I’m glad Doc got this thread going as I’ve been thinking along the lines of going a “veggie” route for several years. I have some questions I’m confident can be answered here as there’s many quite knowledgeable folks from the posts I’ve read.
First, and I imagine this is a silly question, is my age. I’ll be 56 in a couple of days. Is it too late in life to start a new way of eating?
Second, how difficult is it to eat vegetarian and keep your daily calories no more than 2200, preferrably a bit lower? I’ll just add that over the years I haven’t met a veggie, nut, grain or legume I don’t enjoy!
And finally, I do love my high fiber cereals for a quick breakfast. I can’t get past the idea of soy milk (what it’s made from, plus I think it’s high in calories?). Would it be okay to continue to use “real” milk (skim or 1%)?
Ask yourself this question: Is 56 too late in life to start learning to play the whistle? To learn how to bike?
There is nothing wrong with ordinary milk when you’re a “veggie”.
And since it’s already best to have a high energy meal in the morning, i see no problem with it.
As i see it, there are different “levels” of being a veggie.
1: still eat chicken (birds in general), fish, eggs and drink milk (not technically a veggie diet, but generally the healthiest (certain fats from the fishes (you can get them from vegs, but your body will have a more difficult time absorbing it), and good protein from both chicken and fish))
2: no meat but still eggs and milk (The basic veggie diet)
3: no animal produce (Vegan and the likes) (This includes cheese, or you might as well use option 2 )
It’s not far at all. Maybe an hour or so NW of Livonia. You could take 96 to 496 to M43 West. Go until you cross a river (the Grand river) and Washington street is on the right. Follow it up a few blocks to the music store.
And to keep on track with the thread, I had some really good baked spinach the other day. With cheese.
For the first, it’s very easy. Because I have on-going weight problems, I eat no more than 1500 calories per day, and when I’m actively trying to lose weight, I can easily keep it to 1000.
For the second, you’re thinking of veganism. Vegans (pronounced VEE-gun) don’t eat any animal products, including milk, eggs and honey. When people simply say “vegetarian,” they’re speaking of ovo-lacto vegetarians, who eat no flesh (and no…chicken and fish are NEVER part of a vegetarian diet, much as the wannabes would like to think so!), but who do eat eggs and dairy.
Chop into chunks red and yellow bell peppers
4 onions
peel a head of garlic
spread the veggies over a cookie sheet tossed with 3 tablespoons of oil.
Roast at 450F for 40 min. Stirring occasionally
add sliced zucchini and cook for 10 more minutes
Boil some pasta, put it on a plate, cover with the cooked veggies, add pine nuts and thyme and eat.
A recipe we should have again (only made it once)
We made a marinade of thyme olive oil, Worcestershire sauce, marigoram, savory, lime juice, pepper, coriander, savory, and mustard. Put cubed tofu in it in the morning, skewered it with red peppers onion zucchini and cherry tomatoes and broiled it on both sides.
Served with sumac (sprinkle it on top), naan (rip off a piece and grab the kebab with it), and green chatnee (scoop it with your naan and kebab).
Green Chatnee
Finley chopped cilantro(should be about 2/3 of the total ingredients), mint (about 1/3), juice from a lime, 1/2 of a finely chopped onion, pinch of cumin, one or three chopped Serrano peppers. You can put the ingredients in a food processor or blender and cut it into a constancy that you want instead of hand chopping it.
Man, I need to learn to write down (and use) measurements.
I think it was just yesterday, I saw the head honcho from PETA, on Larry King. And with him was Pam (vroom vroom) Anderson, who said she was a vegetarian.
I was a vegetarian for 10 years. My diet eventually devolved to basically pastries and I gained a lot of weight. I also found it difficult when people wanted to invite me to dinner and I’d have to tell them I wouldn’t eat this and that.
So I’m not a vegetarian now, but I do eat vegetarian a lot of the time. I learned that meat is not necessary, but good food is.
I find that many of the ethnic cuisines are rich in vegetarian options. The American meat and potatoes diet has to fall by the wayside because there really isn’t a substitute for that big slab of meat, with the exception of a big slab of portabello mushroom or eggplant (cooked in olive oil, garlic and balsamic vinegar yum!)
When I went to India I always ordered off the vegetarian menu. The food was so much better that way. In India, vegetarian means no onions or garlic either because you have to kill the whole plant to eat onions and garlic. No matter. It was plenty tasty whatever they did to the food.
So, Indian, Thai, Italian and Mexican are good places to find yummy things to eat.
Mmmm…and I must say my experiment with the tropical riblets turned out very nicely, too. If you want to try it, you’ll need:
1 cup brown basmati or jasmine rice
1 1/2 cups lite coconut milk
1 1/2 - 2 1/2 water
1 1" piece fresh ginger, peeled
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 boxes Gardenburger “riblets” (2 riblets per packet)
2 cups pineapple cubes
1 green bell pepper, sliced
In saucepan, combine rice, coconut milk, 1 1/2 cups water and salt. Bruise the ginger slightly and add that as well. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly (it’s normal for this to become very thick as it reaches the boiling point). Once it boils, cover, reduce heat to low, and let simmer for about 45 minutes, or until all liquid is absorbed. Check occasionally, and if it looks like the liquid will be absorbed before the rice is tender, add a little water. When cooking is done, let sit, covered, for about 10 minutes, then remove the bigger chunks of ginger before serving.
Heat the riblets slightly in the microwave (just enough so you can cut them). Pour their barbecue sauce into a large bowl and cut each riblet into bite-sized chunks. Add the pineapple and bell pepper, and toss well to coat.
Fire up the grill and grill the riblet mixture, tossing occasionally, until the pineapple is showing char lines and the pepper is tender-crisp. Serve over coconut rice.
When it comes to beer, I go on the “no visible chunks” theory.
Seriously, it’s virtually impossible to live in a 100% vegetarian manner. Many everyday things are made with animal products (including tires and camera film). If you want to be perfectly strict about it, sugar isn’t vegetarian because it’s filtered through bone char. I’ve been in the movement for a lot of years (was even executive director of Earthsave International…the organization John Robbins founded…for a while), and I know there are a lot of people who obsessively read every ingredient list (I was even one of them, for a while), but unless one has religious reasons for avoiding even the slightest hint of animal products, some things you just have to let slide.
You have to ask yourself why you want to become a vegetarian. If it is strictly for health reasons, then you don’t have to get caught up with all that anal obsessiveness like worrying about what type of charcoal something gets filtered through. On the other hand, if you are doing it for philosophical reasons, then you have to judge the degree of purity to which you wish to adhere to your chosen path and honestly assess your own degree of sphincter control.
Now I want you to stop for a moment, take a deep breath, hold it for a few moments, then slowly let it out. Then I want you to think about a top sirloin steak, grilled to perfection, a few sautéed mushrooms and onions, and tell me what on earth you were thinking with all this vegetarian idiocy.
As much as I like a nice grilled chunk of bison I’d be really torn if I had to chose between either the bison or mushrooms only, especially if the 'rooms were fresh morels
My wife found a couple of morels Friday. I cooked them up for breakfast yesterday. It’s the third time we’ve found some. Them’s some seriously tasty mushrooms.
Building on ID’s last recipe, there are loads of great veggies-on-pasta dishes. One of our favorites is uncooked diced tomatoes with a little basmati vinegar and chopped fresh basil. Another is summer squash cooked lightly in olive oil with fresh basil. Both benefit from large doses of Parmesan.
Redwolf, you’ve been especially helpful to me. Thank you for your answers.
No way I could ever go the vegan route, but I’ve got no problems not having beef and pork since I seldom eat them anymore as it is. Now saying farewell to chicken and turkey will be a bit difficult, and I sooo enjoy fish, especially salmon. But I want to change my diet for health reasons, as Doc mentioned in his original post, and vegetarianism seems to me to be high fiber, low fat friendly. One question I forgot to ask earlier, will I need a vitamin B 12 supplement, or is a good multivitamin sufficient enough?
As an aside, it’s funny how my eating habits have changed quite a bit since separating from my wife last July!!!
Sorry, ElPollo, I did read your earlier post. I guess the problem is I’m torn as to whether to go all out or what. Perhaps I could start off still having fish and birds but that would hardly be a change from what I eat now. I’m so confused! LOL
Gain weight on a vegetarian diet? Would it be medical advice to suggest balancing out proteins to carbohydrates to lipids
and what lipids you choose to use?
I was vegetarian and sometimes vegan from the age of 15 to my early 40s. It never was a weight gain that made me expand my diet to include animal flesh.
In my early 40s I learned I had to occasionally integrate some animal products for proteins to keep my blood sugar in a nice balance
(though I’m promised by the knuckle heads over on the raw food forums that sort of thing isn’t a problem on whole raw food. We’ll see … ).
I do know my tryglicerides go sky high if I eat unsprouted cooked grains, but I do have a genetic adventure I’m dealing with. You milage is probably going to vary.
Unfermented soy products like soy milk seem to be unpopular with the wackiest groups of health bozos these days. They say the studies in Japan were in accurate and that Japanese women never ate as much soy as they were said to have.
I tried to drink that stuff for years before giving up on it. I thought the phytoestrogens might help since I’ve never had enough fat on my body to store my own.
A good tasting milk like substitute can be made from raw almonds.
Soak the almonds for about 12 hours.
Rinse them and pinch the “skins” off. If the skins don’t pop off (there do for me) you can blanch the almonds in boiling water for about 2 seconds then dunk them in iced water quickly to keep the enzymes in the soaked raw almonds from being denatured.
If you’re crazy enough (C’est moi!), a couple days before soaking the raw almonds you’ve soaked some raw wheatberries, rinsed them three times a day for a few days to get them sprouting, and then use the sprouted wheatberries to make a liquid called “Rejuvelac”.
Use either a little Rejuvelac or water to blend the soaked skinned almonds in a mixer (thank heavens I invested in a Vitamix over thirty years ago when they only cost a couple hundred bucks).
If you don’t add too much water it will come out as a paste. Store that in the refrigerator until needed.
To make “milk” you mix a couple table spoons of the almond paste with more water (or in my case, more Rejuvelac) and perhaps an inch or so of vanilla bean (or extract).
I use the almond paste in lots of other raw food recipes when I want to boost the protein and lipid balance (instead of using animal products).
You can also sprout other nuts or seeds (sunflower, pumpkin) to make “milks”. I’ve only blended the pastes with Rejuvelac. They say the Rejuvelac (plus refrigeration) prolongs its shelf life for a few days.
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