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Hey guys, this is Heather from healthyeatingstartshere.com. Today, I’m going to share some vegetarian
recipes for meat eaters. Things can be really tricky when you’re trying to make a vegetarian
or vegan food for meat eaters, because they’re used to different taste of food, a different
plate setup, and all that kind of stuff.
The most difficult thing is if you are a vegetarian or vegan and then you’re trying to make
some food for your spouse of your kids who are not. That would be really difficult. I’m
very lucky because Phil and I are open to each others ideas and decided to be vegetarian
and vegan at the same time. Things worked up really well for me, but I know it is very
difficult for a lot of you guys out there.
So I have a few tips. One, start having a vegetarian or vegan night, or you can do multiple
nights a week. But if you try to go in with the mind set of converting people and convincing
them that they should it – it more than often backfires, because you can’t force
people to share your ideas or your mind set or outlook on the world.
They have to come around and change on their own. Sometimes it can work if you provide
the information in a loving way, in an open way. You know, just put it out there and let
them make the choice, but if your try to force other people – it doesn’t usually go so
well.
So if you start with a vegetarian night, you might have more luck. And if you make your
vegetarian night super delicious, it might help your chances of convincing people that
this is something that is fun and easy, and healthy to make it long term.
Similarly, if you’re making a meal which is not vegetarian or when you have to make
a meal with meat, what you can do is to make a very delicious vegetarian meal with the
meat on the side. That will help those people see that the meat doesn’t have to take the
center of the plate or the biggest part of the plate. It will also make them realize
that there are so many delicious things that you can put on your plate other than meat.
If you’re one of those people who can’t bear to cook meat anymore, what you can do
is to invite whoever wants to eat meat and let them to cook it for themselves. You can
also give them some ideas on how the meat can go with what you’re making, the veggie
part of your plate. Just try not to make it a battle because, like I said, it’s going
to make things more difficult long term.
Now in making things more delicious like some of these vegetarian recipes for meat eaters,
or for your plant foods – a couple of tips that you can do is to use more oil or fat
than you normally would or those food included in my recipe because I normally use very little
oil or no oil at all, but you can level up the fat content for that transition just to
entice people over to the plant foods.
Because animal food has such a high fat content, it can be difficult to switch from that to
a very low fat plant food diet, so just make sure you have a lot of fat going on down there.
Similarly, salt – there is naturally quite a bit of salt in processed animal foods or
recipes that used animal foods.
Use a little bit more salt for your plant food, just to start things off. As long as
you’re cutting down with the processed foods, especially processed meat on your diet, that’s
going to cut down a lot of the sodium. So you can afford just to use a little bit of
salt on your plant foods.
So, those are a few tips, and then I have some specific vegetarian recipes for meat
eaters, which I find meat-eaters really enjoyed posted on my blog at healthyeatingstartshere.com.
Things like shepherds pie, you know, comfort foods, mashed potatoes with gravy, vegetarian
Bolognese sauce, which is made of tomato sauce but instead of meat I used chopped mushrooms.
Yes, I know not every one likes mushrooms but that’s just one way to do it, and some
other interesting vegetarian recipes for meat eaters. I want to hear from you guys, let
me know what you have made that has blown away your non-vegetarian friends or family.
Leave me a comment, and let me know about the success you had for meat eaters.