I need to eat more vegetables. I grew tired of raw, boiled, or grilled, so I started thinking of different ways to get my veggies. I thought, "I wish there was a way to make vegetables the main meal, other than salad." Then it occurred to me: vegans eat a lot of vegetables, maybe they have some recipes that would be tasty.
I started with sandwiches. We have a microwave at work, but it's often busy and having a ready-to-eat lunch is handy. I like hummus plus veggies on pita as much as the next girl, but surely there were more sandwich options than that. I found a recipe for Chunky Bean Spread Sandwiches and it looked interesting, so I tried it. The consistency was a little off, and it looked disturbingly like ham salad, but it was quite tasty after spending the night in the fridge.
Motivated by this success, I bought a vegan cookbook that I heard about on a podcast a few months ago: Appetite for Reduction by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. Mostly I've been trying the non-lunch recipes and taking the leftovers to work. This doesn't help with the ready-to-eat lunches, but leftovers are an okay lunch if it means I'm eating more veggies for dinner, too!
One of the things I hated, when I was a vegetarian, was the fake-meat or fake-food trap some recipes have. Tofu and portobella mushrooms are tasty, but they are not a burger. Just let the tofu and mushrooms shine and don't make them stand-in for something else. And don't get me started on vegan mayonaise.
The book does have a whole section on tofu as a meat stand-in, but there are enough other recipes to keep me occupied. Two that I've tried and like are the 40-Clove Chickpeas and Broccoli and Curried Chickpeas and Greens. As you may guess, many of the main course recipes also include beans for a protein. So, it's not the veggie extravaganza I expected, but beans are good, so I'm going to roll with it.
I don't think I'll stop eating meat any time soon, but vegan recipes are an easy way for me to get more veggies in my diet. And who doesn't need that?