The Great Vegetarian Experiment

For one of my daughter's classes she has a project to work on one of the "five pillars of health" (is it just me, or does this sound vaguely cultist?) for six weeks. She chose to go without meat for that period, and we decided to be supportive and work on our own "pillars of health" at the same time. We were all worried about whether the "the only good bean is hummus" boy child would make it though, but he signed on, and stuck with PBJs instead of ham sandwiches in his lunch.

So how did it go?

Success: Finally a Pad Thai recipe worth making

I have tried before to make Pad Thai, and the results have always been disappointing. But this vegetarian one from epicurious is really good. Tip: use 1 to 2 T of tamarind paste from a jar instead of mucking about with blocks and pods. But don't skip out on the tamarind entirely: it adds an essential kind of tanginess.

Failure: Life without chicken stock

From the start it was agreed that this was not to be a vegan experiment: dairy and eggs were on the table. Early on we realized that life without chicken stock is too awful to contemplate. We usually have several jars of home-made stock about the place, as well as fish stock in the freezer, and some home-made beef stock intermittently. Yes, you can make vegetable stock (a good corn stock being a great base for chile and chowder), but for most soups, chicken stock turned out to have some essential quality we couldn't do without.

A good cookbook goes a long way

Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook has lots of excellent vegetarian recipes in it. The vegetarian moussaka and gado gado were big hits. We also leaned on The Greek Vegetarian (spanakopita, some nice salads) and various Indian cookbooks we had lying around the house
(Madhur Jaffrey is my favourite: we have several of her books).

Simple things

Some of the easiest things turned out the best: fondue, cheese/fruit plates, a simple pesto/tomato/olive pasta sauce, veggie burgers, quiche, corn/black bean burritos. Higher on the effort scale, but not that complex: spinach/mushroom/onion calzones, butternut squash raviolis with sage butter, savory crepes (the mushroom with crème fraîche was best).

Biggest surprises

We usually do all our shopping and most of our cooking on Saturday, with the rest of the week being mostly a matter of simple side dishes and reheating tupperware. The biggest surprise (and biggest impediment to doing this on an ongoing basis) turned out to be that a lot of vegetarian recipes just don't lend themselves well to being pre-prepared in this way. Towards the end of the week there would either be a rather disappointing result or a lot of mad scrambling and late dinners. I did not expect this in the least. I expect that more experience and expertise would go a long way to helping here. We've had a lot of years of honing down our collection of (mostly non-vegetarian) recipes to a set that work well with this kind of process; we just haven't got there with the purely vegetarian results. On the other hand, a hunk of beef holds up uncooked better in the fridge (or freezer) for a week than many vegetables.

We don't use a lot of bacon/prosciutto/ham in our cooking, but boy, that little bit makes all the difference in a lot of recipes. Bean soups, pasta sauces, spinach salad, and quiche really lose something without it. Given how little (relatively speaking) we use, I was really surprised that this was the only meat I really missed.

True confessions: Sneaking out for a steak

On the days my daughter was away at dinner, and on our dinner-out Fridays, the rest of us frequently went for the carnivore's fare. But dang! I really like those chicken rajas at La Fiesta.

Final thoughts

Are we about to abandon our omnivorous ways and go vegetarian? Nope. On the other hand, we did discover some great new recipes, and are happy to fold them into our rotation. We have also discovered a willingness (even from the vegetable-hating teen boy) to try more things. All in all, I'd call it a success.