Are any of our new members, especially the Askville refugees, vegetarians?

Oh man, you aren’t corrupting them this soon are you?

I’ve tried to be vegetarian a few times, but meat is so delicious.

However, I LOVE veggie food, and want to make sweet culinary love to most everything you’ve ever posted, @Kardamom .

This is how I plan to Corrupt them. Hee hee. Only I’ll be waving a block of tofu.

I was vegetarian for years and though I do eat meat again now, I still have vegetarian food on a very regular basis. Here’s my favourite home-made Middle-Eastern style lentil soup; warm, thick and filling. It’s also very cheap.

4 cups or 1 litre vegetable stock
half-pound or 250g dried red lentils
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon cumin
up to ½ teaspoon cayenne or flaked chillis
a handful of fresh coriander/cilantro leaf, or 1–2 teaspoons of the dried herb.
3 tablesp lemon juice

Bring the stock to the boil and add the lentils. Simmer for 20 minutes. keep checking & stirring to make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan.
Meanwhile heat the oil in a frying pan and cook the onion and garlic until the onion is soft.
Stir the cooked onion and garlic into the lentils, season with cumin & cayenne/chillis. Simmer for a further 10 minutes.
Meanwhile chop the coriander leaf (I find this easiest to do with scissors).
Remove the soup from the heat and puree in a blender until smooth.
Just before serving, stir in the chopped coriander and lemon juice.
Delicious served with strips of lightly toasted pitta bread to dip into it.

@downtide Yum! I just posted something on Facebook, in regards to a survey I saw about the 100 greatest foods (most of which were meat dishes) So I came up with my own 100 vegetarian items. 2 of which were Indian lentil dal, and Ethiopian lentil wat.

For you Americans, coriander leaf is called cilantro in the US.

I am a long time vegetarian, I love quinoa, avocados, hummus, spinach pasta and fruit salads – that’s the major part of what I eat.

Is it as good without the coriander leaf? That stuff tastes like toothpaste to me.

Well its not as good to me because I love it, but I make it with just the cumin and chilli sometimes, because fresh herbs aren’t always readily available locally. When I do it that way I tend to add a bit more chilli.

@downtide Mmmmmm chili and coriander.

@Seek_Kolinahr I bet you could substitute oregano, or just leave out the coriander (or as we Yanks call it, cilantro, for the fresh leaves, and coriander for the ground seeds). Should be fine and tasty.

I @Kardamom, am both an Askville refugee and a vegetarian. Have been for as long as I can remember. I gave in and started eating sea food a couple of years ago. Not because I was hounded into it, but because I got so tired of everyone making such a big deal about where I could eat. Small town, yes, but Italian, Mexican…?

@ibstubro I am not judgmental about what people choose to eat, or why. I am a food enthusiast. I just happen to be a vegetarian too.

It’s hard to be a vegetarian in a world that puts so much value on meat. I just do the best that I can, and figure that everyone else is trying to do that too.

Welcome to Fluther, too : )

Thanks and thanks, @Kardamom.

I live and let live. If people press me why I;m vegetarian, I press back—tell them that if they’d look at some pictures of the factory farming process, they would probably give it up too. That usually does the trick.

In reality, it’s more complicated for me. Being diagnosed with IBS and being haunted by pictures of the raising of veal pretty much did it. I used to be a huge food enthusiast (reading cookbooks cover-to-cover like novels), but age, the veggie thing, the IBS thing and lack of an appreciative audience have largely killed it. I can and will still talk food, it’s just not the passion it once was.

@And that, sir is why we have met.

I love to cook, love to find recipes for every event and every food allergy or constraint. In my family we have celiac disease, diabetes, vegetarians (only me) and folks who are on the paleo diet and those who are just plain un-healthy, for a variety of reasons.

In a perfect world, all of us would be vegetarians. In the real world, all we can do, is the best that we can do. And that is what makes me a food enthusiast.

Don’t give up hope. Just do what you can do.

Oh, just make with the pancakes already. Jesus, it’s like a match made in interwebs heaven. ^_^