God no kidding. Plain, uncooked tofu is really quite gross. The reason I like it (and I really do like it a lot) is that it will take on the flavour of whatever you cook it with. If I throw it in with a curry it gets a lovely curry flavour. If I put it in with saffron it tastes of saffron, etc.
And agedashi tofu is really the food of the gods. If I could have it every day I would. 
Well, I don’t think that’s a fair statement and I’m always annoyed in this type of thread when someone posts something like this.
One of my good friends is fully vegan and she’s the least annoying person I’ve ever met. In fact, you wouldn’t know she was vegan unless you specifically asked.
To give an example, if we’re going to lunch as a group she’ll contact the place ahead of time and figure out which menu options she can choose specifically so she’s not a pest to the rest of the group. I’ve had more hassles eating with omnivores or carnivores (EVERY MEAL MUST HAVE MEAT- BWAHHH!!!) then I’ve ever had with her.
I would never give up meat, because its good and I don’t think we should restrict ourselves with prohibitions (I can’t eat this, do that).
Many times I’ve happened to eat vegetarian, spaghettti, beans etc. vegan? I don’t think so.
I can’t say I pay any attention to whether our meals are vegetarian or not. I often cook vegetarian meals–I’m not all that good with meat actually, esp. big things like roasts. I only just learned to do pot roast and turkey roasts! I’ve made steak once in my life.
So I cannot tell you exactly how often I cook veggie. I don’t seem to have had any meat today. Yesterday I had a slice of leftover pizza which had some chicken in it. Can’t remember otherwise.
Likewise I have no idea if I ever cook vegan. I expect so. My favorite curry would be vegan, and my favorite lentil soup. But it’s not like I think “OK, I am going to cook vegan today!”
I don’t cook tofu. Dangerdad and I like it, it’s not that, but as our daughter is allergic to all legumes, including soy, we don’t do beans/tofu/lentils unless it’s me cooking my own lunch. And I don’t see the point of meat substitutes like tofurkey. Bleh. We could not have a vegan lifestyle, and DangerGirl will probably not be able to be vegetarian unless she spends all her time figuring out proteins from grains.
I’m sure I do have vegetarian/vegan meals on occasion but it’s never a deliberate choice. I am a huge fan of meat. I also like tofu, especially with kimchii. Yum.
Hindu. Well, Hinduism, I’m Hindu (technically I’ve got my own issues with it).
Though the monday thing isn’t exclusive to Hindus, almost every day can be a religious occasion and it varies who follows what habits. My family would do mondays, where they would fast and all that day- but they didn’t expect me to do so growing up, but they certainly wouldn’t cook Meat in the house. So I just naturally got used to eating veg. on those days. I SHOULD really be fasting and eating once a day on those days, but we all have our little ways.
Currently, I think my mother’s always done Mondays, my father does something on Saturdays (they’re both vegetarians so for them it means fasting), and I think he might do something for Thursdays as well. My grandmother who’s extremely conservative and stricter in her views eats fewers times than she fasts because she tries to obverse all sorts of religious holidays and such things. It’s crazy. She’s a tiny typical old indian lady though going strong after two knee surgeries and completely avoiding any heart problems or diabetes despite her HUGE family history of it, and her being diagnosed with those issues, she’s been able to control it just by her food intake. But that’s just anecdoatal evidence and not meant for everyone obviously.
But I love her all the same
Well, I have pasta (penne ala vodka) all the time but I’ve never really thought of that as vegetarian. If you mean a meal based around some type of vegetable, then rarely ever.
Depending on what sort of vegetarian meals you mean, either 2/3rds of the time, or never.
The vast majority of the time, supper is the only meal I eat meat - I’m one of those odd people who isn’t in love with bacon, nor do I take sandwiches for lunch anymore and meat is messy without bread - and I do eat meat nearly every night, but despite no meat for breakfast or lunch I have dairy at nearly every meal. Milk with cereal or as the base of an instant breakfast, and yogurt or cheese as the non-veggie, non-fruit part of my lunches. So where does that rank on the vegetarian scale?
I don’t think I ever eat anything much vegan beyond fruits and veggies as snacks, because a real meal that completely lacks meat, dairy, or eggs? I’m likely to miss that on one of the last two alone. Even some of pasta and most bread contains eggs.
It depends on where I’m living. Currently I eat vegan about 4 times a week, vegetarian about 3 times, out of the 14 major meals. Breakfast is almost always vegetarian. I never eat “substitute” foods: I’ll eat humus or tofu if I want humus or tofu, but if I want a steak I’ll get one that comes from a cow.
I’m a reluctant omnivore. I’m not really a huge fan of meat, but I’ll eat it. That said, I never order or cook it, and often I’ll pick around it.
So I eat meat a few times a week, when I am out and about. And since I live in China, where dairy isn’t widely consumed, that means I end up eating vegan pretty often by default.
I could eat a lot more non-meat meals, but using rice/pulses/pasta as a staple won’t work in our household (my wife eats a really low carb diet).
I like pasta with pesto or tomato, I do a really good paella with chickpeas, lentils and vegetables. Dahl, Bombay potatoes, paneer are all good. My vegeburgers (spiced lentils, potato and kumara) have been pretty popular, and I often eat them in preference to meat burgers. Bean chilli. Scalloped cheesy potato bake is good, too. My bulgar wheat and chickpea salad does nicely for lunches.
Some of it probably qualifies as vegan, but I wouldn’t restrict myself in that way.
Si
Hm.
Breakfast - vegan [except for sunday when I have 2 slices bacon, 2 eggs, a slice of toast I eat oatmeal with raisins and almonds]
morning snack is usually vegan - favorite is cut up veggies and humus
lunch varies - typically vegetarian [chopped salad] or leftovers from dinner the night before [could be carniverous, vegetarian or vegan depending on what it was]
afternoon snack is typically vegan, might include cheese occasionally if I am in the mood
dinner - can be anything, depends on what my menu plan has
bedtime snack - most often ignored to the irkdom of my nutritionist, I just hate going to bed right after eating anything.
We’re not vegetarians but we pretty much 99% of our meals are vegetarian, accounting for the one or two times a weeek I’ll add bacon to something I cook.
It’s simply that killing a chicken is too much of a bother, since I have to be in the mood to pluck, gut and cut it, and then it means we’ll eat chicken meat at most meals (we don’t have a freezer) so it’s a total bore.
We rarely if ever buy meat because most meat in the supermarket looks gross, so we keep ourselves for the times we go to an awsome organic market an half hour from where we live and then, we may but some really nice and competitively priced cut of beef.
And after a few years of that, I simply don’t know how to organize a meal around meat anymore and don’t feel a need to eat some. It’s weird when we got to my parent’s house and my mom feel we need to eat meat twice a day.
Except for breakfast and sweets, a fair part of our meals are also vegan (I don’t use much eggs and prefer to cook with oil instead of butter, and alternate using chicken broth with vegetable broth). It’s really not as if it was something difficult to do, but knowing how to google for recipes, or buying one or two veg cooking books came in handy in the beginning. We love cheese too much to go totally vegan on most meals.
I don’t know that I’ve ever eaten a vegan meal…I’m far too obsessed with cheese…but by the same token, I’m not a huge meat-eater so a lot of my meals end up being vegetarian.
Grilled cheese sandwich and potato soup…or an avocado and salsa pita…or bean and cheese tacos for breakfast…or beans and rice for dinner…or a big salad with breadsticks…or egg drop soup with wontons…or a baked potato…
I never plan vegetarian meals, I just make or buy whatever sounds good, and half the time what sounds good doesn’t involve meat.
About every couple of months I get a craving for a big rare slab of steak, and it’s such a sudden urge that I wonder if it’s my body telling me I need iron or something. But once I have that steak, I’m good for another month or two.
I am very fond of shellfish, and I love a good chicken salad, but even in my baby-book my mom wrote down how fond I am of apparent “side dishes” as main meals. Cheese, bread, salad, rice, beans, etc…
I could never in a million years go vegan, but I could probably learn to live with a vegetarian diet.
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
We rarely eat vegetarian meals; there’s almost always meat involved somehow, whether it’s beef, chicken, or other meat as the main focus of the meal, bacon or ham as flavoring (such as in bean soup) or beef or chicken stock as a component in preparation. The exception might be when I have cereal for breakfast or grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch or dinner.
I don’t know if we’ve ever had a vegan meal; I doubt it.
Meat can be expensive, so even if I buy it, occasionally my one or two “meals of the week” will be vegetarian. Most of my breakfasts are cereal, milk, and coffee. If I eat out, I order vegetarian occasionally because it is cheaper or the less fattening option (ie, a calzone stuffed with veggies is bad, but not as bad as the one stuffed with pepperoni and italian sausage).
When I buy the soup at work, usually it is chili or a veggie soup. I like the creamy veggie soups, so I buy those. Really, there are days I don’t get any meat at all… and I don’t miss it.
Less that I used to.
If I were answering this question a year ago, the answer would probably be “at least once a week.” Not on purpose, just because it worked out that we were having beans & rice, or pasta with pesto, or spinach lasagna, or a PB&J sandwich, or several other dishes in the rotation that just happened to be either vegetarian or vegan.
Nowadays I eat a fair bit more meat than I used to, because after becoming diabetic, the ol’ blood sugar just does not deal well with the large amounts of carbs that make up most vegetarian/vegan meals. I’m not saying I never eat them, but pasta is not a once-a-week meal anymore, and when I do have it, it’s much more likely to be a smallish amount of pasta with a biggish amount of meat sauce.
I’ve never minded well-prepared vegetarian or vegan food (though well-prepared Vegan here in the midwest is nearly impossible to find.) I don’t want to be vegetarian or vegan full time - I like my meat, even pre-diabetes - but I’ve never been one to think that I had to have meat with every meal. In fact, when we order Chinese or Thai, I’m very likely to get mine with tofu - I actually prefer it to meat in a lot of Asian dishes. (As an aside, it’s funny how many people make the assumption that anyone who orders tofu MUST be a vegetarian. No, I eat plenty of meat. Tofu won’t kill you - try it sometime!)
It varies considerably, and it’s not always a matter of me thinking “I’m going to eat vegetarian tonight”, more often it’s something like “I have a taste for hummus and baba ganoush” or “I just feel like rice and vegees tonight” or “I’m not very hungry, I’m going to have some cheese and crackers and an apple for lunch” or maybe “I think I’ll have a salad with hardboiled eggs and feta cheese on those six varieties of lettuce I grew in the garden this summer”. Although I love meat, fish, and fowl and I don’t feel a compulsion to eat animal flesh at every meal. In fact, it’s fairly common I only eat meat once a day, not at every meal. I love vegees, fruit, and grain just as much as meat.
Likewise, while I’m sure I’ve eaten some vegan meals it would be largely by accident as I never think “I’ll eat something vegan”. It’s more a matter of just happening to choose something that qualifies as vegan.
I’ll also add that I despite fake meats - if I want meat, I’ll eat meat, thank you very much. Vegees, fruit, grain, nuts and dairy taste good in their own right, they don’t need fake crap added to them.
My only real obstacle to eating vegetarian more often is my food allergies, which are entirely to plants. I am allergic to many legumes, for instance, including common ones such as peas and lentils (but not soy, thank goodness!), as well as the nearly ubiquitous tomato. This can make eating vegetarian outside the home hazardous to my health, so most of my vegetarian meals are made in my own kitchen.
When I make a meatless meal, which used to be a few times a week, but of late has been less often. Seldom vegan because I don’t shop vegan (I’ve cooked vegan having had vegan friends - its a special shopping trip for me) - things like butter tend to get in the way of a vegan meal. Lunch is often vegetarian - but I don’t go specifically for vegetarian. I don’t think in those terms. I think “I have a chicken breast defrosted” or “nothing is defrosted, I’ll do something with a can of beans or tofu.”