Cook'n is the best selling recipe organizer

Volume III
March 8, 2012


Weekly Home / Cook'n & Eat'n

Resources for Vegetarians - or Vegetarian Wannabe's

By Patty Liston

My hubby and I are working on our health this year. We just purchased a Vita-Mix and are enjoying some delicious green-smoothies in the morning. We clock in (most mornings) around 7 AM at the local rec center for a variety of work-outs, and we are experimenting with more raw food recipes. Before you feel any sense of intimidation, let me tell you that I ate 5 cookies and a nice chunk of chocolate cake today. Yes, my will-power still needs a little work.

While we do not intend to become vegetarians, we are working on eating raw 75% of the time. Dinner is still some kind of fish or chicken. That said, it is sometimes difficult to find good web-sites that will explain the vegetarian life-style in a way that is not intimidating, threatening, or guilt inducing. Enter, the No Meat Athlete, (NoMeAtathlete.com) This web-site was started by Matt Frazier, a young man who wanted to run marathons. He decided to use his new-found vegetarian life-style as a catalyst for other athletes to experiment with his ideas.

While running a marathon is intriguing, it is not something that is anywhere near by "bucket list". Remember, I am the one who ate all of the cookies today. However, I have learned a lot from Matt and figured I would pass it on in case any DVO readers are interested.

One of Matt's recent blog posts was, "50 Fantastic Resources for New Vegetarians". I have researched quite a few of them, taken notes, and am incorporating a lot of the ideas, recipes, and exercise regimes listed. I decided to list numbers 13-23 of the 50 to get you started. Whether you are a marathoner, vegetarian wannabe, or non-wannabe, this information will come in handy for anyone who just wants to try something a little different in the kitchen from time-to-time.

From No Meat Athlete

13. Sprout School: you don't have to be vegetarian to sprout beans and seeds, but it's one of those things nobody seems to try until they stop eating meat. Sprouts are healthy and very easy to grow at home, and probably fun for kids.

14. How to Cook Beans from Scratch: beans are so much better tasting, healthier, and cheaper when you cook them yourself instead of buying canned. Here's how to do it.

15. Kitchen Fundamentals: Basic Knife Skills: one of the hidden perks of going vegetarian is that it forces you to cook your own food more often. Learning basic ways to chop food will save you hours upon hours in the kitchen, so check out this Art of Manliness post if you've never thought about your knife skills.

16. How Can I Spice Up Vegetarian Dishes?: Madhur Jaffrey is the author of one of the best vegetarian cookbooks I've seen, World Vegetarian. In this post she gives several simple guidelines for making your food more interesting.

Recipes

17. YumUniverse: Heather Crosby offers tons of free, whole-food (and sometimes raw) vegan recipes at YU, including lots of innovative approaches to replacing dairy products. The site also offers several guides for getting started on a plant-based diet.

18. Peas and Thank You's Reci"peas" Page: family-friendly recipes that are always delicious and usually quick and easy. Sarah's cookbook is one of my wife's favorites for finding vegan dishes (especially breakfast foods) that our 20-month old son will eat.

19. Post Punk Kitchen: when you want to spend just a little more time on dinner and know that the time will be worth it, Post Punk Kitchen is where to turn.

20. Choosing Raw: Gena Hamshaw's approach to raw food isn't the militant, complicated one so many people associate with raw. Instead, she creates lots of recipes to help readers incorporate more raw foods into their diet. She also writes lots of thought-provoking posts about vegan issues.

21. Vegan Latina: delicious vegan Latino food recipes from Terry Hope Romero, Veganomicon co-author (and NMA guest poster!).

22. Foodily: a new and fast-growing recipe search engine that allows users to search for recipes that contain and, more importantly, do not contain certain ingredients. (For example: "French onion soup without beef stock.") Foodily is also a recipe-sharing site; check out the my favorite recipes on the No Meat Athlete page.

23. Fat Free Vegan Kitchen: thanks to Forks Over Knives, everyone seems to be jumping on the "no added oil" bandwagon. If that's you, you'll like Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, which has hundreds of recipes that fit the bill.


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