A major change I have made in my life recently is to go veggie. Yep, you read that right, this meat lover has decided to become a VEGETARIAN. No more pepperoni on my pizza, or my dad's homemade sausage, or a BBQ chicken breast, or bacon....GASP! No more bacon! I did a LOT of research about the link between nutrition and cancer and the information I found was astonishing! (I plan on posting about that info later) So, 2 weeks ago I made the jump, and I quit meat cold turkey (heehee...pun intended).
So far giving up meat has been easy, I just don't eat it. The hard part has been finding filling delicious veggie recipes. A lot of the recipes I find have one of two problems...
1. They seem more like a side dish. I need something that is the main dish and that my family will also eat as a main dish (Joe & the kids are going veggie with me to an extent...I'll explain that later too).
2. They use ingredients that are weird...tofurkey anyone? Along with cutting out meat I am cutting out processed foods. That means the more natural the food the better. No items in the ingredients list that I can't pronounce, nothing that doesn't look like its original form (ie:corn flakes look nothing like corn and also have ingredients I can't pronounce). A lot of recipes just have you substituting meat or dairy products with processed man-made foods, rather than a healthier alternative (ie: tofurkey, soy cheese, etc...is that really how that product looks in nature?) An easy way to deal with this is to think "would my grandma/great-grandma know what this food is?" If you answer "no", then don't eat it.
Most of what we've cooked so far have been our recipes just minus the meat (ie:burritos with rice & beans instead of hamburger.) We've tried a few new recipes...some were good, some were ok, and some were seriously bad, like "smothering them in an entire jar of alfredo sauce didn't fix them" bad. Tonight's dinner was a veggie meal for me, but Joe & the kiddos used it as a side dish & had some tilapia with it. It was a green bean potato salad. I got the recipe here and it was very yummy!
The only problem I had with the recipe is that it uses a store bought honey mustard dressing on it. I LOVE the dressing it used, but it was filled with ingredients I don't know. We will make this dish again, but next time I think I will try my hand a making a homemade honey mustard dressing, or find one with better ingredients. As far as veggies go, it had green beans, potatoes, garbanzo beans, onions & olives (are they a veggie?). The kiddos also had an assortment of fruit with their dinner.
Girlie insisted I take a picture of her plate.
I'm hoping to post recipes, information I learn, suggestions for going veggie, and lots more. This blog will become a medium of accountability for me. If anyone has recipes or suggestions, or information they think I might find yummy or useful, please send me an email (you can do that through the "Let's Chat" tab above).
Hope everyone enjoys following my veggie journey!
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