Eating Vegan: A Complete Guide to Vegan Cooking for Beginners

Tools and Tricks for Easy Vegan Cooking

For maximum enjoyment of new recipes and cooking techniques, it’s worthwhile to invest in a few kitchen items that are extra-helpful to veggie chefs.

A good blender and/or food processor is absolutely essential. Cooking with fresh veggies can involve lots of chopping, and many delicious veggie soups, sauces, spreads, and cheezes need a blender for best results.

Slow cookers make it ridiculously easy to cook dried beans, lentils, chickpeas, or root veggies for later use in recipes. Cook dry black, red, or navy beans on high for 8 hours or so; black-eyed peas and chickpeas cook a little faster, and are usually done in 4 hours on high heat.  As a budget-stretching tool, make almost effortless veggie broth in your crock pot for use in soups, stews, roasts, sauces, and casseroles.

Slow cookers make it easy to take vegan yum to pot lucks or family dinners, where otherwise your dining options might be uninspiring. I have two large slow cookers and one small one, and use them all– I consider them essential tools for surviving the holiday season with my sanity (more or less) intact!

A rice cooker with a steamer basket makes good food fast, and is highly recommended. Cook rice, quinoa, or whatever grain you like while simultaneously steaming marinated tofu, tempeh, or veggies– so you can make healthy meals very quickly even when you don’t have time to plan ahead.

Unless you live very close to a natural foods store or upscale grocery, and have a lot of extra money lying around, consider buying a bread machine. Most prepackaged breads and rolls contain animal derived ingredients; they also cost about four times as much as if you make your own bread from basic bulk ingredients. Even better, the smell and taste of fresh bread is incredible! With a bread machine, ‘real’ bread is so very easy and delicious, you’ll never go back to the other kind.

These are the tools I would rate as most valuable, for new herbies. Some cooks also swear by pressure cookers, juicers, and ‘George Foreman’ style grills, for preparing beans, veggies, tofu, grilled sandwiches, bean burgers, quesadillas, and other foods quickly and easily.

Every new veggie chef should have two or three good vegan cookbooks. There are some great plant-based recipes online, and definitely explore those too– especially the ones that provide other cooks’ reviews of each recipe– but when you’re first exploring veg cooking, books by well-known vegan authors are likely to be a better source of ‘tried and true’ dishes. Thanks to the editorial process and extensive recipe testing, books by good vegan authors are also likely to explain things more clearly, and leave less room for confusion or unsatisfying results. When you’re just getting started with veg cooking, that’s especially important: so splurge on a cookbook or three!

Cooking with fresh ingredients requires a different mind-set, for maximum efficiency. As much as possible, be proactive with your food prep and cooking. If you need to make rice for a stir-fry, make twice the amount you need so you’ll already have cooked rice for tomorrow’s casserole or stew. When you’re making pasta, cook twice as much as the recipe calls for; freeze the leftovers in single or double servings, then later add whatever sauce is handy for a quick lunch.

Gonna want nachos and bean burgers this week? It takes practically no time to soak dry beans over night Saturday, then let ‘em cook in the crock all day Sunday while you do other things– so when you want nachos or bean dip or burgers or whatever, later in the week, it comes together very easily. After grocery shopping, go ahead and prep your veggies– chop your broccoli or cauliflower, make celery sticks, wash and chop your kale and other leafy greens– do whatever you need to do for easy cooking or snacking with these foods later in the week.

With a little practice, this kind of forward-thinking food prep becomes second nature, so that it’s easy to throw together tasty, nutritious meals quickly and simply.

Embrace Vegploration

Many new herbies are surprised to find that their diet actually expands, as they move towards plant-based eating. Food ethics writer Erik Marcus offers this excellent advice for embracing a vegan or veganish diet:

The most important piece of advice I can give you is to constantly try new foods. Every time you discover something new that you like, you’ll be helping to crowd the animal-based foods you grew up on out of your diet. Until you’re ready to take off your vegan training wheels, make a commitment to sampling ten new vegan foods a week. I promise that you’ll be astonished at how quickly this will enable you to become comfortable on a vegan diet. Before long, the next time you find yourself hungry, the very first food that pops into your head will automatically be vegan.

There is a world of food out there that most SAD diet eaters have never experienced: taste it! There are so many delectable plant-based foods that most American consumers have never thought to try– falafel, cashew cheez, kale chips, Israeli couscous, nooch sauce, tempeh, kohlrabi, seitan roast… there is a vast and delicious list of foods you may love, that the sad old SAD never offered you. Make it your mission to explore them all!

Hola, Herbivorous Habits!

The most important things to remember, for making the transition to a mostly- or all-veggie diet:

1. Read all you can about it (nutrition, health benefits, and recipes), and implement veggie cooking at a pace that feels comfortable.

2. Eat responsibly-produced food: support local growers, and buy organic whenever possible.

3. Cook with whole food/ un-pre-processed food to the greatest degree possible, to maximize both health and environmental benefits.

4. Enjoy the adventure: have fun exploring new ways of new shopping, cooking, and eating!

Change doesn’t have to be scary — read all you can about plant-based nutrition, buy a few good cookbooks, and most importantly seek out new plant based foods to taste and enjoy.   You’ll be surprised how well you eat!

Image credits: Creative Commons photos by flavorrelish, Army Medicine, Josh Lowe, Laurel Fan, Ecstatic Mark, indigotimbre, and myveggikitchen.

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