If you are tired of eating meat at every meal or have decided to change your eating habits for health or environmental reasons, then you may be interested in learning all there is to know about vegetarian cooking recipes. Vegetarian cooking recipes often replace meat with some kind of meat substitute. Perhaps the best known of these meat substitutes is tofu. Tofu is made from soybeans and while it in and of itself does not have much taste, the reason it is used so much in vegetarian cooking recipes is that it takes on the flavors very well of whatever it is cooked with, and it provides a good, low-fat and healthy source of protein from soy beans.

Other things that are commonly used in vegetarian cooking recipes are other meat substitute products such as seitan or tempeh. Tempeh is fermented soy beans, while seitan come from wheat. Both have a unique flavor that can add a lot to sandwiches, stir fries, and casseroles.

Many other vegetarian cooking recipes rely heavily on beans as their main source of protein and as something of a meat substitute. Often vegetarian cooking recipes that rely heavily on beans are very filling in their own right, so that you hardly notice the absence of the meat. If you are using a vegetarian cooking recipe that calls for beans, make sure that you realize that dried beans can take quite a bit of time to cook. Allow at least a couple of hours, depending on the bean, before you will need to use it in your vegetarian cooking recipe. If you soak the beans the night or day before, or quick soak them ahead of time, then you can greatly reduce the amount of time that you will need to cook your beans to the appropriate level of tenderness.

Vegetarian cooking recipes can be very tasty and also healthful. Vegetarian cooking recipes are also good for the environment because it is more efficient to just grow grains to feed to humans than it is to grow grain to feed to animals to feed to humans.