A-Z of Easy Eating – Hot Tips for Veggie Virgins!

• Bangers & Burgers Veggie sausages and burgers keep well in the freezer – one favourite standby of mine is sausage and mash with onion gravy and greens. There are also lots of vegan varieties, mostly in health food shops.
• Bulk It Up  If you are cooking beans, lentils, rice, pasta sauce, soup, home-made burgers, curries and so on … it’s almost as quick to cook a bit extra, then freeze the leftovers in portions.
• Cool Schools Most schools do veggie options now, although not so many do vegan. If you and your children are happy with the meals, fantastic. Otherwise they can take their own! All the lunch recipes in Family Affairs are for 4, but you may want to reduce quantities if your kids are eating a cooked meal at school.
• Favourites. Most people have about 7 or 8 dishes that they cook regularly, and veggies are no different. You don’t need to learn a whole bookful of new recipes! Keep the experiments for when you have a little more time, such as weekends or holidays – that way you will enjoy cooking new dishes.
• Saucy! For those frantic nights when time is really short, there are lots of tasty ready made veggie-friendly sauces around – you can create quick Indian, Italian, Chinese, Thai dishes like this. Just add rice, pasta as appropriate. Otherwise make your own quickies!
• Seeds of Health.  You don’t need to eat polluted fish from our over fished oceans to get important protein or Omega 3 and 6. Safer and more compassionate sources are seeds such as sunflower, sesame and linseed – all found in good supermarkets or health food shops. Linseeds can be ground up in a blender - a tablespoon on your breakfast cereal will keep you fighting fit! Or buy it in oil form from health shops – keep in the fridge and use in salad dressing. Other nuts and seeds are delicious on their own as snacks or else sprinkled in salads.
• SOS (Save Our Stores) If you are lucky enough to have access to an independent health food shop, use it and talk to the staff – they are usually delighted to advise you on their products. The same goes for Asian and Chinese shops, often much cheaper for vegetables, pulses, rice, spices and other goodies.
• Soy Ahoy! Delicious, small pots of fruity soy yoghurt (made by Provamel/Alpro) are available in packs of 4 from supermarkets and health food shops. They’re a great extra in packed lunches.
• Speedy Stir Fries are another quick fix meal – and you can add almost anything to them! Use Liz Cook’s So, What Do You Eat? P.26 for some fantastic ideas.
• Stock Up There’s nothing like home made veggie stock to add flavour to sauces and soups, (good frozen in ice cube trays) but here at Viva! we are great fans of Marigold Bouillon powder. Wonderful stuff, it’s available in veggie and vegan versions.
• Tofu Totty soft or medium silken varieties are particularly good for quiches and ‘cheesecakes’, instead of eggs. One fabulous example of this is Red Onion and Thyme Tart
• Tofu Treats.  If one of your favourite old recipe calls for meat or fish, substitute tofu, which comes in plain, smoked and marinated flavours. Drain a slab of firm tofu and mop up excess dampness with kitchen paper.  Slice it longways into 2 ‘steaks’, sauté in a little sunflower oil till golden brown on each side. add a bit of shoyu in the pan and let it coat the tofu. Drain on kitchen paper. You can use these tofu steaks as they are or else slice into cubes and add to the rest of the ingredients near the end of cooking time.
• Vegetize! Many popular meat dishes such as Spaghetti Bolognese or Chilli Con carne can easily be made vegetarian, as you’ll see from some of the recipes featured here.