I don’t make them myself and I wouldn’t call it regular rotation but I’ve been on a taco kick lately and especially chiles rellenos. Those are poblano chiles blistered and skinned, then stuffed with cheese, battered and deep fried. The side of beans I get are probably loaded with lard but the tacos are vegetarian and lard-free beans would be an easy sub.
Yup. A pound of black beans is about a buck twenty, and that’ll form the basis of 8-12 meals. It’s hard to get cheaper than beans.
Our standbys include a few meals that haven’t been mentioned here:
-Quesadillas with refried beans, salsa and guacamole
-Trader Joe’s Indian frozen meals: Palak Paneer (spinach) with channa masala (chickpeas), veggie biryani and garlic naan.
-Cold sesame noodles with bean sprouts
-potato pancakes with applesauce and sour cream, either from scratch or Trader Joe’s
-pancakes with eggs over easy, hash browns and sliced sauteed apples. Breakfast for dinner, yum!
Soy and protein concentrates are the only reliable forms of protein.
Beans and peas do contain protein. But like my former doctor once said, you’d have to eat a bucket full of them (his words).
Soy is a bean, so your doctor is wrong.
3.5 ounces of soybeans = 16.6gm of protein, which is a very respectable serving of protein. That’s by weight, not volume, but an estimate would be about half a cup of soybeans.
It’s possible to be a doctor without retaining much real world knowledge about human nutrition. That’s left to nurses, registered dietitians and lactation consultants.
I wonder how all the vegetarians and vegans survive, then. I think you should actually look it up before passing along his claim.
I’m an unrepentant carnivore, but I can’t tell you the last Chunk O’ Meat I ate (wait, there was some brisket at our last Poker Guys potluck…).
We’ve been trying to eat healthier, and most nights we’ll have “the big salad” (and my wife has the only recipe that makes kale palatable).
Oh, and I’ve discovered that my favorite tavern for watching sports has a kickass Veggie Black Bean Burger. I get it smothered in grilled onions, tomatos, and mushrooms, with their brown mustard/garlic sauce… under all that stuff I can’t taste the pattie anyhow!
While i like a burger with mushrooms, cheese, and ketchup, if the burger is good, i may have just a burger, naked, on my plate, eaten with fork and knife.
Yeah, i prefer fresh ground beef for my burgers.
(Although falafel with lettuce, tomato, and tahini, and possibly just a little pickle, is good, too.)
And a quick Google tells me that
A cup of cooked lentils provides 230 calories and 18 grams of protein.
A 3.5oz hamburger patty provides about 204 calories and 15 grams of protein
Or, by math, a quarter pound patty is 233 calories and 17 grams of protein. Which looks really comparable to that cup of cooked lentils. And yes, a cup of lentils is more volume than a hamburger patty, but cooked lentils are wet, and a cup is a comfortable serving. Not “buckets and buckets”.
As a convenience meal, DesertRoomie and I like the frozen tikka masala from Trader Joes. She prefers the chicken but I prefer the texture of the paneer version.
Veggie quiche! With broccoli or zucchini, spinach, artichoke hearts, mushrooms, peppers. Crustless if we’re in a hurry, but a crust makes it more substantial.
You can probably chuck a potato in there, too.
Nobody’s mentioned minestrone soup.
I’m not a Vegetarian, Presbyterian, or any other committed “-arian”. I do find, however, that as I grow older I tend to eat less meat, particularly less beef. Interestingly, my son is getting to be the same way. We still enjoy the occasional burger and other non-vegan things, particularly chicken and fish – none of us are zealots.
The last several times I made spaghettini with my favourite authentic Italian semplice sauce, I left out the veal-chicken-beef meatballs that I normally simmer with the sauce, and just sauteed some fresh brown mushrooms in garlic butter. It was delicious and perfectly satisfying. The meatless version is becoming a habit.
Vegetarianism is most certainly not an ideology around here, but meals with little or no meat seem to be happening more frequently.
Nothing in regular rotation. I may grab a nut butter sandwich, or vegan grilled cheese. And I do have a vegan mac and cheese that I love, but I most often wind up adding meat to it. I do sometimes make a noodle dish with vegan meatballs.
There was this one amazing veggie burger I found that didn’t try to actually be meat. It was just a bunch of completely recognizable veggies in a patty. It didn’t even have beans in it. But it was very good, somehow completely replacing my desire for meat in the sandwich I made out of it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the name of it, and haven’t been able to find it since.
I’m fond of some cheese-stuffed manicotti with marinara sauce every now and then.
There’s also an Indian restaurant near me that serves a vegetarian appetizer platter that I like having as a meal every now and then.
That reminds me, this looks bloody awesome, but I just can’t bring myself to deep fry anything. I despise the mess and hassle. But man, it is so tempting I might try a half-assed version and suffer its relative mediocrity. Helps that I really like zucchini and similar squashes.
I’m cutting down on beef, too, because too much will make my feet hurt (first sign that I’m inching toward a full-blown session of gout). Probably unrelated, but I’ve heard people say that too much pork will make their joints ache.
If you don’t know about it already, you might like “noodles” made from zucchini. I tried it once and got decent results with just a sharp knife, but I ended up cooking them for too long, and I was being careful to avoid that. I might try again some day with one of those spiralizers.
Our regular rotation meatless meal is a sauce of onion, garlic, capers, fresh tomatoes, lemon juice and white wine over mushrooms, spinach and a little pasta.
Jeebus, there’s a lotta mushrooms in this thread.
signed, purplehorseshoe, who can’t stand fungus
Mushroom tastes meaty. If my husband were willing to eat it, I’d add it to a lot of our meatless dishes.
There’s also a lot of pepper, a food i can’t abide. It didn’t taste meaty, but it has an assertive flavor that i suspect many people find satisfying. Blechh.