Our food is delicious

Delicous bread ©Janet Allen
What's more delicious than bread fresh from the oven?

People seem to think that we, as vegetarians, have a limited diet and are living a life of sacrifice. People have said, "You must eat a lot of pasta!" (We rarely do.) Or they ask if we eat a lot of fake meats like Boca Burgers (not for years). I guess if they eliminated meat from their own diets, that's all they could imagine would be left.

But comparing our own meat-eating past to our current vegetarian diet, we know they have it backwards. We now have a much more varied diet, and, we think, a much more delicious diet than we used to have in our omnivorous past.

I guess they'd be surprised to know that I feel sorry for them, eating a limited diet of highly processed foods — foods that often lead to chronic health problems.

Are we fooling ourselves?

Apple crisp ©Janet AllenOur apple crisp, for example, is much less sweet than the average American dessert, but still delicious

Are we fooling ourselves, convincing ourselves that our food is tastier than it actually is?

I admit that the typical person today might not like some of our food as much as we do, at least at first.

After all, most people are used to food that's loaded with sugar, fat, and salt. Humans gravitate toward this kind of food and get used to excessive amounts of these ingredients (see the Kessler book in the sidebar).

But once people wean themselves away from the unnatural, exaggerated flavors of the typical processed, industrialized foods, their sense of taste returns to what had been normal before the last half-century of processed foods. It's been so long since people have had real food that they may not realize how delicious it can be.

The tradeoff

Sauteing ©Janet Allen
Many good things begin with sauteing some garlic!

We do probably spend more time in the kitchen than most people, since most people aren't cooking much at all—or even know how to cook.

We have busy lives, and there are times we'd prefer doing something other than cooking (or especially cleaning up after we cook), but we've come to generally enjoy the activity.

Here's how we've learned to manage the time commitment involved.

Though we aren't world-class cooks, we have managed to feed ourselves some pretty good food (in our opinion). So we're sharing some of our recipes. Feel free to modify them, as we've modified them as we go along, and make delicious food for yourself, too.