h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

On the eye front, i can do nothing but agree

Over the last six months me and my friends have finally converted a vegetarian, though one place where i had a meal with her, we were trying to get parts of her food (it was tepinyaki) since it was better than our beef, which was hard to do.

My wife was vegetarian since she was a teenager, and was vegan for quite a few years too. If it's good quality food, cooked well, then it doesn't really matter if it has meat in it or not.

But I do love a good steak sandwich. A nice, slow flame grilled thick steak, basted with a nice onion stock/gravy as it cooks. Good, fresh out of the oven bloomer bread, cut on the diagonal and gently toasted on one side (top keep the juices in) buttered slightly with soft slightly salted butter, a layer of crisp (usually iceberg) lettuce mixed with some rocket and watercress, a drizzle of strong horseradish mixed with a good English mustard, the medium rare steak, then some quick fried onion rings.

You can't get a better breakfast

To clarify, onion rings: onion sliced into rings. Not bits of onion coated in batter/breadcrumbs and then deep fried. That'd just be wrong

Don't like onions, in any form really. Do like the flavour they can give to say, minces etc while being cooked, but they having to very finely cut (my mum refers to my wish as "pulverised"...which here new machine does...to extremes) so as not to muck up the texture

Nah my family eats way too much meat to give up. Evidently you can eat good vegetarian meals and go a couple of days without meat, but not a drastic length.
Veganism i must say i am against (not the people, the concept), it seems drastic and in places logically incosistent.
Also dangerous unless you like nuts

Veganism is actually quite healthy if done right. The problem is that you actually have to know about food, and go out of your way to find and cook good food with all the right vitamins, minerals, etc, etc. A normal meat fueled diet you just get given everything, but for a vegan diet you don't.

I reckon that the first meat free ready meal manufacturer that makes sure they get all that stuff into their meals will clean up.

I do think though I might have to buy a steak this weekend.

Veganism is more logically consistent that vegetarianism. If you object to killing.

To eat dairy produce you have to have a cow without a calf, so therefore you have to eat the calf. For chickens you need more hens than cocks,so you have to eat the males.

In terms of safety - you can get enough protein as a vegan without nuts, pulses and vegetables have plenty of protein in.

I've been vegan for eight years and am allergic to tree nuts. I get plenty of protein. It's really not dangerous at all. Especially if you eat whole grains and pulses, they are very complete sources of protein. I'm not lacking in any nutrients- one side benefit of having adopted a vegan diet is that I'm healthier than ever. I still like my starches and guacamole a little too much, so I'm not yet back to my ideal weight, but that would come with a little more effort (and a little less bread ).

I should have mentioned as well that I switched to a vegetarian diet 26 years ago and then carried it to the, to me, logical vegan conclusion eight years ago- I was never much of a cheese eater, and I can easily give baked goods a miss (although I do enjoy baking vegan stuff for other people to eat ). The only holdout was eggs, and as my primary reason for being vegetarian was ethical, in those terms, it's actually worse (for the chickens) to eat eggs than to eat chicken.

Ah, but nice fresh bread...

I really ought to make that steak sandwich this weekend. I can see I'm going to be spending all Sunday in the kitchen.

I just love freshly baked bread. I've been baking some about every other day since it got cool enough to use the oven again. But I eat way too much of it!

*looks around the staff room*

What did you day staffers do to the staff room?

promised husband he could have steak and home made chips for his birthday tea, maybe with some pickled onion or red cabbage.....

It's not uncommon for us to eat meals that contain no meat and sometimes no animal products at all. I did consider going vegetarian with a view to eventually giving veganism a go but as I have no ethical objection to meat eating (as long as it's reasonably local and not factory farmed) it seemed a bit pointless really.

I want a steak sandwich now.

*surveys the hole in the wall*

Sorry.

*had been hypnotized while watching the popcorn rotate inside the microwave the previous evening*

*now revives with a sudden twitch, and looks around, slightly bewildered* My word, there is an hairy elephant in the staff room. And what happened to my popcorn?

Probably outside, i think it was in line with and the wall

I've been cooking my own, since we've not built a nice hot stone oven for steak

I just cooked some on the stove myself.

*passes the popcorn around*

And why am I suddenly hungry for a steak sandwich?