How to get lots of protein on a vegetarian diet

Last week I met up with a friend of mine who 5 weeks ago gave birth to two beautiful twin boys. She has struggled to breastfeed the boys and the doctor informed her that one of the reasons she has struggled is because she doesn’t have enough protein in her diet. You see she is a vegetarian and that is something that she has always struggled with, in fact during her pregnancy it got so bad that she had to start eating meat just to be able to keep up with providing her body with enough protein to help grow those little boys. 

Now I remember what it was like when Morgan was 5 weeks old, so I can only begin to imagine how hard it must be for her with two, plus as her husband was way things were very stressful. So Chris and I decided that we would go over and give her a hand with the boys and provide a dinner that would help give her the protein she needed without having to compromise her diet.

Thankfully it didn’t take long to decide how to do that because it was a dish that was already on my menu for the week, Southwest Quinoa Salad a double dosage of protein goodness.

Learning new tricks to cook up Tofu-Stir Fry when you are a busy mum

Sorry for the sudden absence. We just moved into our first home here in the UK and things didn’t work out very smoothly for us to get Internet. Plus it was also very difficult to get all that I needed to get done with a small baby. Funny how life has so quickly changed, things take so much longer to get done now. For example I put together an Ikea dresser, pre-baby this would have taken tops an hour, today it took three and a half hours. But no matter how crazy it is with a baby life presses on and it is up to us to find a way to keep going. I will be the first to admit that it has been a lot harder to get back into cooking then I had hoped it would be. So I have had to come up with little tricks to make things easier. One of those tricks is using times during the day that she is napping to do any prep work. For this Tofu Stir-fry I went ahead and prepped my tofu, veggies and even my sauce during the two short nap breaks I got one after lunch and the other one later on in the afternoon. Then when it was time for dinner I was able to just saute it all together. Now if I could just master the trick of getting my daughter to not be fussy at dinner time so I can eat it when it is hot, oh well re-heated dinner is also apart of a mum's life.

Finding meals that will work for people with more restrictive diets

Cooking can be a little more of a challenge when you are cooking for people with more restrictive diets, whether it is someone with an allergy or just personal preference. I have found that during these times I do a lot more research on recipes then I normal because not only do I want to make sure I prepare a dish correctly but I also want it to be just as nice as the meals that I normally prepare. On this particular occasion I was cooking for someone who was a vegan so needed to find a dish that would be filling and enjoyable for the meat eaters as well as something that would be suitable for the vegan. The thing that I have discovered, the more I am faced with evenings like this, is that it is a lot easier of a task then it sounds. For a long time the idea of preparing a dish for a vegetarian, a vegan or anyone with a food allergy sounded like a very stressful event, but through careful research I have discovered that it really is easier then I thought. There are tons of meatless dishes that my family enjoys and often times it only takes small tweaks to recipes that you already have to make a dish appropriate for those with restrictive diets. If you have a dish that you really enjoy that contains ingredients that people either can't eat or won't, a quick Google search on ingredient substitutions and more often then not you will find others who have been faced with a similar situation who have wonderful ideas for you to try.