Many people are looking to reduce their meat consumption after the festive period, some are looking to become vegetarian or vegan for a month, some will follow meat free Monday for the whole year, whatever your reason there are lots and lots of tasty recipes easily available on the web for you to try. For some they choose to ty meat substitutes or ready meals, but remember a highly processed diet is unhealthy in the long term it doesn’t matter if it comes with a ‘healthy’ label.
First thing most people find difficult when they swap to no meat is that there is no centrepiece to their meal, the meat was the focus, the whole meal is the focus with many vegetarian dishes, also many people are soon put off eating dishes with lots of vegetables since they find the preparation time consuming, if need by when changing your diet cheat, use ready made curry paste, ginger/ garlic purees and ready prepared vegetables.
Susan’s Meat Free Monday meal for her family today is River Cottage’s Fragrant Veg stoup served with brown basmati rice, it took about one hour to cut, chop and cook but the kitchen smells lovely.
For just the soup it comes in at around 340 calories per serving, this was made using full fat coconut milk so you can reduce the calories if you use a lower fat version. It is high in saturated fat due to the coconut milk so not a meal to have every day. The stoup provides 15% of your daily protein, 105% of your vitamin A, 10% of your potassium requirements, handy for those on diuretics that tend to be low in potassium due to the medication, low in carbohydrates 9%, high in fibre 26% of daily requirements and 50% of your daily vitamin C, with 5% of your daily iron.
Add in 100g of cooked Basmati Rice – Basmati rice is lower GI than all other rices so better to help keep blood sugar levels stable. Basmati has the highest content of all rice for amino acids and essential nutrients.
Percentage daily values are based on a 2000 Calorie per day diet.
Healing Foods 