And so the adventure begins... Let me tell you the story of how The Sneaky Vegetarian be. You see I'm a passionnante vegetarian and I love sharing my cooking with others. I try not to preach about going veg to others although I do encourage anyone who shows interest in trying vegetarian meals or who wants to become vegetarian.
I've never cooked any other way so to me, preparing food the vegetarian way is second nature. Mix that in with the fact that I'm the type that loves cooking and loves to be prepared and organized, Sneaky Vegetarian was an inevitable product of my cataloguing nature. I have always composed a menu, usually on Sunday for the week of the meals I will prepare and then a grocery list to go with it. I thought everybody did this since my Mom raised me to always plan nutritious meals and to avoid take out except for special occasions.
In talking to friends and family, I realized a few years back that not everyone plans their meals in this way. Many people decide the day of or just a few hours before supper what they will eat that night. Talk about stress and pressure which often leads to take out and a less than nutritious mealtime. Being a vegetarian, take out is not much fun. What is there besides salad, fries and veggie burgers(if you are lucky).
I found out a few years back that to many people, eating vegetarian is strange, unknown but interesting. More and more, as vegetarianism is becoming mainstream, people are itching to try a vegetarian menu but have no idea how to start and are not sure if they dared how other people in the family would react.
The natural solution of course was for me to write a cookbook that would include lots of good recipes, meal plans with grocery lists, vegetarian resources, info and do it in a way that would not be scary and strange even though it would be completely vegetarian ( and actually pretty much vegan). No problem, right? Well, what is not strange is not always obvious to me since I have been vegetarian since the age of 10! Therefore so far, only my husband, who is a flexitarian, had tried my vegetarian meal recipes.
And so, The Sneaky Vegetarian Taste Tester Analysts were summoned. I put a post on my Facebook page and I now have my 8 testers for the 4 week Supper Menu Plans section of my book. The first week is going on right now. On Wednesday, I will gather up the food diaries of these first analysts and make any improvements necessary on that week's recipes. Once the recipes have been well taste tested by veg and non veg ( mostly) families, I will send the perfected recipes to my growing list of recipe and taste tester analysts. They will follow the grocery list and then go through the motions of preparing these meals for their family for a week. Soon enough, my recipes and supper plan will be perfected and tested on real families and on real people who want to flex in their diet to include veg meals in their real every day life ! I'm so excited! Can't wait to see the first comments in the diaries this week! I'll keep you posted;)
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