Any vegans out there?

I am primarily vegetarian....occasional pescatarian and aspiring vegan lol!! I am always looking for recipes too.

Welcome to Vegan Land. It's hard to suggest recipes and such without knowing what you like, but I will say there are tons of recipe blogs out there to have a look at. My faves are The Post-Punk Kitchen (www.theppk.com) and Fat-Free Vegan (http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/) I also recommend cookbooks, particularly Isa Moskowitz's, who runs The PPK, and the Happy Herbivore ones. The latter focus on whole foods that are easily obtainable without a lot of stuff that you're likely to find only in health food stores, which are obviously more expensive.

Because I hear you on expense. Sure, veggies (and beans and lentils) cost (a lot) less than meat, but I live in the near-desert at high altitude, with an insanely short growing season. Much of the produce in our stores is trucked in from far away and it's both expensive and not nearly as tasty as that which you can get if you can buy locally-grown. So, for me, frozen fruits and veggies are a godsend, especially stir-fry blends that I can throw in a skillet with some pressed tofu and some spices for a few minutes and, bam, there's dinner.

Still, I do have to venture to the health food store sometimes, mostly because that's where I can buy stuff in buik, which is ultimately cheaper. Yeah, I can buy that little box of quinoa at Walmart for $5, and it's enough for me to make a few recipes (which are at least 2 or 3 meals each for me, since I'm a single person), but I can go to the health food store and spend the same $5 and come out with a much bigger bag of quinoa that will last me a lot longer. So definitely check out bulk stores for your staples. I buy my quinoa, all sorts of lentils, dry beans (which I soak, cook, and freeze instead of buying sodium-filled canned beans) rice pasta, nutritional yeast, various flours/meals, vital wheat gluten to make seitan, etc. -- basically all the "dry" stuff that I use all the time and that won't go bad-- in bulk. It definitely saves money. Avoid, if you can, vegan convenience foods, like frozen meals and premade seitan and veggie burgers and such. Not only are they expensive, but they're highly processed. Not everything vegan is healthy.

The best thing I can suggest for variety is to check out those recipes, either on the web or in cookbooks, and try all sorts of new things. Don't think of going vegan as "giving up" anything. Think of it as an opportunity to try a ton of new things. Even just exploring new proteins like tofu, different beans, lentils, and quinoa can be pretty exciting. (Make sure you rinse the quinoa before cooking!) Not to mention trying different fruits/veggies that you might not have had before. Oh, and making your own salad dressings, experimenting with mixing different flavors. That's fun, too. Try different cuisines that you might not have had before --Thai, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, etc. Honestly, I thought I'd miss eggs/cheese, having been ovo-lacto all my life before switching, but I was having so much fun with experimenting with new stuff that I never missed any of it. Still don't. Especially not since I've figured out how to make a tofu "egg" salad that tastes virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

Good luck to you.

I don't call myself vegan (because I love honey & leather), I just prefer to eat that way.
But I get most of my recipe ideas from the cookbooks I've collected over the years (the kind diet, post punk kitchen, crazy sexy diet/kitchen, happy herbivore) and these books all have great websites to get recipes from.

Hope that helps!