I suppose I’m a bit of a pretentious fucker when it comes to food, I’ve always found comfort in food, from reading about it, to preparing it, to eating it. I’ve been lucky enough to try all sorts of different things, I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world and eat in some amazing places, even if sometimes things got lost in translation and “Pork” turned out to be “Dog”, but that’s another story for another blog post…
In the last few years I’ve taken more of an interest in food provenance, trying to buy meat that is locally reared and well looked after or using seasonal ingredients instead of whatever we can import for convenience. I’ve Tweeted about my problem with Marks & Spencer (and I’m sure others) selling potatoes imported from Israel, the last time I checked we could grow potatoes just fine in the UK.
I digress, so, anyway we have a few friends who are vegetarian, we’ve shared food and we’ve been introduced to new things by them. After embarking on my mammoth 1000 mile cycling journey this year and changing what I eat completely we began talking about trying out a vegetarian diet for a month and the idea of “Veggie August” was born.
I’d already cut out a lot of meat from my diet and my wife and I mainly eat chicken when we do have meat, but I adore game and seafood and I head straight to that part of the menu whenever I can. I’ve always felt like I’m full of energy even after riding my 60 miles a week but our vegetarian friends rave about how good they feel just from having moved to a more natural and let’s be honest, ethical way of eating.
So, yesterday was the start of Veggie August, we’re foregoing meat for a month and seeing how we feel. I generally do the cooking at home and for a while have done a mix of meat and veggie food anyway so moving over to vegetarian shouldn’t be too much trouble. I’ve stolen recipes from The Waiting Room, an amazing local vegetarian restaurant and I’ve been pointed in the direction of Becka Eats, a great blog about veggie and vegan food.
So for day 1, we went with Lentil Shepherd’s Pie with Sweet Potato Mash, a recipe from Becka’s blog but changed slightly from vegan to veggie purely for convenience! I’m going to add the recipes for what I cook in August to the blog and share how the month is going…