Hellobee Boards

I could never be a vegetarian, but I do cook quite a few meatless meals, and would do way more if DH wasn't around. I just don't crave meat for every meal.

Stuffed red peppers are super filling non-meat dish (fill with some combo of Mexican rice, jalapeños, black beans, corn, cheese)

Eggplant Parmesan with a pasta side is another filling one.

Just me eating, I'm more than happy to chop up an avocado, tomato and add some cottage cheese.

Pollo Vegetarian here!

I sparingly eat chicken & often omit it from recipes. I eat lots of beans and salads, but also have a love for pasta. Black beans are super filling for me!

I also don't eat fake meat, and I don't like tofu.

I was vegetarian for about 4 years and only stopped because my digestive system was unhappy. I found out years later that it is a fructose problem (which eating too many fruits/veggies can aggravate).

However, I don't think I will ever choose a restrictive diet again, I like eating out at trendy restaurants too much.

Meat is a luxury for us! You can always reduce the amount per meal. Serve chicken in a salad, for example, instead of a breast of chicken with a side salad. Make it a topping. Acorn squash stuffed with veggies and a little bit of turkey sausage.

Black bean soup is a good option. Nice and hearty too, you hardly miss the meat! Veggie pizza with roasted eggplants. Breakfast for dinner - eggs and pancakes. Spinach quiche. Quinoa and stirfry.

Meat is awesome and delicious. You can eat more vegetarian dishes without restricting meat completely. Just eat meat that makes you feel good, like fish for instance.

We cook a few meat free meals in our house - we do a vegetable bolognese, a vegetable lasagne, a delicious vegetable soup - but we don't do this half as often as we should. I think, for us, the reason is laziness - pure and simple! Meat is easy to cook. Vegetable dishes require a lot more peeling and chopping, you have to know what to add to enhance the flavour, lentils have to be soaked - sigh! I always just revert back to the meat dishes I can cook with my eyes closed!

I eat meat because I like it, but I actually don't think I'd miss it if we had to do without. Though bacon would be hard to let go of, for sure. I wish I could make more meatless dishes, but my husband would live strictly off of meat if he could, so it's almost impossible to do it.

i really like meat, but we've cut down on it a lot starting a few years ago because: (1) a lot of my friends were vegetarian and (2) we started buying "happy meat" (humanely raised, not factory farm) which is quite expensive, and buying more veggies was cheaper than buying the happy meat. but i'm not interested in going all vegetarian.

I like bacon. However, we don't eat meat all the time. I have tried to go vegetarian a few times, but after a couple of weeks I get an insane craving for meat and I give it and it is GOOD. I am branching bout and trying new vegetables these days, and I'm also trying to like fish more so that we aren't eating red meat so often. Also, whatever meat I do buy is either local or humanely raised.

I've been close-to or totally vegetarian for ... er, many years. We're talking double digits here, which is why I'm unwilling to count them. I started out due to idealism--eating animals just didn't feel right. I modified my stance a little along the way and I now eat some fish, but I am really selective about what kind/where it comes from for health and environmental reasons.

Like a lot of others, I don't eat fake meat. (Okay, I end up eating like two fake hot dogs at cook-outs in the summer. I get the ones without soy/corn in them from Whole Foods because they're not loaded with junk. Also, I make a BLAT with fake bacon once a summer, because...well, ripe avocados and tomatoes don't really need an explanation, now, do they? )

The main obstacle to going partly/totally vegetarian is finding a good cookbook, I think. I started out with two (now ancient) copies of "Vegetarian Cooking" and "Great Main Meals Without Meat" by Betty Crocker (yeah, I know). Those are actually pretty good cookbooks for stand-by type stuff and if Bisquick bothers you (it's in a few of the recipes), you can just sub in your own biscuits. I've owned those books for a really long time and I've never bought a box of Bisquick or anything else produced by BC. I know some people love Mark Bittman's veg book, but I use his recipes from the NYT and his app, and I'm not totally enamored. I think he tries too hard, although I appreciate that he doesn't write extra steps in his recipes just for the heck of it (a common problem in recipes). "Vegetarian" (ed. Valerie Ferguson) is a good basic/starter book, too. It covers stuff from dips and quick dinners to the fancy-pants mushroom gougere I serve for Thanksgiving (that is seriously delicious). I recently bought the Martha Stewart "Meatless" book. It's not bad. For fancier fare, I have really enjoyed "Plenty" by Yotam Ottolenghi and "The French Market Cookbook" by Clotilde Dusoulier. But honestly, my cookbook shelves are full to bursting with books filled with meaty recipes too. Nigella, for example, cooks a metric ton of meat, but her veggie dishes are worth buying the books for!

So, that's where I'd start. Check out some well-regarded cookbooks, because the recipes are more likely to have been better written and more heavily vetted than the ones you can find online (except maybe the ones written by people like Ottolenghi, who writes for a UK paper occasionally).

Why am I not a vegetarian? Simply because I can imagine no greater form of torture than to feed myself meatless meals every day. I need some form of meat in my diet nearly every day, I just don't feel full without it. Really though, I have absolutely zero desire to ever be vegetarian or to even try to cut back on meat. We do buy the expensive, free range, organic cuts most of the time, but it still works out cheaper than loading up on veggies here. Even if it were cheaper to be vegetarian, I still would never do it.

Carnivore for life!

Combination of being too lazy and sort of liking meat and my meat-loving husband. I was vegetarian on and off for years and then for many years before I met my husband I was vegetarian in-home and only ate meat at restaurants. But my husband loves meat and its too hard to find enough recipes he likes that don't have meat in them to feed him all the time at home.

I do eat less meat than most though I think. So far this week (in the past 4 days/12 meals) I have had meat 3 times and only one time was the meat the main part of the meal (I had a sub yesterday for lunch. Other than that I had soup that had some chicken in it and I also had a quesadilla that I picked the chicken out of but probably ate a little of). I just don't need meat to feel satisfied or full.

I love meat! Though I do eat red meat sparingly now and try to stick with chicken.

I meat. DH would never support meatless meals, let along becoming a vegetarian! And already, I can see our boys are meat lovers.

There is no way my body would function without it. I have canines for a reason. To rip my meat apart

I like meat. I believe it's good for you and the best form of protein. I think if you're going to eat like a vegetarian, you just have to be mindful that you don't eat a lot of pasta and that you balance your meals well

I was raised vegetarian and didn't start eating meat and fish until I was about 20 years old, and now I would not go back to vegetarianism. I believe a diet with quality animal protein is healthier than a vegetarian diet. I feel better eating meat and have more energy. I also find it is much easier to control my weight and body composition while eating meat.

My FIL raises cattle & chicken, vegeterian really isn't an option for us! And we love meat too much...my husband hates when I do a meatless meal...he would starve & I would be crabby.