Over the years, a surprising number of people have thought I am vegetarian. I’m not. I never have been. I eat everything, pretty much. It’s true that I don’t really like tiramisu or angel delight or gherkins, and I’ve not had a lot of time for aubergine, but if someone served them to me chances are I’ll eat them and smile. When we were kids, we ate what Mum had cooked or we didn’t eat – not that I think we ever tested that! And Grandma always made us try things. We were allowed not to like them, but we had to try.
Clarkie, on the other hand, had a more sheltered gastronomic upbringing. Over the last 16 years she has massively expanded her range, but I was still somewhat surprised when she suggested we tried going vegetarian for an entire month. I mean, she loves her bacon. Loves. It. But suggest it she did, so we did! January was a (predominantly) vegetarian month for us.
Although we do cook almost every night, we are not people who love cooking. Clarkie enjoys baking on occasion, but the day-in-day-out preparation of food is a grind. So Clarkie plans it out (she always beats me to it) and writes a meal plan and makes sure we have the right food. I do my share of the cooking, (although I think I do less than I did before I broke my arm back in 2017) but she almost always beats me to the planning. We have a list of meals that we know work well, and part of the plan for trying a month of vegetarian eating was to try to shake that up a bit. Other reasons included increasing the amount of veg we eat, and possibly a reduction in food bills. Fine aims to be sure.
So how did we do?
Well, we slipped up a couple of times. The first time was totally accidental – I had to go pick up a prescription at lunchtime, and Clarkie went to the postoffice, so we bought sandwiches. Without even thinking about it, I bought brie and bacon and Clarkie bought chicken salad. D’oh! We didn’t even realise until we got home. The second time, we treated ourselves to an Indian takeaway. I know Indian food is supposed to be great for vegetarians, but we both have our favourites and they do include meat. Since it was supposed to be a treat, we decided to let ourselves off and stick with our favourites.
We managed just fine other than that. We did a couple of our normal meals, with the meat switched out for halloumi, and once with quorn. The new recipes we found, some were great and will slot into rotation, whilst others were less successful but still interesting. Others of our standards we just dropped the meat out – bagels and scrambled egg is pretty good without the bacon! In all honesty, I really didn’t miss the meat.
What about the other aims for the experiment? Well, we ate quite a lot of veg. So that was, I think, pretty successful. I managed to avoid losing weight (I know that’s odd, but I have a super-fast metabolism and struggle to keep weight on). And apparently we saved nearly £100 on our normal monthly food shopping bills! Honestly, that last really surprised me. I’m not 100% convinced that difference is entirely due to dropping meat, but it’s interesting regardless.
And now?
We are back to eating meat now. It’s interesting though – some of the meals we were looking forward to returning to have been a bit meh. The flavours we found in the veggie stuff were great, and meat hasn’t really added. So we think we’ll probably go with mostly veg from here on, save the meat for eating out and special occasions. Also, I feel like we tried during the hardest part of the year. I’d like to try again when it’s warmer and we can throw salads in as well.
All in all, a worthwhile thing to try. 10/10, would do again.
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