I have been a vegetarian since I was 14, so I have never bought meat for myself as an adult. I am 34 now and going on year 2 of being a vegan. My kids are lacto-ovo vegetarians. I would think being a vegetarian or vegan is a lot cheaper than being a meat-eater. I’ve shopped for my parents who are meat-eaters a few times and meat seems very expensive to me. I always think I could buy 2 bags of apples for the price of this! and stuff like that.

I’m also not sure on the time as I haven’t cooked any actual meat in about 20 years…nothing I cook, other than a lot of the baking stuff of course, takes longer than 30 minutes to make/cook. Most of my meals I can get together in around 15 minutes, and that includes the cutting and stuff.

Typical breakfast in my household:
Cereal- honey oats, cornflakes, multi grain flakes with plain or vanilla Soy milk
Fruit- banana, orange
Omelette’s- not often because we buy organic eggs and they are $3 a dozen. Expensive! Brian and the kids have omelette’s around twice a month.

Typical Snack 1 – apples, raisins, crackers, peanuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, homemade muffin

Typical lunch:
Peanut butter & jam sandwiches (grape or strawberry or blackberry)
Rice and seaweed
Green beans or sweet peas
Fruit- apple, peaches, plums, whatever fruit we have in the house.

Typical Snack 2- apple or other fruit, carrots, celery sticks, granola, homemade apple sauce(no added sugar). During the school year I’ll give the kids occasionally Goldfish crackers or fruit roll-ups or potato chips as a snack to take to school.

Typical dinner:
Veggie burger of some kind or fried/sauteed/baked bean curd or bean/legume dish or casserole

If we eat out or get takeout it’s veggie pizza for the kids, and Chinese food or veggie subs for me, stuff like that. We are cutting back on that.

Some kind of pasta or rice or potato

2 kinds of green veggie: broccoli, spinach, peas, green beans, asparagus, mustard greens, etc.

Salad and dressing (we keep it simple, often it’s just lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers, maybe some black olives and onions)

Dessert- yellow cake with chocolate icing is a family favorite, we have cake around 3 times a month. I used to usually I use a mix, but since I went vegan I’m back into making cake from scratch. No egg/no cow’s milk cake is very good, very hard to tell from cake with animal products in it.

Or we have fruit, like mangoes and cantaloupe or pineapple. Anything I have to cut up we usually have for dessert.

Other desserts include ‘mocha-mochas’ which is just hot cocoa with whip cream on top (my kids love this during the winter)and ‘smoothies’, which I make using sherbet and grapefruit soda and a little fruit. We rarely have this because pop makes my children hysterical. In our back yard there is an apple tree which bears very tart green apples, quite ugly (we don’t spray the tree or anything) and very tart to my taste (my boys eat them a lot) but make the best apple sauce. We have apple sauce a lot during the summer for dessert too.

Drinks – Other than soy milk at breakfast we mostly drink water throughout the day, I like herbal tea as well. Generally the only non-water drink my kids have is at dinner because I want to make sure they get enough water throughout the day. During the school year I do give them a juice box in their lunch. At dinner I give them orange, apple, or cranberry juice or iced herbal tea. They like the berry flavors or Celestial Seasonings Red Zinger.

Other drinks for me and my husband include beer, wine, vodka, and margaritas. These are not very expensive because we don’t drink very much, a 6-pack in my house can last for 2 weeks and a bottle of wine for a month. The tequila/margarita mix lasts for around 2 months.

I get most of my fruit and vegetables from the open air market, it’s very cheap. My kids eat a lot of fruit, around 6 pieces each every day. I also bulk shop, and I try to make as much food as I can from scratch. I got real lazy with this but I’m getting back into baking, cooking and freezing food. If I spot something on sale somewhere I try to buy as much of it as I can, for example the Drug Mart near me used to sell big jars of Smuckers Grape Jam for 98 cents! I’d buy at least 5 jars at a time.
Recipes & more tips in my Veggie Mama Book!

This blog entry written by Trula Breckenridge. Thanks for visiting Family Footprint!

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