5 ways to reduce the amount of meat in your meals
5 ways to reduce the amount of meat in your meals
I'm a Buddhist, and interested in reducing my total "suffering footprint" while I'm here. If left to my own devices I'd happily eat no meat at all, but although my family go along with a few vegetarian dishes during the week, I wouldn't ask them to go "all the way". So I still prepare meat dishes, but deviously, in a way which makes em come out looking, smelling and tasting like meat dishes, but with substantially less meat in them than the traditional recipes.
So, if you are interested in cutting back on meat, be it for idealogical, health, environmental or whatever other reasons you may have, I would love to share some of my ideas and recipes with you.
1. Halve the mince, add refried beans
I find that for any mince dish I make (spag bol, lasagne, shepherd's pie etc...) I can get away with halving the amount of mince I would normally use, and substituting tinned refried beans. Add the refried beans along with the sauce, after you have browned the mince with onions, garlic, herbs etc... in the pan. I find half mince and half beans gives a similar texture and flavour to the fully mince recipe. You could adjust the ratio though (more mince, less bean) if you wanted to.
Incidentally, refried beans are low in fat and high in fibre. Compare the different brands in the supermarket and get the one with the lowest possible salt (sodium) content. I use one of the generic supermarket brands. It smells and tastes like... er... well, like it looks if you eat it straight out of the tin, but mix it into a mince dish and you won't even know it's there.
2. Make chicken pie with (almost) no chicken
You can make a really tasty basic chicken pie by frying up onions with some herbs (rosemary, parsley, sage for example) and then adding loads of finely diced veges (take your pick from carrots, celery, capsicum, zucchini, peas, corn, mushrooms...) and continuing to fry until they are all softish. Then add a tin of condensed cream of chicken soup. Then stick the whole lot between two bits of pastry in a pie dish and bake it up.
This pie is yum. The only chicken in it is in the soup, but because the veges give lots of interest and texture, usually people won't notice there are no chunks of chook in there. If you serve this up and all goes well, move on to condensed cream of mushroom or corn or celery and see if you can get away with that instead and hence avoid chicken altogether.
3. Add beans to casseroles
I usually use tinned red kidney beans for beef casseroles, and tinned cannellini beans for chicken. Again, reduce the amount of meat you add and ramp up the beans. They are good for you, and they make you feel full.
4. (Very little) chicken and lentil soup
Fry up some onion in oil with rosemary, sage, parsley, a bay leaf maybe, a bit of chilli if you fancy, or whatever herbs you usually use with chicken. If you want to add veges, do it now, but make them hardy ones like diced potato, celery and carrot because there is a fair bit of boiling to come. Then add a cup of dried brown lentils and a couple of litres of chicken stock. Bring it all to the boil and then add one chicken breast fillet (i.e. half a breast). Just as it is. You can even drop it in there frozen if you want to.
Boil it all up for half an hour. Pull out the chicken breast and slice it up finely. Drop it back into the pot and keep boiling everything for another 10 or 15 minutes until the lentils are nice and mushy to the touch. Serve it up with crusty bread if you have some. Yum. Again, the lentils fill the gap where previously more meat would have gone. They fill you up and they do you good.
5. Stir fries
Instead of chicken or beef in a stir fry, try using a small amount of bacon, which has a nice strong flavour so you don't need to use much of it, maybe just a couple of rashers, but it's your call.
I like to cut up and fry the bacon first so it's crispy and then set it aside. Sautee some garlic, ginger and onions or shallots, then add your veges and some soy sauce. Tinned pineapple pieces are good in there as well. If you want to, once it is all cooked, make a well in the middle and fry up a couple of beaten eggs, then slice through the cooked egg and mix it into the veges. Finally add the bacon and some toasted pine nuts or cashews. See if they don't love it. See? They love it.
Best of luck, I hope you enjoy these ideas.
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