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When approached by an evening that involves preparing a meal for a vegan, even professional chefs can struggle in determining what to cook for the main dish and side dishes that make up an evening meal. The following are some helpful rules to help you in the process of cooking meals for vegan diners:
What is a Vegan?
Not everyone understands the differences between veganism and vegetarianism. While a vegetarian usually avoids all animal products, vegans avoid all meat AND animal by-products also. Animal by-products include dairy, eggs, and even honey. Any item that comes from animals must be left out when creating a vegan meal.
Plan Ahead
Whether you are cooking one dinner or ten, fixing food for vegans needs serious planning. It is critical for every meal to be as nutritious as it is tasty, which is often a problem for the cook who is used to using animal-based food products in dishes. The courses should be specced-out early in the process, considering the best way to to introduce protein, fiber, iron, and flavor to the vegan meal.
Preparation is simpler if you can locate a reliable on-line recipe collection with plenty of vegan recipes. Even then, you need to check each of the recipes in detail before utilizing them. Many recipes labelled as vegan are far from it. Sadly, some individuals have completely opposite views of what 'vegan' actually means. However, if you do a little work some of these vegan recipes are exceedingly scrumptious and extremely nourishing. Some may need specific ingredients, but once again, the internet can be a major help in finding these. You might even locate online sellers of vegan food stuffs, which, as they are usually 'specialists' in the veganism, may even be able to offer advice on alternative ingredients for your vegan dinner.
Variety Is the Spice of Life
In vegan cooking, it is all too easy to make unexciting meals that seem similar to one another. This can, and shouild be avoided. The truth is, vegan dinners can be as interesting as those prepared for carnivorous cooking. With the large number of TVP style alternatives to animal based ingredients, you can use substitutions for foods from beef to pork, which really helps to introduce a great deal of flavor and variety to the meal.
Leave No Stone (or Ingredient) Unturned
As the host or hostess at a vegan dinner party, your main task is to be utterly sure you are respecting your vegan guests' choice of lifestyle. It would be all too easy, as well as far quicker, to just assume that all non-meat ingredients are not animal based and prepare a recipe based on that. However, a thoughtful cook will remember to read through the list of ingredients of all bought items appearing in the recipe so you can be perfectly sure the food is 100 percent vegan. You will discover some surprising areas that anmial products and assocaited by-products crop up, e.g.:
• Refined Sugar: Around half of the sugar producing plants in the USA use carbon produced from animal bones to process the sugar. Consequently, quite a few vegans won't eat processed sugar.
• Gelatin: Most cooks do not know that gelatin is derived from fish or animal sources.
• Vegetable Soups: Most tinned vegatable soups are made with chicken or beef stock.
• Bread: Even those that are not made with milk or eggs may contain animal-derived lard.
• Worcestershire Sauce: This tasty sauce is made using anchovies, look out for vegan alternatives - they are available
If you follow these guidelines, any cook can cook a dinner that is suitable for carnivores and non-meat-eaters alike, and your vegan friends will without doubt thank you for care and attention to detail.
Roger is a keen amateur chef who offers nutritional support and food articles for Recipes 4U (www.recipes-4u.co.uk), one of the largest free recipe collections on the internet. Recipes 4U has over forty thousand recipes with specialist recipe categories for vegetarian recipes, pork recipes and tuna recipes.
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