I need crowdsourcing.

It won’t happen until late this year after I’ve eaten my way through New York, Austin, St. Louis, and Chicago one last time but I plan on making a trial run at being a vegetarian. It won’t be because of health or ethical reasons. It will be because I’d like to find out if, and how long, I can go without slapping a ribeye on the grill or frying up a half-pound of bacon. Mmm, bacon. I almost talked myself out of this.

The delay will also give me time to eat the almost 5 lbs of Wagyu beef I have in the freezer (Thank you Allan and Alison), collect recipes so I don’t get stumped at mealtime, and stock up on things I don’t normally keep in the pantry. (I only drive out of Charleston on I-26 if I’m going to Kentucky but a trip to H&L might be necessary.) There also may be some appliances that would make my vegetarian life easier such as a food processor or blender. I might even look at rice cookers, although I’m not sure why. Rice is easy to cook in a saucepan but many of my friends own cookers and love them. And since Charlestonians eat so much rice, cookers are available in many stores

Before you can ask, I won’t be going vegan. I can’t image life without yogurt, milk, butter, cheese, and the occasional egg. I can’t imagine life without bacon, either, but I’ll deal with the cravings when they happen. And I won’t be doing this hoping I get a book or movie deal out of it. Julie Powell got lucky. Only half of Julie and Julia was worth watching and it wasn’t the Julie half.

Now comes the part where I need your help. I need recipes. The only purely vegetarian cookbooks I own are Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and Diane Kochilas’s The Greek Vegetarian. A nice start but I know that there are other options, particularly ethnic ones. And searching Google for vegetarian recipes returned almost 8 million hits. At 62 I don’t have enough years left to check all of those out. Whether you are a vegetarian or not, if you have favorite meatless recipes I’d love it if you would share them with me. You can email me at notoriouslynice at gmail dot com or send me a message on Facebook (I’m Mike Courtney there.) I won’t promise that I’ll use them, but I’ll try my best. Crockpot recipes would be great since I actually own one of those.

To make things easier here are the foods I don’t like and those I love. I hate beets. No further discussion. I’m not fond of cucumbers but will eat them in small doses. The same goes for cilantro. There’s a fine line between just enough and too damn much.

Other than those, I love just about everything. I love rice, beans, and noodles of all sorts. I figure those, alone, make a great base for many recipes. I don’t need help with breakfast - oatmeal, fruit, and yogurt have that covered.

Because sometimes I don’t feel like cooking I’d also like to hear about Charleston restaurants that have a good selection of vegetarian choices on their menus. Especially those West of the  Ashley. I’m not going to go all OCD so if I’m on a date or dining with family and my only menu choice is to eat meat or the side salad, I’ll eat the meat but I hope it doesn’t come to that.

I’m a recluse and have almost as few virtual friends as real ones so I’d appreciate it you would pass my plea on to your friends who love to cook. Tell them I’m notoriously nice and would be a good online friend. :-)

Comments

[Margaret]

We are a fan of vegetarian chili and cornbread, lots of different beans, corn, tomato sauce, spices, etc...Ashley makes a fantastic potato/cheese/onion casserole which is total comfort food. If she has time, I'll get some recipes from her, although she is a foodie type and doesn't really use actual recipes. Vegan is awful--I'm so glad that Ashley is back to being vegetarian. If you're ever in Seattle, I'll take you to Cafe Flora on Capitol Hill, one of the best vegetarian restaurants around. :)

[Pam]

Since I moved into the Airstream, I've become mostly a 'social' meat eater - I don't like cooking meat inside the Airstream, and while I grill out tons of vegetables, I just don't think of grilling out meat (I've only done so about a handful of times since I moved in). I'll have to think about recipes to send on - a favorite (and simple) combination is brown rice and lentils (which make a complete protein combo) and then roasted vegetables (brocolli, carrots, cauliflower, bell peppers, onions, etc). My biggest challenge is to be sure that I get enough protein - it always makes me feel better. Alluette's Cafe and Five Loaves have good vegetarian options... italian places are usually good options too.

[imabug]

None in WA come to mind, but there's Black Bean Co on Cannon St downtown and another location on Folly opening soon.

[Carly]

A couple of my favorite vegetarian/vegan blogs are: http://www.dailygarnish.com/ and http://peasandthankyou.com/. Lots of family/baby stuff thrown in though too. But the Recipe Pages should have good stuff.