What to serve a vegetarian at Christmas

This blog post is about what to serve a vegetarian at Christmas. I’ve been a vegetarian all my adult life, and someone asked me about a vegetarian Christmas dinner, so I thought I would blog about it here.

This is actually my first blog post after a six month hiatus here on the blog, and this marks both my return to blogging here, and also missing the wonderful food and drink I devoured at Christmas!

 

First let’s start with the Christmas meal for vegetarians.

Many people believe vegetarians love nut roast meals and pasta at Christmas, yet I’ve never known one that did! A nut roast as far as I can tell is a 1970s throwback, and the pasta is just an easy meal for restaurants to make.

Most people turned vegetarian later in life, and not because they hate the taste of meat. Think of it akin to a vampire giving up blood, but still liking the taste! So rather than telling a vegetarian about some exotic Christmas meal you are going to make them, ask if they like a roast meal, but with a meat replacement, and you might find they do. If they don’t like a roast meal, then there are plenty of other vegetarian friendly meals you can make.

 

So let’s look at what I ate for my vegetarian Christmas meal 2012.

• Roast potatoes
• Cauliflower cheese
• Sprouts
• Peas
• Gravy
• Roast parsnips
• Stuffing
• Gammon meat replacement made by Redwood (purchased Holland & Barrett in UK)

How much extra effort was there involved? Basically I shared everything the meat eaters in the family ate, other than the meat replacement. They had turkey and my wonderful girlfriend and I, ate the gammon meat replacement this year. So I enjoyed a vegetarian roast meal on Christmas day.

It was obviously important that the rest of the items were made in a vegetarian friendly way. So for example the cheese and stuffing packages were checked to make sure they are vegetarian or vegan friendly, which many high quality items are, and people just don’t realise.

 

The starter.

I’ve enjoyed many different vegetarian starters over the years. For the Christmas day in 2012 it was a quarter of a melon.

 

The cheeseboard.

I enjoy a dessert, and often cheese and crackers after a Christmas meal, usually with a lengthy break in-between to digest it all! So like the cauliflower cheese, it is just a case of checking the packaging on the cheeses and crackers. Years back it was a nightmare, whilst these days, many quality items are suitable for vegetarians.

 

Vegetarian beer and wine.

I like a drop of red and white wine at Christmas, and for a few years now I’ve stopped eating eggs. Now this doesn’t make me a vegan, but it does put my drinking requirements beyond vegetarian now. For example the production of some wines include eggs or fish extract etc.

So it is important that the wine or beer is suitable for vegetarians, and in my case vegans. Did this stop me drinking mainstream wines and beers? Nope! With a bit of research we found the local supermarkets have a good selection, and I enjoyed some incredible wine and beer over Christmas!

 

Conclusion

Cooking a Christmas meal for a vegetarian hardly requires any extra effort, once you realise it is mainly about checking packaging. Most people don’t cook their potatoes with lard these days, and with shops such as Holland and Barrett in the UK, picking up a meat free replacement is easy.

 

Read more of my blog posts

There already is a great selection of vegetarian food recipes on this blog, if you are interesting in vegetarian cooking in general. Plus I am going to blog more about vegetarian roast meals in the future. If you want to follow the blog, I recommend you either follow me on Twitter *removed* to be notified of new blog posts, else paste my website url into ‘Google Reader’.