I scrambled together a vegetarian lasagna once that wasn’t based around fake meat but was around bunches of legumes. It worked quite well, but I’d have to go a-hunting for it. (It is from back in the days when I was dating vegetarians, and so got pretty damn good at cooking for them.)

I have to ask, is “woof it down” a regionalism? I’ve only ever heard it as “wolf it down”, and was curious if it was one of those things that changed depending on where you grew up.

The hominy idea has got me thinking about vegetarian enchiladas with beans and hominy. I really like this recipe for red enchilada sauce: http://mexicanfoodie.com/red-enchilada-sauce-recipe/

Gumbo! The first time I cooked it, I just left out the meat but since then I’ve added black eyed peas to my recipe to make it more of a meal.

Turns out that the hominy was really the key to making posole work.

That’s because the defining feature of pozole is that it contains hominy! And yeah, pozole is fucken delicious!!! It’s fantastic to dice up some white onion and cilantro, sprinkle them on the pozole, and squeeze a lime on top!!! YUM!!!!

cosign the Gumbo! It’s delicious without meat.

This isn’t a translation from a meat-based dish, Amanda, but merely my mothers’ peeps contribution to vegetarian cuisine.  I’m a carnivore by appetite, but this is da BOMB when it comes to a veggy meal.

Lohan’s Delight: Buddhist Vegetarian Dish

Lohan (monks or saints), following general Buddhist principles, were also known as “destroyers of the passions.” Fittingly, this dish does not use any of the usual condiments—ginger, garlic and scallions—for in Buddhist belief they arouse human passions which, in turn, impede one’s hopes of achieving Nirvana, the state of absolute peace and blessedness.

To make it authentic, you use peanut oil only.  To use any other oil aside from health considerations is not authentic. Also, the wheat gluten can be substituted with fried tofu pieces instead for health/taste considerations.  You’ll also notice that many of the ingredients can be foraged, which would be an advantage for monks and others who couldn’t afford much more than rice and a few seasonings.

This is an example of bad food photography, the plate isn’t centered, and I can’t tell what that utensil in the back is because it looks like a cobra sporting a bad tattoo. 

Here’s a Youtube that from that modestly-named channel Supreme Master for a more ambitious version of the same.

This is a good dish to make around the Chinese New Year.

Cool fact about hominy: Bleaching the corn with lye or potash makes the niacin more easily absorbed. The Native Americans invented this process to keep the corn from sprouting and rotting in humid air.

A diet hugely high in corn products without much variety leads to pellagra. Parching or bleaching the corn usually prevents pellagra.

Texture wise, I like eggplant and portabella mushrooms as meaty replacements, though they don’t add much protein, so additional beans are necessary. The most “meaty” of beans I’ve found, btw, is the Cranberry Bean. During winter I’m a big fan of hearty veggie soups with all three of those elements.

LC @ 1, I just realized I don’t think of lasagna as necessarily involving meat. I very frequently make vegetarian lasagna of various kinds. The easiest is spinach lasagna—microwave a 1-pound package of chopped spinach; cool and drain well (I like to use a salad spinner). Then mix the spinach into some ricotta cheese along with some grated Parmesan. Layer 1-1.5 cups tomato sauce, uncooked noodles, and spinach-cheese mixture, until your casserole dish is full. End with tomato sauce and sprinkle with some cheese. Bake covered with aluminum foil for about 45 minutes, then uncover and bake a bit longer until browned. You can add layers of cooked veggies to this—onions, bell peppers, and zucchini sautéed in olive oil and flavored with some red wine, oregano, basil, and rosemary are one good option. Sliced, salted and drained, roasted or sautéed eggplant is another.

From a cookbook called “Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker,” I got the idea of making Sloppy Joes with lentils instead of meat. You can’t get away with canned Manwich sauce, though.

But my most exciting recent discovery is this: If you slice shiitake mushroom caps thinly, then sauté them in olive oil until they are browned and crisp—they taste just like bacon. I mean JUST like bacon. You can sprinkle them on anything. I’m planning to try replacing the bacon in my favorite split pea soup recipe with shiitakes. In that recipe, you first fry the bacon, then fry onions in the bacon fat, then add the split peas and water (and sprinkle the cooked bacon on top of the soup when it’s done). I bet frying the mushrooms, then frying onions in the mushroom-flavored olive oil, would work just as well. And I know sprinkling the fried mushrooms on top of the soup would be awesome.

Do you have a favorite dish you successfully converted to vegetarian?

Now why would I want to go and ruin a perfectly good dish by doing that?  Just kidding (though I am a committed omnivore and most of my favorite dishes do contain meat).  On the other hand, I am really fond of many East Indian, Southeast Asian, and East Asian vegetarian dishes.  They have had millennia to perfect these and it shows.

Oh, yeah, I do have a veggie version of a dish:

Grilled portabello caps, sprinkled with salt, pepper, garlic and onion powder, and grill in the pan with olive oil just like you’d grill a piece of steak or pork.

Thealogian, OTOH, a 3 oz serving of any mushroom gives you the MDR for vitamin D, which is somewhat hard to supplement if you’re a vegan or can’t tolerate any milk products.

I didn’t do the conversion, but I find one of Cook’s Illustrated’s older recipes for baked ziti to be perfect for any and every baked ziti jones:

-Make marinara sauce.
-Cook pasta.
-Toss pasta with tomato.
-Layer with mixed shredded cheese (I’d use mozz and Reggiano)
-bake till cheese is melted and browning

Ricotta? Sausages? Meatballs? You can add them if you want, but you won’t miss them if you don’t.

Your mom only bought you a new rice cooker/veggie steamer for Christmas? Did she think the Thermomix was too good for you?

Having been a vegetarian for almost 10 years now, I’ve changed lots of meat-based dishes to veggie ones.  One of the best, though, is something I’ve made for Thanksgiving for the past 4 years:  stuffing.  I always loved stuffing as an omni, to the point of actually buying stovetop and just making it for a side for random non-Thanksgiving dinners.  Of course the traditional stuff is full of weird turkey parts that come in a bag inside the bird (uh, gross), or sausage, or oysters.  But I wanted something I could eat and would fulfill that “mmmm, fourth carbohydrate in one meal” feeling.

It’s based on this Martha Stewart recipe, with a few changes.  I use a bag of Pepperidge Farm wheat & white cubed in place of the bread, and add a bunch of chopped sage, cause hello! it’s stuffing!

It’s good stuff.  Even better as leftovers.  So good, both my omni parents request it now, and pass on the stuff scooped out of the turkey’s ass.

I know this is totally weaksauce as far as a conversion tale, but I enjoy hawaiian pizza with fake bacon more than the “real thing” with ham/canadian bacon. The way the fake bacon crisps up in the oven is much more appealing than the greasy, rubbery ham.

I have been making laksa (curry and coconut milk based soup) using vegan stock and it works surprisingly well.  I add smoked paprika to make it look right, and also because smoked paprika is delicious.  I’m sure the dish ends up like, totally not what laksa is supposed to be, but it’s good. 

An aside because I know there are a few Boston area people here: was anybody in Dewey Square this morning during the eviction?

I hope you’ll share some rice cooker/veggie steamer ideas.  I got one recently and feel I’m not living up to it’s potential.

This reminds me, I need to go to work on converting my favorite empanada filling recipe (key ingredients: ground beef, tomato, green olives, raisins). I’m thinking lentils to start with.

A while back I came up came up with a yummy bacon substitute, completely by accident: chopped roasted pine nuts. They’ve got the crispy-smoky-umami flavor just like bacon. A little salt at the end brings it out.

Man, nobody makes a really traditional pozole anymore:
“According to research by the National Institute of Anthropology and History and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, on these special occasions, the meat used in the pozole was human.[4] After the prisoners were killed by having their hearts torn out in a ritual sacrifice, the rest of the body was chopped and cooked with corn. The meal was shared among the whole community as an act of religious communion. After the conquest, when cannibalism was banned, pork became the staple meat as it “tasted very similar”, according to a Spanish priest.”
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pozole

Tristan:

The problem with that story is that cannibalism accusations seem very often to be a result of some cultural grudge or another, so it’s hard to pin down exactly how often it’s actually true…

I love meat, but it doesn’t have to be in everything. Mushrooms are my go to ingredient for recipes that were originally designed around red meat.

Stuffed mushroom caps:  save the clean sections of the stems/gills from preparing your caps and pick up some extra mushrooms to dice.  Dice them and the stems/gills finely. Saute slowly with finely diced garlic and onion in either butter or olive oil. Season with black pepper, dried basil and a tiny bit of dried oregano. Cook until mushrooms are pretty dissolved. Dice up pickled jalapeno pepper very fine and add it and a bit of the pickling brine to the mixture, adjusting to your spice level preference. Cook briefly, tasting and adjusting the flavour. Let cool enough to handle. Spoon filling into the raw mushroom caps and broil for a few minutes at high heat. A pinch of grated cheddar or other strongly-flavoured cheese on top is a nice addition before broiling, if you eat dairy. I really like these with jalapenos, but the mushroom stuffing is a pretty blank slate. You could easily use red wine or soya sauce and sesame oil in the cooking for a different approach.

I also use mushrooms instead of meat in baked pasta shells. Potabello/crimini mushrooms are best. Cut them in small chunks and saute them slowly in olive oil with garlic and cracked pepper. I usually use a roasted tomato/garlic sauce for shells, sometimes with roasted eggplant,  maybe some finely diced carrot. You want to cook the mushrooms for a while before adding them into the sauce so that they hold a bit of independent flavour and have an identifiable texture. I usually cook everything together in the sauce pan for about 15 minutes to blend and add a bit of lemon juice, freshly diced garlic right at the end of this to brighten the flavour. The shells will taste better if you stuff one day/cook the next. I like to put bocconcini pearls in each before baking them. If you don’t like them to get crisp on the tops, bake under foil, or cook in a microwave. If you are going to omit the dairy at the end, maybe make a bit of additional sauce to put over the top before baking/re-heating.  Shells are fussy, so making a big batch is worthwhile. They freeze well. You just bake after thawing.

I make spinach lasagna with a pumpkin bechamel, and it’s quite tasty. I’ve used chicken stock in the bechamel so it’s not so fat-laden, but mild-tasting veggie stock would probably do just fine.

A restaurant I frequented used to do stuffed onions—they were stuffed with sausage stuffing and topped w/ brown gravy, and they were completely awesome. I’ve done a version that uses wild and brown rice and that included a cranberry-orange relish (maybe?) that worked nicely, and there are multiple variations that would work.

It’s a lazy dish anyway, but chili pie/pizza is really easy to convert to vegetarian.  Just use a can of spiced chili beans and a can of red kidney beans instead of canned chili, then heat and pour over corn chips or tostadas like normal.  Skip the shredded cheese topping if you’re going vegan, or if you’re just not in the mood for cheese.

Why do I expect the head of Stan Ridgeway to pop up out of that bowl of beans and sing, “Radio… Radio… “?

I was having a hard time thinking of vegetarian conversions, despite having been a vegetarian from 14 to 25 years old. I think because I learned to cook largely as a vegetarian and had that aversion to meat substitutes, my repertoire was just vegetarian-to-start-with. I still cook about 80 percent vegetarian, but when I do cook meat, it’s MEAT. Brisket. Whole roast chicken. Stuff that there isn’t much point substituting or converting.

But then I remembered several vegan conversions I’ve done in the last few years that were really, really good (and a I say that as a meat-eater and cheese-addict).

Vegan lasagna. The “cheese” in this is based on tofu, but hear me out. This comes from “Romancing the bean.” Blend in a food processor: One package silken tofu, two cloves garlic (it’s optional but I don’t know why you would leave it out), 1 cup pecans, 1 cup chopped fresh basil, 5 tablespoons white miso. This comes out tasting like herbed chevre. When I make it, I find myself going to embarrassing lengths to get every last bit of it out of the food processor and licking my fingers.

Because this has a higher water content than cheese, you don’t want to cook your noodles first. Layer sauce, noodles, tofu mixture, some kind of raw veggie - the recipe called for grated zucchini, I’ve used chopped fresh spinach with good results - more tofu mixture, more noodles, more sauce. Cover and cook for 45 minutes.

If you like, you can sprinkle some nutritional yeast instead of parmesan on the top.

Speaking of nutritional yeast - that stuff is amazing! Which brings me to my other conversion.

Vegan pesto, made with nutritional yeast instead of parmesan cheese, tastes just like regular pesto. Some other variations we do is to use walnuts instead of pine nuts, just because they’re cheaper and we tend to buy them in bulk and have them around, and I often use spinach and other green stuff along with the basil.

I’ve also done vegan mashed potatoes, with just olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, and they turned out great.

We sometimes do vegetarian pozole similar to yours, and I totally agree about leaving out the cheese. If I need something to cut it, I like a dollop of sour cream/plain yoghurt, but the cheese somehow seems wrong to me. We also sometimes throw in some frozen sweet corn because we like that sweet/spicy combination.

Remember the zucchini, corn, beans baked enchiladas that you were doing in the summer? We do that in the summer, and then in the fall/winter switch to butternut squash, and it also has that sweet/spicy thing going on.

Hominy is great by itself, heated up in a pan with a little water and a little butter and salt and PEPPER.

My vegetarian pizza includes fake pepperoni, but it took a while to figure out how to make that work well, since it’s crumblier than regular pepperoni, and gets dry quickly, so there’s no point in my mind to laboriously peeling the individual slices apart and then laying them out on the pizza just so they can become little disks of disappointment.  I usually top with sauteed onions and mushrooms, so I just do a coarse dice on half a slab of Yves vegan pepperoni and toss it in about a minute before distributing the rest onto the pizza.

I modified Emeril’s red beans and rice recipe to vegan.  Substitute a little oil at each step which asks for meat or bacon grease.  I sub fake bacon for the ham hocks but you could leave it out.  Sub with vegetable stock where it calls for chicken stock and add a little smoke flavoring with the stock to make up for the smokiness that would come from the ham and sausage.  Use a lot more garlic (it’s pathetic how little is called for in most mainstream recipes).  The longer it cooks the better it is, stir every half hour and lower the heat if it’s getting stuck to the bottom of the pot.  Don’t leave out his step of smooshing 1/3 of the beans against the side of the pot about half an hour before you want to serve it as this is what makes it thick and wonderful. 

And of course it’s even better reheated.

This is an example of bad food photography, the plate isn’t centered, and I can’t tell what that utensil in the back is because it looks like a cobra sporting a bad tattoo.
Comment #6: Dark Avenger Guardian Chow Mein on 12/10 at 06:30 PM

I think it’s a serving spoon, with carving on the shaft.  But it does look more threatening than appetizing.

I’m a little confused that the recipe description says it doesn’t use ginger but then one of the ingredients is ginger.  Though it is just to cure the seaweed, it is in there!  “It’s not got *much* spam in it.”

Put the water, ginger, wine or sherry and oil in a wok or saucepan and bring to a boil. Submerge the seaweed and boil for about 5 minutes. Drain through a fine sieve and discard the ginger.

The ginger isn’t in the final product, FWIW.

Your post reminds me of a gap in the otherwise glorious world of restaurants in Central Queens: we could stand to have a vegan and/or kosher Tex-Mex place as well as a vegan and/or kosher Soul Food place.

Anybody want to help me spend even more money by opening up such restaurants?

I’d go with opening a kosher Thai place, unless hot spicy food is tref

I can’t take credit for it, but Spouse makes Sloppy Joes with textured vegetable protein that is outstanding.  She never makes it with ground beef anymore.  A lot of the other vegetarian meals we make pretty much start out that way, like with a base of squash or beans.  When we eat meat, we bake a whole chicken or make pork chops or something like that.  We just got 30 lbs of lamb meat, so we’ll be eating a lot of that this winter.

Dark Avenger Guardian Chow Mein,

Indeed.  And kosher Vietnamese would also be good.

*

RonO,

I am a confirmed carnivore, and I agree with you—for Sloppy Joes the fake meat is better than the real stuff. I used to eat pork and shrimp (my parents’ are not kosher) ... and I gotta say that the fake stuff you get at vegetarian chinese restaurants is much better than the real thing.  The only pork product I really miss is ham (they use fake ham in some of the vegetarian chinese dishes, but you can’t get a “ham” sandwich at such places).

Ooooo ...  Lamb.  Oh, the roasts and soups and stews.  Sigh.
We tend to replace all or some red meat with some combination of lentils, dark mushrooms, pinto/kidney/red/black beans. For chicken (and some pork, as pork can seem light or dark), we use tofu, white beans, eggplant, whitish mushrooms.  Soybeans, green, can be used for either.

Dunno if we’re supposed to be endorsing things here, but there’s a really nice vegetarian Mexican cookbook, called A Taste of Mexico: Vegetarian Cuisine, by Kippy Nigh.  We ate in her restaurant in San Cristóbal de las Casas and bought several copies of the book to give as gifts.  Those who liked the recipe above might like this book.  It’s of modest scope, but inexpensive.

One of the first vegetarian conversions I made was for crispy tacos. I would cook 1/2 cup rice (now I use quinoa) and 1/4 cup buckwheat together with 1-1/2 cups water, covered. Then stir in a cup of corn, 1/2 cup water and an envelope of taco seasoning, uncovered. All you need is taco shells, lettuce, tomato (I have salsa instead), cheese (I have quacamole instead) and whatever else you like your tacos with.