Low-Budget Vegetarian Cookbook a Tasty, Nutritious and Varied Vegetarian Diet Based Primarily of Rice, Beans, Vegetables and Other Grains
By Tony Bradey
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About this ebook
There seems to be a prevailing popular myth in our culture that eating a diet with little or no meat or dairy products is challenging, tedious, or expensive. It takes a lot more time and effort to 'replace' animal food with a healthy diet.
I find the opposite to be true. This book is written to give you the basic knowledge and tools you need to have a diet primarily or entirely based on grains, vegetables, and beans. That is nutritious, interesting, and inexpensive. That takes no more cooking effort you would need for a healthy meat-based diet.
Grains, vegetables, and beans, taken together, make up the core of the traditional diets of most people around the world for most of our history on our planet. They are the core foods that I talk about preparing in this book.
In this book, you will find:
The Basics Shopping, Meal Planning, Cooking
Essential Ingredients and Cooking Instructions
Basic Recipe Patterns Frameworks for Creativity
Basic Rice and Veggies Recipe Patter
Sample Recipes
Grain Dishes
Bean Dishes
Dips and Relishes
Salads
Cooked Vegetable
Soups
Buy it NOW and let your customers get addicted to this amazing book!
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Low-Budget Vegetarian Cookbook a Tasty, Nutritious and Varied Vegetarian Diet Based Primarily of Rice, Beans, Vegetables and Other Grains - Tony Bradey
The Basics - Shopping, Meal Planning, Cooking
On Grains, Beans, Protein and Balance
The core of a satisfying vegetable-based diet is a balance of grains, beans and vegetables. This is true whether or not you include any eggs or dairy products. It also works well even if you still decide to eat some meat or fish. In my experience, I would roughly estimate the proportions of these foods in a satisfying diet as follows:
Grains - about 40% to 50%
Vegetables - about 30% to 50%
Beans - about 10% to 20%
Everything Else (fruit, dairy products, nuts, desserts) - maybe 10%
A meat-based diet is anchored or built around the meat dish. That provides the center of the meal, and the rest of the meal is usually built to complement it.
In a vegetable-based diet, your grains and beans together form the hearty center of the diet. They are the dense and satisfying parts of the meal. If you try to eat too high a proportion of just vegetables without grains and beans, your meals will be unsatisfying and leave you feeling hungry and often ungrounded, spacey.
Your vegetables provide a lot of the variety of texture, color and taste. A diet without sufficient vegetables, with just grains and beans, is monotonous and unsatisfying in texture, and will leave you feeling stuffed and sluggish.
Get the proportions of these about right and you will have a diet that is nutritious, satisfying, that sits well and is easy to digest, and that leaves you feeling energetic and balanced. Also, these three together will give you a diet as simple, or as wildly varied, as you care to make it.
I have also found that grain, bean and vegetable-based meals leave me feeling centered, balanced. Eat these foods enough and you will develop your own intuitive sense of meal balancing. This is useful, because if you have a sense of what it feels like to be centered and balanced, you will recognize it when you get off-balance. It’s not much fun binging on sweet donuts and coffee once you recognize how off-balance you feel afterwards. Develop that feel for balance and your diet will become increasingly self-regulating. It just plain old feels better, and tastes better, to eat healthy and balanced meals.
Basically, with few exceptions, neither grains or beans by themselves are balanced and complete sources of protein. However, grains and beans complement and complete each other, so that these two foods eaten together provide complete and high-quality protein.
The optimal proportion of grain to bean for best protein balance is around 3 to 1 or 4 to 1. Interestingly, I have found that this is about the proportion that these foods seem to digest the best.
A small amount of animal food - a little bit of cheese or yogurt, or egg - also complements grain protein.
I have for me that having at least one good protein-balanced meal a day seems to provide more than enough protein. However, I have found that some form of grain is necessary at pretty much every meal for the meal to feel satisfying and balanced.
Weekly Meal Planning and Background Cooking
Cooking economically , nutritiously and tastily takes some weekly thought and planning to pull off successfully. Being able to cook quickly and economically means thinking ahead to make sure you have good ingredients readily available to be able to put together a quick meal, and some already prepared dishes to use.
Not planning your dinner meal until an hour before does not encourage creativity and spontaneity. Instead it limits your choices to what you have on hand. If you don’t take the time to think ahead you will find yourself being tempted to have pre-cooked convenience dinners sitting around, and they are not economical for money, for nutrition, or for taste. Or, more expensive yet, faced with a time pressure to cook and lack of good foods to cook with, you will be tempted to do take out, eat out, or home-delivery. That is not an efficient use of your food dollar.
A week seems to be about the right unit of time to for making a general meal plan. I use the weekend to think out meals - with the general plan in place before I go shopping and not after! - then to do the shopping and major cooking.
Bean dishes, stews and soups lend themselves to being cooked in advance, and some stews taste best on the second or third day. Grain salads for lunches, and some cabbage-based vegetable salads, can also be prepared in large batches ahead of time.
Grains cook quickly enough that they can be cooked plain, in batches good for 2 or 3 days maximum, then kept on hand to combine with vegetables and other foods for quick dinners.
When you have main bean and grain dishes chosen as the framework for your week’s meals, the one other thing you need is to have enough good quality vegetables around to quickly turn those grains and beans in to tasty and varied meals.
In your main weekly shopping trip, your task is to get the foods and spices you need for the week’s general meal plan.
Good quality fresh vegetables are the key ingredients to have around to make the meals work. You will probably have a combination of the main vegetables you always have around - things like onions, carrots, celery and such - combined with other veggies that vary by week or by season, according to what looks good at the market that day. You may end up building one or more meals around a vegetable that looked especially good that week.
Because good quality vegetables are so important to making meals work, I suggest that you make your main market for your weekly shopping run, the best source for good, fresh produce you can