Non-meat Protein Sources

If you can have dairy, eggs and cheese and other milk products.

And, of course, beans. In combination with rice, pretty complete. :D

So many soya based products are widely available now and take on all the flavours you give them(as they have none of their own.) Quorn is a great substitute. TVP (Textured vegetable protein) can substitute or be an add to. A wee bit of steak mince and a handfull of TVP can make a great spag boll. Never tried it completely on it's own though.
Why not try Humus or Falafel Chick peas are nutritious. Wrapped in some flat bread or tortilla with a greek salad
Have you tried googling protien substitutes for meat? I'm sure there will be something interesting
Good luck. ..I'll count my blessings that i can still eat anything

Sorry, sometimes i forget about the great differences we have culinary-wise either side of the Atlantic.
Steak mince is very lean ground beef and spag boll is a shortened version of spaghetti bollognese.

I thought the same about quorn till i tried it. I use it in some highly spiced Indian vegetarian menu items, and I'd defy anyone to think it wasnt chicken.
You can buy deep-fried bean curd at your chinese supermarket... Lovely stuff if you slice it and add it to a veggie stir fry...Has no flavour, but it soaks up what you give it and its an added texture.
Always worth a try

My dad and step mom are vegetarians. You would be surprised at how the non-meat products have gotten. Try MorningFarms breakfast sausage links, not the real thing, but very lean and actually quite good. I'll think of more...

Split pea soup
Indian mansoor dal sauce with rice or flat bread
is seafood out of the question? I could go crazy with that.

Shel, it's really not very hard. What you merely have to remember is that, with two exceptions, neither grains nor legumes provide complete proteins.

In combination, however, they provide the balanced amino acids found in animal proteins. So, at each meal, you make a legume/grain combination. Beans & rice is certainly once such mix. Use your imagination to come up with others. Or just pick up a good vegetarian cookbook.

The exceptions, btw, are quinoa and soy beans, both of which supply complete proteins.

True, but even with quinoa or soy beans, you want to vary your protein sources. That's not hard to do, and in fact hard not to do. Most of us eat more protein than we need, and that includes vegetarians.

Barley is a nice inclusion, as is greek style yoghurt. Great substitute for sour cream.

Made a really nice green split pea soup here last night for our main meal, with lots of crusty bread, thickened the soup with rice instead of cornflour (not that it really needed it!) bit of cumin, ginger, was nice - made excess to freeze.

back in the 60s i think, the book "diet for a small planet" was published, which was one of the first that really tried to scientifically come up with good plant protein sources that could be used by the human body.l My daughter stopped eating meat about 15 years ago, and while she lived at home,a nd when she visits, i have to cook for her,and i got "laurel's Kitchen" whicgh is an even better book from the scientific point of view. The point of these books is that humans can't use the protein from vegetables as they are because they are not the complete molecule strands that we need and we don't have the digestive systems to make them up (like cows, for instance). However, if you eat combinations of semi-proteins from vegetable sources, in the same meal, you will digest fully useable protein.
so
legumes and grains (pasta and fagioli, pasta and ceci (chickpeas), lentils and rice, rice and peas, lentils and bread, or any combination of those - grains being wheat, barley, rice, corn, etc)
grains and seeds (bread with sesame, hummus (chickpeas with sesame paste), falafel (same), etc
grains or legumes with milk or egg (pasta with grated cheese, bread and cheese, polenta with cheese, or basicallyany dish with a small amount of milk product or egg, mixed with a large quantity of grain or legume) (Of ncourse milk and egg are already fully usable protein but you don't need as much)
Naturally, insofar as you can, use whole grains for more protein.

also other vegetables have a discreet amount of protein which, in combination with other foods, gives you the complete protein of meat. (pasta with broccoli, for instance) Anyway, if you're not actually still growing you don't need all that much protein.

Fortunately, since most people were too poor to eat meat for most of history, peasant food of all countries is full of plenty of great recipes. Mostlty i know the italian versions, since i live here. I can give you plenty of recipes, just ask.
PLEASE DON'T BUY THAT AWFUL FAKE MEAT - it doesn't taste like meat anyway, and has a creepy texture and is basically an industrial product.

You'd be surprised how full you feel after a nice dish of pasta and fagioli.

I've made a delicious fresh pea soup, with pureed fresh peas. I don't know the protein content of fresh peas, but since they are a legume, I imagine they're a pretty good source (?) Maybe someone can inform me on this, since I couldn't find that info.

In Mexico:
- gusanos de maguey (maguey worms)



- escamoles (larvae of ants of the genus Liometopum)

I don't have kidney problems or gout, so I will continue to enjoy green peas :D

Those gusanos look really yummy um . . . .

One item you may want to experiment with are soba noodles, sort of a Japanese buckwheat pasta. Gee, I should know this, I think ubon, udon, ?? noodles are a wider, flat version of soba.

Cold in salads, or alone with a dash of hot sauce, garnished with diced green onions, or hot in various soups, or a quick stir fry with onion slivers, bell pepper, garlic, or maybe leek rings, tofu and peanuts, or a little Thai curry, lemon grass and snow peas, or ....

mjb.