When approached by a situation that involves cooking for a vegan, even professional cooks can have problems in deciding exactly what to cook for the main dish and side dishes that make up a proper dinner. The following are a few helpful rules to aid you in the process of devisinbg menus for your vegan guests:

What is a Vegan? There is much confusion between vegan and vegetarianism – they are not the same. While a vegetarian often avoids all meat products, vegans avoid all meat and fish AND any associated by-products as well. Meat by-products include dairy, eggs, and even honey. Any item that comes from animals should be avoided when creating a vegan meal.

Advanced Planning Whether fixing one dinner or one dozen, fixing meals for vegans involves strategic planning. It is critical for each meal to be full of flavour and nutritionally correct, which often presents difficulties for the cook who is accustomed to using non-vegan ingredients in dishes. The meal or meals should be planned out completely in advance, considering the best way to to include iron, protein, fiber, and taste to the vegan dinner.

Advanced planning is less complicated if you can find a specialist online recipe collection with a collection of vegan recipes. Even so, you must check each of these recipes item by item before utilizing them. Some recipes labelled as vegan are actually not even close. Sadly, some folk have completely different views of what ‘vegan’ really means. All The Same, if you make an effort many of these vegan recipes are very tasty and highly nutritious. Some may require special ingredients, but once again, the internet can be a great help in tracking these down. You may actually locate online sellers of vegan food ingredients, which, as they are normally ‘experts’ in the being vegan, can even be able to provide advice on substitute ingredients for your vegan cooking.

Don’t Equate ‘Vegan’ with ‘Boring’ In vegan cooking, it is all too easy to produce unexciting meals that seem similar to each other. This is not necessary. In Point Of Fact, vegan meals can be as exciting those prepared for carnivorous cooking. With the large number of TVP style alternatives to dairy and meat dishes, you can use substitutions for foods from fish to pork, which really helps to introduce plenty of of flavor and diversity to the meal.

Don’t Make Dangerous Assumptions As the main cook for a vegan dinner party, your main task is to be perfectly sure you are honoring your diners’ beliefs. It would be all too simple, as well as a lot quicker, to simply accept that all non-meat items are vegan-friendly and cook a recipe accordingly. However, a thoughtful cook will take the time to read through the ingredient lists of all bought items needed for the recipe in order to be absolutely certain the food is OK for vegans. You will find some surprising places that anmial products and assocaited by-products appear, for example:

* Processed Sugar: Around half of the sugar producing factories in the USA use animal-based carbon to process the sugar. As a result, quite a few vegans won’t eat refined sugar. * Gelatin: Most cooks do not realize that gelatin is made from meat or fish. * Vegetable Soups: Some vegetable soups are made with chicken or beef stock. * Pastries: Often contain refinde sugar (see above), egg, milk and sometimes lard.. * Worcestershire Sauce: This tasty sauce is made with anchovies, though vegetarian alternatives are available.

Honoring these tips, anyone can produce a dinner party that is suitable for meat-eaters and non-meat-eaters as well, and your vegan friends will no doubt thank you for your consideration. Roger is a keen amateur chef who offers nutritionary support and food articles for Recipes 4U (http://www.recipes-4u.co.uk), one of the most extensive free recipe collections on the internet. Recipes 4U has over 40,000 recipes with specialist recipe sections for vegetarian recipes, pork recipes and seafood recipes.

Roger Wakefield is a staff writer at: DRU Gas Fires, (http://www.drugasar.co.uk), a manufacturer of modern high efficiency gas fires.