Meat?

What are your feelings about eating meat?

I know I should eat less meat and more vegetables. I realise that the amount of CO2 and Methane created by meat farming is a major contributor to global warming.

The problem is I was bought up eating meat. Some of it was poor cuts of it, my parents could not afford much, so we had some very strange things on our plates. I’m not going to go into detail, suffice to say most of them had odd shaped bones.

I have tried to eat vegetarian food. But it’s hard to find a supplier of good imitation meat that isn’t too expensive. Suddenly vegetarian foods have become fashionable and therefore costly. With the cost of living crisis even tins of baked beans from some suppliers have trebled or quadrupled in price. So I guess the way to go is to cook from scratch.

Thinking about the prompt, I will try and eat less meat.

Winter stew

I just made a vegetarian stew for dinner. I could have made Staffordshire Lobby which is a beef based stew, lobbing all sorts of things into the pot. But I used a meat substitute, Quorn pieces.

Basically I put two small chopped potatoes, two small sliced carrots and half a sweet potato, peeled and sliced, into a pan and covered them in boiling water. I let them simmer for a few minutes, then chopped up a small red onion, chopped some slices off a cabbage (about a sixth of it) and two sticks of celery sliced up. Then I added half a pack of Quorn and a couple of teaspoons of Lazy Garlic. I let everything simmer for about twenty minutes. Then I added a couple of vegetable stock cubes. Let it cook for a few more minutes before serving with a hunk of brown bread and vegetable spread. I didn’t add salt, but if you do add it on top of the stew when you serve, that way it sits on the food and doesn’t get absorbed into it. That means you don’t eat too much salt. You can also add pepper at the end.

Carrot and ginger soup

Ingredients
We used..a lot of carrots, half an onion, 3 large cloves of garlic, some garlic olive oil and plain olive oil. A knob of butter, a bit of flour, a bit of ginger powder, a couple of pinches of salt, some crushed black pepper, luck….
Mix the chopped up carrot onion and garlic in a blender with water and oil. When its blended cook for 20 mins….

Added black pepper, ginger and salt to taste. We tasted as we cooked and gradually added more flavouring as it was a bit bland to start. My blender does not completely pulp vegetables so it’s a bit chewy.

No chick peas, fish food or UFOs were used in the soup. My hubby was wearing a tweed but you dont need that either for flavour!

Downside…I took over a bit, should have let him do it all…