Vegan/vegetarian shabbos food

challahchallah

Wed, Apr 25 2018, 12:41 pm

yamz wrote:

I guess you would fall in the tiny minority then. I eat mostly vegetarian myself, and as I said, many of my family members are vegan or vegetarian. Most do not care for faux meats, and certainly not after they have been sitting on the blech for at least an hour. These products do not have the fat content of meat products. They get dried out and overcooked very easily. Everyone I know is perfectly content to eat the side dishes for a meal or two. Obviously I am not suggesting that OP only make one vegetarian dish -- a tossed green salad -- and force her guests to subsist off of a few lettuce leaves and grape tomatoes. I have seen meals where vegans literally had nothing nothing to eat. I also think if you are vegan, you probably shouldn't expect to eat out too many Shabbos meals. You can't expect the average cook to suddenly and completely change their way of cooking just for you. A lacto-ovo vegetarian has more options. Honestly, if you ate challah and dips and then were served potato kugel and roasted vegetables and a hearty salad, would you really walk away hungry? It may or may not be the style of food you might prepare for yourself, but I don't think you would faint from hunger on your way home.

I say all this as someone who goes out of her way to accommodate allergies/food preferences/ lifestyle diets/ food chumras as a host. As a guest, if I accept a meal invitation, I do not expect the hosts to veer from their standard menu at all. It isn't fair to make my hosts stress over the menu just because I eat differently. If I think the food situation will be really suboptimal, I either make sure to eat something before I go, or leave something at home for later.

I really don't think I'm in the tiny minority of people who prefers to have some form of protein with a meal. I agree with you that I don't like faux meat either (I choose not to eat meat, I don't need to pretend that I do). And yes, challah with several dips plus kugel and roasted vegetables and salad could be plenty, particularly if somewhere in there was some protein (for instance, hummus was one of the dips and the salad had nuts or something like that). I wasn't trying to say that you needed to make a tofurkey, just that it's kind to to have some form of protein available.

Of course guests should also not expect hosts to change the whole way they cook, and if the op had been a question by a vegetarian guest I would have certainly suggested pre-eating--dinners out are about the company not the food. I've had many meals out that I couldn't eat much of anything at, and that's certainly no tragedy. But that wasn't the question. This post was by a host asking how to be gracious, and, since she asked, I wanted to let her know that just having, for instance, a green salad with no protein at all is not filling enough for many vegetarians.