JCC Veggie tips for Watto

My partner, Karin, signed up our daughter's class for a drawing competition in the name of animal welfare awareness.

I said, good idea, but aren't we being a little hypocritical? Eating all that meat. Caring about animal welfare. Of course, I had @tom' s recent words in the back of my head.

How can we preach what we don't practice? I'm going to lay off the meat for a bit. But I've never done that, and I'm not one to start visiting veggie sites. I'm one to be on here, and I'm sure people on here have great tips - give them to me!

 

Eat a wide variety of porridges and gruels made from farro, quinoa and oats. Savory gruel for evening meals. Porridge sweetened with honey for breakfast. Don't mix the gruel with the porridge, because it's highly volatile and may explode.

 

Try quinoa. The thing with quinoa is you have to mix it up with something, otherwise it tastes like nothing. I do a summer salad kinda thing, where I make a sort of pico de gallo (onions, green peppers and tomatoes mixed with garlic powder, olive oil and lime juice) and mix it up. You can cook it in the rice cooker.

Also, hummus is great with almost anything and of course sweet potatoes.

 

I don't know 80% of the stuff you're talking about
Garlic, I know garlic!

 

Oh, yeah, agreed! I oven roast sweet potatoes and other root vegetables (turnips!) in the oven with a red onion, tossed in olive oil, salt and pepper, with a bit of thyme. Can be mixed with gruel, obviously.

 

My sister bakes sweet potatoes and serves them with a garlic sauce. They're delicious. I could get you the recipe if you want. She also makes great bruschetta--baked French bread slices with a marinated tomato and basil topping. I confess that I don't really cook, but I do eat a lot of hummus and pita bread. Hummus is also a great dip with carrot & broccoli pieces, etc. If you're really craving red meat you can try substituting marinated portbello mushroom caps. They can be a delicious substitute for steak or hamburger patties.

Are you looking at becoming a vegan, or a lacto-ovo vegetarian?

 

This seems quite drastic, Supes. Would it be possible to convince your daughter that meat isn't animals, and animals only refers to household pets? (I am assuming your diet does not include household pets)

 

Roasted Egg Plant is a fantastic meat-substitute. Three ingredients - egg plant, salt, olive oil - and you've got something decent. You can add pretty much anything else to infuse whatever flavor you want. Put it in a pita, put it on a salad, even put it on a pizza. It's pretty versatile.

Chickpeas are a go-to for us on Veggie day (we do at least one day per week). Mash em, toast em, or just eat em plain. They're high in protein and fiber.

I'd also recommend not going whole hog (no pun intended) at first. If you're a heavy meat-eater going cold turkey (no pun intended, again) will be challenging. Try a single day per week (lots of folks like Meatless Monday because alliteration makes everything better). Once that works, pick a meal and make it meat-free. Say, lunch. If you're not going vegan, continuing to add cheese and eggs can be a nice way to get some of the satisfaction from meat without having meat.

I've got a number of great recipes I'd recommend. Just depends if you're going vegetarian (in which case, you need to make yourself some shakshuka) or vegan (in which case, my recipes are much more limited)

 

American demand for quinoa has driven up quinoa prices for indigenous cultures that have relied on it as a staple crop for centuries, so enjoy that while you're eating your meat-free quinoa.

Also, while you're laying off the meat, eggs and dairy are just as bad, if not worse, for animals. The dairy industry coexists with the veal industry. For cows to keep producing milk, they need to keep having calves, and when they have male calves and the dairy industry has no use for them and doesn't want to use resources to keep them alive, they have to find some use for slaughtering baby cows. Like marketing veal as a desirable, expensive product.

 

Which unsustainable agricultural practices employed to feed 7 billion people are most evil? So hard to choose.

 

black bean burritos and soup with a veggie sandwich are my easy fall back meals if i don't feel like doing anything fancy. i would be grateful for more vegan tips, cutting out dairy is one of my 2017 resolutions.

 

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine...

 

Veggie sushi is a delicious vegan meal. It's just seaweed, rice, and something like avocado, cucumber, and/or carrots. Add soy sauce and wasabi paste, and OMG so good.

 

I've been thinking about reducing-- if not giving up--meat as well. The constant nagging of Debo and tom helped--nah just kidding, I have many vegetarians and animal activists in my life and I just can't deny the ethical reasons to do so. Ethical, environmental, even macroeconomic! So I've started reducing my meat consumption and trying to "eat ethically". I'm not sure if I'll ever go full vegetarian, but we'll see how it goes when we get there. So I'll be looking at this thread with interest.

PS I know it's a JCC inside joke, but it's true: salads are the devil. The disparity between the amount of energy needed to get it to your table and the nutritional benefits they give, alongside the considerable ecological impact, make salad a very costly luxury.

 

Don't forget pasta and pizza - you can do plenty of veggie sauces for the pasta (tomato and mushroom, for example) and pizza doesn't have to have meat to be good. However if you're giving up dairy as well you might have a problem as that would mean no cheese.

 

I had a mango and avocado roll recently and it was DELICIOUS. If you're looking for a good combination.

 

Dal (lentil curry)
1/2 onion
1 tomato
1 tsp of garlic
1 tsp of ground red chilies
1 tsp of ground turmeric
1/2 to 1/3 cup of soaked lentils
Some salt

Take a pressure cooker, and put everything in it. Stir and cover it with the lid. Turn on the stove to the lowest setting that still builds up steam. Once it starts making noise, time it for 10 minutes, then turn off the stove and let out the steam. It may not be fully cooked yet so you can cook it open for a few more minutes if needed. For extra flavor, take a tsp of whole cumin seeds and fry them in oil, and then dump that into the curry.


Potato curry
You can do this with many different vegetables actually. Popular choices are potatoes, eggplants, and gourd.

3 small-medium potatoes
1/2 an onion, cut into squares
1 tomato, sliced
1 tsp of powdered red chilies
1 tsp of ground turmeric
1 tsp of ground cumin
1 tsp of ground coriander
1 tsp of mixed ground ginger and garlic
Salt if needed

Put a little oil on the stove in a cooking pot. I don't know what your settings are, but mine's a 0 - 9 and I cook it on 4. When it's hot, put in the onions and stir until brown (but not burned). Keep a cup of water nearby, putting very little in soften the cooking if it makes too much noise/sounds angry. Take the 4 spices plus ginger and garlic, mix them in a bowl of water while that's happening and when the onions are brown, put them in. Now this is the most important part. You want to cook the spices well otherwise your toilet will be tired of your ****. So, stir it well. you should notice a change in the smell of the spices. That might take a lot of practice, so for now, let's just go with concentrated stirring and monitoring for 7 minutes, then put in the tomatoes in. Let it cook/stir until the water from the tomatoes is gone. Finally, put in the potatoes, stir well to get the spices on all the potatoes, and put enough water so that it just covers all the potatoes. Cover and cook on 3, checking back occasionally. Stab a knife in the potatoes to see if it's cooked. Dry the gravy to an acceptable level (personal preference).

 

Thanks, these are all great tips guys. Cooking Vivec's suggestion first!

 

No, not as long as the livestock is well taken care of. If you live outside of any countries with well developed animal welfare laws, like Sweden, I suggest only buying meat from organic farms*.

* that's the right term, right?

Regarding food: Beans with fried mushrooms is good and healthy, even if you need something for your C-vitamin intake. I suggest cauliflower salad created by shopping the cauliflower and then mixing it with some oil, vinager, salt and paper.

 

SuperWatto If you like pinto beans here is a super easy recipe, I often saute a chopped onion in olive oil and add a can of drained pinto beans and heat until cooked through. Then I mix that with avocado. I season it up with cinnamon, cayenne and if I have it, red pepper flakes.

 

Both equally?

 

Vegetarianism is more honorable than veganism.

 

Are you planning to feed your daughter a vegetarian diet, too? If so, you should let her pediatrician know, and maybe ask for a reference to a nutritionist for some tips on ways to balance her diet and add needed supplements.

Vegetarians of all ages should be have fairly regular blood tests to make sure they're not deficient in things like iron and B12. But it's especially crucial for developing children, because amino acids in animal proteins and vitamins found in animal products are vital to brain and body development. Like it or not, we are animals that evolved to eat omnivorous diets. In western countries, we are lucky enough to have tech and science to come up with balanced vegetarian diets for children, if followed very carefully.

So yeah, I don't think that's something to get from here or blogs anyway. I'd speak to a pediatrician and maybe get a ref to child nutritionist.