Oh no! Not butternut squash risotto again.

March 26, 2008 3:25 AM

As a multi-decade ova-lacto-pesca-vegetarian, I am bored to tears with my diet. Help me revitalize my meal planning/diet. Meat is still not an option.

For the past 15 years or so i have been using the same cookbooks and basically the same few recipes. I need something new both cookbook wise and recipe wise. The criteria I want to use is that meals should be relatively quick to make (45 minutes max. and should utilize everyday ingredients. I'm tired of going to the store for arugula or pine nuts.

posted by Xurando to food & drink (16 comments total)

I don't have a particular cookbook/recipe suggestion, but I'd think that ova-lacto-pesca would have a lot of good possibilities. Could it be that a meal planning / shopping strategy is as or more important than finding recipes that stick to "everyday" ingredients? My wife and I cook new and unusual stuff all the time, without daily shopping trips. We choose about 5 recipes a week, make a shopping list and get everything at once.
posted by jon1270 at 4:10 AM on March 26

So, you eat vegetables, dairy, eggs and seafood? And you're having difficulties staying away from other types of meat? Seriously?

Why not branch out into some other dietary staples. Indian/Thai comes to mind since a large percentage of their diets subsist entirely on your dietary choices. My personal favourite cookbooks for quick/easy and quite inspiring are the following (they're vegan, but quite good nonetheless):

Go Vegan - How It All Vegan, La Dolce Vegan, and The Garden of Vegan.
Fresh by Juice for Life - Any of them. Slightly more complicated recipes (some take awhile) but the food is wonderful. Their may be some non-vegan recipes in the new one, I haven't picked it up yet.
posted by purephase at 5:02 AM on March 26

Hmmm, I've just discovered quinoa and that got me out of a diet rut. From a lacto-ovo veggie point of view (I'm like you, but without the fish) it's a godsend as it contains a whole barrage of proteins that you wouldn't find in other grains (except it's a seed). More at Wikipedia.

A delicious way to cook it is this:

100g uncooked quinoa
7 or 8 chestnut mushrooms, sliced thinly
a couple handfuls of spinach, washed
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
25g pine nuts (yeah yeah, sorry)
25g goats cheese, crumbled

Serves 2. You'll need a sieve, frying pan and small saucepan.

1. Rinse the quinoa under cold running water in a sieve. (This is because au natural it can be quite bitter. But you can wash the bitter coating off.)
2. Put in a pan of boiling water (about 1 litre should do it), leave to simmer for 15 mins.

While that's happening...

3. Keeping the olive oil on medium heat throughout, fry the onions, crushed garlic and pine nuts for 5 mins, taking care not to burn the garlic;
4. Add the mushrooms and balsamic vinegar, stir well and leave to simmer for another 5 mins. The vinegar will caramelise the onions and mushrooms;
5. Add the washed spinach, stir in and cook for another 5 mins. The leaves will wilt in the pan.
6. By now, the quinoa should be cooked -- you can tell it is when it turns transparent and the germ separates from the seed. Drain the pan thoroughly, then add the quinoa to the frying pan. Stir well so it picks up all the flavours.
7. Take off the heat and stir the crumbled goats cheese in. It should *just* melt.
8. Yum!

(PS: The above is all from memory, so quantities might not be quite right...)
posted by randomination at 5:09 AM on March 26 [7 favorites]

Channa Masala. Cheap, delicous, you can make a lot at once, and it makes great leftovers. Plus it gives you that health-power! feeling.


Cook soul food, just without the usual pork element. Cornbread takes about 10 minutes to mix up the batter, and 25 to cook. Steam some collard greens, heat up a can of black eyed peas. Throw some sliced up sweet potatoes with herbs and butter in the oven; might as well. Instant grits, surprisingly good for a 1-minute microwave dish. Raw tomato slices with salt and pepper. You could cook fish too, but the vegetables alone make a satisfying meal.


Thai Curries are reasonably fast and use very few dishes. I usually make them with chicken, but tofu is pretty good too. Or just use vegetables.


If you like cheese and don't mind the fat content, quesadillas can be amazingly delicious. Add lots of vegetables: tomatoes, onions, green peppers, beans, avocados... a good way to use up remnants of vegetables from the fridge. Super fast, only uses a cutting board and a frying pan.


I keep a bag of frozen shrimp in the freezer. You can get it at discount grocery stores for 4 bucks a pound. Rapid thaw in water and it tastes great. I like this fast, but not terribly healthy recipe for one or two people:

Put on water for spaghetti or angel hair pasta. Chop some garlic - more than you'd think would be necessary for the amount of shrimp you are using. Fry the garlic in plenty of olive oil and butter. When the garlic starts to turn golden brown, add the shrimp, and some salt and pepper. Halfway through add the juice of 1/2 a lemon. When the shrimp is done, turn the heat off and put the cooked pasta in the frying pan. Stir it around to absorb the extra butter and oil. Squeeze the other half of the lemon over it all. Eat.
posted by scose at 5:33 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

I'm a long-time veg too, and although I have a bunch of good veg cookbooks I pretty much ignore them in favor of blogs & recipe sites. On any given day I'll come home from work and see that I have, for example, some limp kale, a half-dozen eggs, & some mushrooms that look like they really need to be used sooner rather than later, so I google kale eggs mushrooms recipe review & pick out the vegetarian sites from the results. (I prefer recipes with reviews/comments.) There are always lots of interesting combinations that come up.

Searching blogs with the same terms is good too, but only if I have an hour or two to kill --- there are a lot of talented food bloggers out there!

I keep lots of different beans/legumes/grains in my pantry too, and all kinds of spices that I get from the bulk-foods bins and probably get pretty stale by the time I use them up, which will make the food purists cringe but my palate doesn't know the difference.

To get you started, here is a nice veg-recipes website that links to a food blog, which will link to other blogs, and on and on.

Happy cooking!
posted by headnsouth at 5:48 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

Veganomicon has recipes which are coded as "regular-supermarket-friendly" (The test used was that they were able to find all ingredients at a supermarket in Vermont). Plus the food is amazing (the chickpea cutlets have eradicated my occasional pork chop cravings).

I also subscribe to Every Day with Rachael Ray, she has a whole system of what to keep stocked in a basic pantry, and her recipes revolve around that. Every issue has a week long menu, with a shopping list at the end, which I find very helpful (some recipes are meat, but I just replace or modify those, and still, more than half of the planning work is done)!

Cooking Light is also an invaluable resource.
posted by effigy at 6:03 AM on March 26

I don't have a cooking book suggestion, but you might want to look into Indian cuisine if you want to spice up your diet. My housemate is Indian and vegetarian, and everytime she heats up one of her meals (her mother kindly cooks it all for her.... *grumble*) the house smells AMAZING.
posted by Planet F at 6:36 AM on March 26

Ha! On preview, I was just coming in to suggest Indian food. I know you're worried about exotic ingredients, but if you don't mind stocking up on dried spices you can do your day-to-day cooking with whatever you bring home from the grocery store.

For that matter, there are long, long traditions of vegetarianism in China, Japan and Ethiopia, and of pescetarianism anywhere there are Jews, Orthodox or Catholic Christians, or Rastafarians. Lots of wonderful time-tested recipes from all of them.

For me, at least, a lot of the boredom in vegetarian cookbooks comes from the newness of the recipes — you're stuck with the food trends of the past few decades. (Butternut squash risotto is a perfect example.) "Ethnic" vegetarian cooking is a good way to get out of that.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:08 AM on March 26

Do you have the Moosewood? I linked to the low-fat cookbook, but their other ones are also good. They are mainly vegetarian, but also have some seafood recipes. You could also try going to the public library to try out some books. I usually do this before actually buying one.
posted by bluefly at 7:24 AM on March 26

Two great vegetarian cuisines are Vietnamese and Indian. Cultures that have their days marked by fasting and meatless days would include Ethiopian as well. Deeply Buddhist cultures with monasteries have a large corpus of vegetarian cooking knowledge. If you are in places like Berkeley, the local temple has vegetarian days where they sell their tasty dishes to the public.

Mai Pham in her first book has a nice vegetarian section though my favorite Vietnamese cookbook is Andrea Nguyen's Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. For Indian, I have always been partial to Devi's Lord Krishna's Cuisine for Indian though there are many great books on Indian cuisine.

It's not all arugula and pine nuts; it can be curries and other lovely parts of the world.
posted by jadepearl at 7:39 AM on March 26

Do you eat tempeh and seitan? Tofu is ok, I really do love it, but I've been getting into tempeh and seitan pretty heavy, and you can do all sorts of things with them, esp. seitan.
posted by tr33hggr at 7:47 AM on March 26

Join a CSA (community supported agriculture). You'll get fresh veggies and fruit every week, and you'll be forced to learn new recipes to cook them all before you get the next shipment.
posted by tiburon at 8:06 AM on March 26

Indian and Thai food is essential for me during periods when I eat vegetarian and crave variety. Some of my favorite cookbooks are Maddhur Jaffrey's World of the East (she might have some other veg Indian cookbooks as well), Julie Sahni's classic, Thai Vegetarian Cooking, Real Vegetarian Thai, and don't forget delicious Middle Eastern dishes like tabouli, hummus, baba ganouj, and felafels, all of which are pretty easy to make once you buy a few of the basic ingredients (don't be scared of spices!)
posted by aught at 8:11 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

I'll second the recommendation for Julie Sahni's regional indian vegetarian cuisine - it has a ton of recipes which you won't have encountered before (which came in handy repeatedly when our CSA box deluged us with large quantities of veggies we had tended to overlook when shopping). They range from simple lentil stews to complicated multi-course dishes which take a couple hours to prepare.

The only thing I'd add is that you might want to increase the quantity of spices - she has a note about having reduced the spice levels to avoid overwhelming less flavorful American vegetables but I think she was also trying not to insult the less adventurous American palate when she wrote the book 30 years ago.
posted by adamsc at 2:51 PM on March 26

There's a restaurant in Victoria, BC, that mostly serves vegetarian/vegan food. Although I am not vegetarian, I cook all the time out of their fantastic cookbook (Rebar Cookbook). I cannot recommend it enough; it's a blend of styles from north american to indian to tex-mex and more. A warning though: the recipes make a LOT of food.
posted by some chick at 9:33 AM on March 27

Mollie Katzen's cookbooks are good, and the recipes are easy to prepare and vegetarian.
posted by Penelope at 7:59 PM on March 28