When people ask what the most important meal of the day is, the majority of people will often say “breakfast.” After all, it is the first meal of the day, right?

While this is absolutely true for most people, and a good breakfast can really set the tone of a day, there is another meal that has just as much of an impact, if not more, on how your day can end up being. This meal is dinner.

Dinners tend to be one of the largest meals of the day, making it a major source of where you get your nutrients from. For many families, dinners are also a time where people can sit down and talk with each other over a delicious meal. This makes dinnertime an incredibly important meal of your day. However, if you have recently switched your diet to a vegan one, you might feel at a loss as to what your options are for dinner.

For new vegans, there doesn’t feel like there are a lot of options for dinners. There are veggie burgers and a variety of vegetable stews, but these can get quite tiresome after a while. Thankfully, there are a number of different vegan-friendly meals that you can make for yourself and your family.

In fact, some of these meals make any family dinner into something several times better. There are vegan dinner recipes for just about any occasion, whether you are looking for a creamy mushroom stroganoff or you have an abundance of eggplants that you need to do something with. With as many different choices as there are, you will surely be able to find a meal that suits your tastes.

Starting Out with a Vegan Stroganoff

Millions of people all around the world love a good stroganoff meal. From the variety of flavors to choose from to the number of different toppings and additions that you can make to create the perfect plate of stroganoff, this versatile meal can be made to suit just about any taste palate. This includes people who adhere to a vegan diet.

A good vegan mushroom stroganoff can be made without many substitutions, making it an easy recipe for beginners as well. The main two foods that you are going to need to substitute are going to be the butter and the stock that gives the stroganoff the bulk of its flavor. For this, you can substitute the butter for any version of nut butters or even simple vegan butter.

Using cashew butter is recommended, which adds to the hearty, creaminess of the sauce for the stroganoff. To replace the sour cream that most stroganoff uses, you can also add nutritional yeast and lemon juice to the cashew butter to create a suitable alternative.

For the stock, there are a variety of beef-flavored vegan-friendly stocks to choose from. It is easier to find them online than in stores, but some stores do carry them so that you can see them for yourself. If you do not want to use something that is beef-flavored, you can also consider using vegetable broth, but the flavor will not be as strong.

Traditionally, stroganoff is served over egg noodles. As this isn’t acceptable for vegan diets, you can consider using gluten-free noodles that have a similar shape. Rotini noodles are also used, as their shape mixes well with the sauce and buries into the crevices to make for good flavor with each bite you take. As for the seasonings, you can use a variety of them to create the flavor you want. Commonly, people will use dried thyme leaves, salt, black pepper, onion, and garlic to create a well-rounded stroganoff.

Consider a Vegan Moussaka

Another meal that you can consider making is a moussaka. This is a relatively easy meal that you can turn vegan with the right ingredients. Moussaka is a dish that originated in the middle eastern portion of the world, although the most well-known version has been attributed to Greece.

This dish is based on eggplants or potatoes, meaning that you won’t have to substitute many of the major ingredients, which is something important to look for in vegan meals.

To create a vegan moussaka, the biggest substitution you will need to make is using tofu for the minced portion of the dish rather than meats. Aside from that, you will generally need to stick to the dairy-free milks and you will have the perfect dinner. These dishes are creamy, heavy, and layered, making them an excellent addition to any family gathering.

Adding a Vegan Chorizo

If you are looking for a vegan-friendly dinner that is high in protein, you should look no further than vegan chorizo. As the name may suggest, chorizo stems from the type of sausage with the same name.

However, since this is a vegan-friendly dish, there will be no sausage in this dish. Instead, a variety of ingredients will be used to recreate this tasty and flavorful dish into something that anyone can eat. For this dish, you are going to want to invest in sundried tomatoes, tomato paste, low-sodium vegetable broth, onions, and several other ingredients to create the “meat” of the dish.

What really ties everything together is an ingredient that is known as TVP. TVP stands for Textured Vegetable Protein, which will allow you to create foods ranging from meatballs to chorizo without relying on the use of meats or tofu. By using this ingredient, you will be able to recreate a food that is loved throughout the world without having to give a second thought to whether or not any animals went into the dish.

What Are Some Vegan Eggplant Recipes?

Finally, if you still have some remaining eggplant from the moussaka, you may not know what to do with it. When it comes to vegan recipes, eggplants are a wonderful vegetable to use. They have a unique flavor and texture that makes them a perfect substitution or addition to most dinner dishes.

In fact, there are plenty of vegan eggplant recipes out there for you to rely on because of this. These recipes can be used to create brand-new vegan-friendly dinners, or you can use the scraps of eggplants of previous meals to create dips for snacks. You might be surprised at just how versatile eggplant can really be.

Many people enjoy using eggplant in casseroles, although these will require plenty of other vegetables. Other recipes that you can consider making with eggplant include recipes that are as simple as turning your leftover eggplants into meatballs for you to add as a topping to any pasta dish.

If you really want a simple dish that makes use of eggplants, you can consider simply stuffing the eggplants with rice, spices, and a few other vegetables. This is a quick and easy way to turn leftover eggplant into something new and something that is just as good as the previous recipes that relied on eggplants.

With a good list of eggplant recipes, you can rest assured knowing that you will not be able to run out of uses for your eggplants and that you will have the knowledge needed to create enough eggplant dishes for any family gathering.