This past week, we featured a really enticing recipe for Lentil and Mushroom Wellington. Essentially, a luxe Vegan Roast. Is this the kind of thing you need to get you to start experimenting with going meat-free? If not, then what WOULD pivot your preference?
The classy, healthy, tasty Lentil and Mushroom Wellington- A ‘classic’ Vegan Roast!
Romy London is a Brit recipe developer and plant-based food advocate. Her latest cookbook features a focus on what she calls ‘vegan roasts’ – the kind of thing that just might entice meat lovers to at least admit the possibility that they could find both substantial and emotional satisfaction in plant-free dishes.
In fact, the flagship recipe in London’s The Ultimate Guide to Vegan Roasts is her ‘famous’ Lentil and Mushroom Wellington. It’s billed as a beef-beater, even in the mouths of devoted meat lovers.
Open Secrets
The so-called secrets to great, flavourful, chewy – totally satisfying vegan and vegetarian meals have been common knowledge for eons in Asia. In India, for example lentils and chickpeas occupy a higher place on the food-preference ladder than potatoes or rice – the starches given primacy in most of the rest of the world.
Why aren’t Western palates embracing the Eastern ‘norm’?
Many folks who are hesitant to try plant-based foods will tell you the plates look too different from what they’re used to. And the idea of eating ‘only vegetables’ is totally foreign to them.
Friendly and familiar…
London’s dish has a friendly and familiar appearance. Even if you take a more than casual glance, it could easily be mistaken from a rich ground beef concoction. Full of brown lentils and mushrooms, and the classic aromatic root veggies, it even smells deep, savoury and chewy – drenched in umami.
But it’s also clinically vegan. An accomplishment even London admits is hard to achieve.
That takes experience in matching and pairing ingredients most of us in the West have little or no experience with. Except, perhaps, from our own tentative, un-schooled, misguided attempts to dip a toe in the plant-based pool.
My take
The time draws nearer, with every passing month, when we’ll all have to segue our diets to plant-based from animal protein.
My questions to you:
Have you seriously tried a vegetarian or vegan ‘main’?
If so, what was your honest opinion?
If you didn’t enjoy it… Why?
What do you think it will take to push you over the line to embracing a daily plant-based diet?
How expensive and unavailable does conventional animal protein have to get before you call it quits?
Muse on that…
~ Maggie J.