Eating vegetarian

My two go-to recipes are:
Black beans with corn, peppers, and tomatoes and then I eat it over brown rice or quinoa for dinner and in whole wheat tortillas or pitas for lunch.

Lentils with peppers, celery, spinach or kale in tomato sauce and eat it over pasta (I always add nutritional yeast to that one, I like the flavour it adds.)

Other than that I make meals trying out different recipes I find from the internet, magazines, and cookbooks.

www.vegweb.com !! i find tons of good stuff on there and you can look up recipes by dish or ingredient. i think they are primarily vegan but they might have vegetarian recipes too. of course you could alter them to your liking by using diary cheese or milk, etc...

I have the BEST vegetarian recipe if you like mushrooms:

Mix sauteed spinach, cooked garlic, whole wheat bread crumbs, Parmesan cheese, and vegetarian bacon bits (check the label).

Stuff a portabella mushroom cap with the mixture, Bake at 400 degrees F for 20 minutes, then you have heaven on a plate.


You can also substitute meat in recipes for beans... black bean burgers (you can find these at any grocery store), bean quesadillas, bean chili, the options are endless.


Oooo, you can also make "zuke pasta" which is basically long shreds of zucchini from a spiralizer. This is your low carb/low calorie "pasta" that you can top with your favorite spaghetti sauce! yum.

Rather than specific dishes, I thought I might suggest a few general approaches to help you get thinking beyond salads. One is that just as you probably start with deciding what meat/poultry/fish you're going to have when you're not having a vegetarian meal, start by deciding on a legume (beans/lentils, tofu, hummus), whole grain (oatmeal, brown rice, whole grain pasta, whole-grain pizza crust, cooked whole grains), eggs, or cheese (the last two obviously pack a lot more fat and don't offer any fiber, and some people prefer to limit them for those and other reasons) to be the "backbone" or "center" of the meal, and surround or combine them with foods from the other categories, as well as veggies, spices, and/or dressing/sauces (these don't have to be high calorie, if that's an issue -- lemon or lime juice, balsamic vinegar, tomato sauces are all good options).

Another approach is to decide whether you're in the mood for soup, salad, a sandwich, a casserole, a stir-fry, a roast (generally made from nuts and grains, but some recipes call for legumes and dense veggies like sweet potatoes -- kind of like a giant veggie burger :-), an omelet, pasta, a burrito, or whatever other categories of dishes you like to eat ... Once you've made that decision (which might be influenced by the energy and time you have for prep, the weather, how hungry you are -- just as it probably is when planning a meat/poultry/fish-based meal), you can make any necessary veggie substitutions for whatever m/p/f-based meal you might ordinarily have when you're in the mood for soup, a sandwich, a casserole, a stir-fry, etc., or you could search on some of the sites other posters have mentioned, or you could just use a general search engine to look for vegetarian soup (or salad, sandwich, casserole, etc.) recipes, maybe adding one or two main ingredients you have on hand.

Another approach that drives a lot of my meal decisions is what looks good to me in the produce section, which often later in the week turns into "I bought too much produce because it looked so good -- what am I going to do with the eggplant before it goes soft or that kale before wilts?" and the eggplant turns into baba ganoush with pita and hummus, or stir-fried eggplant with garlic sauce or fake eggplant parmigian -- no breading, just broiled or pan fried with a little oil (you have to be careful because eggplant will pretty much soak up as much oil as you give it), covered in tomato sauce and little cheese, and back in the oven or under the broiler for a bit, or the kale gets cooked with white beans and garlic, or shredded into a soup -- it goes really well with oniony potato soups, especially ones that have a little sausage, like chorizo, or ham, but that doesn't help you with exploring meatless meals ;-) (Obviously, I'm not a vegetarian. On average I probably have some kind of meat or poultry once or twice a week, and I've been trying, pretty successfully, to have fish twice a week.)

Another approach is to explore (through websites, cookbooks, cooking shows, restaurants) various cuisines that don't rely as much on meat/fish/poultry as modern Western societies do, which could include Indian, Chinese, various Mediterranean cuisines -- truth be told, probably just about every culture, if you look at the food that ordinary (non-wealthy) people traditionally have eaten, because meat and poultry, at least, tend to be beyond the means of most people in most places and times. We have a thriving food-truck business in the area where I work, with trucks representing a wide range of ethnic cuisines, and I get ideas from there. A few weeks back I had for the first time an Egyptian dish called koshari or koshary, which included vermicelli, rice, lentils, chick peas, fried onions, and a somewhat spicy, thick tomato sauce, and I loved it so much I found some recipes online and have been trying them out. Once you've made the sauce (I started with canned pureed tomatoes, so it wasn't much work) and have some cooked lentils, cooked/canned chickpeas, and cooked rice on hand, it's not anymore work than pan-frying onions until they just start to carmelize, then throwing the uncooked pasta in the pan to toast it, add a little boiling water to finish cooking the pasta, add the lentils and rice when the pasta is nearly done to reheat them, then put it in a bowl with the chickpeas, tomato sauce, and onions on top ... Mmmm, I'm going to go make myself some now. (Here are the recipes I used to give myself an idea of how to do this, but I didn't follow either one exactly (http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/koshari-10000001924679/ and http://allrecipes.com/recipe/koshary/).

I hope one or more of those approaches works for you. You really can have just as much variety when you're not eating meat/poultry/fish as you when you are eating them, if not more.

Thanks, Chelseagirlfl!