parents will visit and I’ll buy some pepperoni to put on half my home-baked pizza, but that’s about the only meat I’ll cook.
Most of my dishes are very highly flavored, though: lots of chiles and garlic, olives, umiboshi plum paste, ginger, herbs, and fragrant oils. Most of my meat-eating friends are glad to eat second helpings of my gingered peanut tofu-and-greens stew. People who insist on meat in every meal are definitely the exception, rather than the rule, in my social circle.
My SO is a vegetarian and a damn good cook, so I’ve learned to love vegetarian cooking. Most of the time I prefer it to meat-based meals.
I think most people have a perception of vegetarian cuisine as stuck in the 1970s-- very bland and whole-wheatier-than-thou. Tofu cheesecake. Nutritional yeast. TVP [textured vegetable protein]. Bleah. I’d be scared of veggie cooking, too, if that’s what I thought it was.
And while I love veggie food, I don’t eat fake meat. I can see where it might be good if you hadn’t had sausage in years, but there’s absolutely no comparison to the real deal.
As a fake meat eater, I’ve had an interesting experience: when I’ve tried real meat on a few occasions, I don’t find it nearly as good as I make it out to be in my head. In fact, I prefer good fake meat to mediocre real meat.
Give me highly-spiced, smoke-flavored, fried-in-olive-oil soysage over Denny’s sausage any day.
Fake meat is bizarre-- no two ways about it. But then again, so is the whole ethical vegetarian thing. If you want hamburger, go grind up a cow, but don’t recreate the flesh in some attempt to fill a void in your head and belly
I describe my eating habits as modern h/g-- based on the idea that we evolved over millions of years to eat a mostly vegetarian diet, with occasional pieces of meat whenever we could chase something down. My wife doesn’t like the texture of any meat except seafood. Needless to say, this colours my cooking.
The only people I’ve had complain about my cooking is my British aunt and grandma. Turns out they do not like noodles or prawns(and I was making a Thai stirfry with oyster sauce :rolleyes: ). If I had known, I would have made something different.
My dad is the stereotypical meat and two veg boiled to death guy. The only time he’s ever come back for seconds (when we’re not eating roast bird) is when I made spaghetti with tomato sauce. I just failed to mention there was no meat in it, because I never put meat in…
I imagine a lot of people are afraid of “fake” meat*. As an omnivore, I don’t mind a vegetarian meal, but would rather not eat vegetable products prepared to resemble meat. I’ll just take the veggies, thank you very much.
*Though I admit there are some good fake burgers out there, now. Who knows but there might one day be a perfect vegetarian “chateaubriand”.
Fake meat is a little weird, but what strikes me as weirder is people’s visceral reactions to it. If it tastes good to me, why do you care whether I “recreate the flesh in some attempt to fill a void in my belly”? I don’t close my eyes while eating it and say, “Take that, little piggy, I eat your dead muscle, mwahaha!” I simply enjoy its greasy, spicy, proteiny goodness.
You people are way weirder than I am on this subject :).
Put me in the “not understanding people who flip out at the idea of fake meat” category. By that logic, you should be opposed to eating animals in any form other than freshly killed and raw. After all, isn’t it unnatural for animal to be cooked and carved in to slices or ground up into bits?
My dad had a huge snit fit this past Christmas over the whole eating vegetarian thing. My family was coming to my place for the holiday and I was going to surprise them by cooking dinner. When they called me a couple weeks ahead of time I, to preserve the surprise, told them I’d found a nice place. My mom asked if it was vegetarian and I said yes. My dad got so upset at the idea that I wouldn’t find someplace where “everyone” could find something to eat (since of course vegetarians can find such a wide selection of choices in every restaurant…riiiight) that he slammed the phone down. I emailed him to explain that I was indeed going to cook and that those who wished to eat meat were advised to bring their own.
He somehow managed to make it through my seven-dish meal without gagging.
I should tread carefully on thew fake meat topic; my opinion has changed somewhat*- I quite admire some of the advances that have been made in the field of food technology; there are some pretty decent veggie sausages available now; if only they weren’t so damned expensive.
Quorn™ is one of the better ones - made from ‘mycoprotein’(mould)
*(in one of my first posts to the boards, I asked if fake meat was the moral equivalent of cosmetics tested on animals - i.e. some animal had to die in order to be compared to the fake meat during R&D - I was mistaken for a troll or a sock, possibly both.)
I always heard that when flying you should pre-order either a vegetarian meal or a Kosher meal, as either one will be fresher, and therefore better-tasting. I’ve never done it myself.
Is there any truth to that, Former Flight Attendant?
I dislike vegetarian food for the simple fact that it is not filling. If I want to eat and feel like I had a great meal then give me meat.
Yes, peanut butter and jelly and pizza are vegetarian foods but they’re not labelled as being vegetarian. In my opinion too many political beliefs and types of people that I consider misguided or wrong are ascribed to vegetarianism and I feel that if I eat something that is specifically labelled as being vegetarian then it’s like on some level I’m giving some sliver of assent towards that belief structure. Like the Eucharist, either it’s the body of Christ or a wafer that tastes like cardboard.
Plus I hate the term “veggie”. They are vegetables. I don’t care if it makes vegetables sound fun, learn to use all the syllables.
Pppllbbbbbbtttttt.
I’m not a fan of cold vegetable dishes. Marinated mushrooms, couscous, that kind of thing. I had cold carrot soup when I was younger that I think scarred me for life. This kind of thing seems to be a lot more popular in vegetarian menus.
I cannot fathom how your ordinary meat eater will gag at the very thought of a different vegetable dish – as if it contained some horrible unnatural adulterant – but will not hesitate to push into his/her slavering maw the strangest meat dish – with its random chunks of gristle, fat, bone, hoof, horn, and other toothsome unmentionables.
Does all this come from having an Irish mother whose idea of a vegetable was boiled potatoes or boiled spinach?
