INTRODUCTION "It's not easy being green." I bet Kermit didn't know he was speaking on behalf of vegetarians everywhere, but he was. People are much more aware today than they were even ten years ago about vegetarian and veganism--so it all seems a lot less weird to most people. But it's still a way of eating that takes time and energy, and the willingness to educate yourself about nutrition and, sometimes, to stick up for your choices. It can feel like a lot of work. So we developed the recipes in this book to help you keep your food low-stress, delicious, and fun. Our goal was to focus on leaving out the meat without leaving out the taste, and after several rounds of recipe testing, our guinea pigs--most of whom were not vegetarians--just kept coming back for more. Come to think of it, it's not so easy just plain feeding yourself. Even if you cooked before you left home, like we did, cooking onyour own is going to be different than what you're probably used to. Believe us. As sisters,we started learning to cook in our family kitchen when we were kids. And then we went off to college. And graduate school. We learned quickly what it's like to cook on a hot plate with one busted pot, after having scrounged for grocery money under the couch cushions. Okay, slight exaggeration, but we definitely found that having less equipment, fewer dishes, and way less money to spend on food affects the way you cook and the kinds of things you cook. That's one of the reasons we wrote this book. We also wrote it because we noticed how easy it is for students who don't have much money or confidence in the kitchen to get into really boring and not-so-healthy patterns of eating--even vegetarians (ramen, anyone?). The good news is that, since you're one of more than twelve million Americans who don't eat meat, you have a ton of cheap, tasty, healthy options, from good old cheese and pasta to soymilk to "superfoods" like broccoli and quinoa. (What's quinoa? Glad you asked! Check out pages 51 and 128.) Vegetarian cooking is no harder to learn or do than any other kind of cooking, and even beginners can whip out veggie comfort food (real mac and cheese), fast food (pizza, wraps), simple food (stir-fries), impressive food (fondue!), and decadent food (mmmm, dessert . . .) with just a little direction. So this book aims to set you up with the basic skills and knowledge you'll need to get started, and to help you stay out of the baked potato rut (because seriously, who doesn't love a good spud, but not every day, okay?). If you know nothing about cooking, we'll teach you something. If you have some kitchen chops and some favorite dishes, we'll share more with you. The first pages of the book have an overview of the ingredients and equipment we feel are essential to setting up a rudimentary vegetarian kitchen, and some of the basic skills and techniques you'll need there (cooking rice and pasta, for example). This is a good place to start if in the past you've mostly thought of the kitchen as the place where the frozen fudge pops are stored. Helpful shopping, prepping, cooking, and storing advice (and also some fun trivia) is scattered throughout the book in headnotes and sidebars. Because we know the likelihood of you sitting down to dinner at six o'clock every night is practically nonexistent, we categorized the recipes a little differently than in most cookbooks, which tend to group things by ingredient (beans, vegetables) or course (soup, salad). If you would have trouble making something suitable for yourself, let alone for other people, there's Survival Cooking: recipes that are very simple and won't strain your cooking abilities the first time out. When money is particularly tight, check out the Cheap Eats chapter, where you'll find great dishes that are very budget friendly (though really, nearly every recipe is written with economy in mind). For those weeks when you've overindulged, check out Excerpted from College Vegetarian Cooking: Feed Yourself and Your Friends by Megan Carle, Jill Carle All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
