When I first started to consider changing to a natural food vegetarian diet, I had many questions and concerns. So I read ….a lot of books. I asked….a lot of vegetarians. I tried….a lot of recipes and combinations of foods. It was fun and filled with learning to say politely, “no thank you” to people who insisted I would “die” if I didn’t eat meat again.
I also wanted to be able to become good at natural food cooking so I hired a friend who streamlined a weekly course they took and paid them half the price for their knowledge and expertise. One of the areas of cooking and baking centered around substituting natural ingredients for unnatural. Here are some of the things I learned.
- If cooking with honey, maple syrup, sorghum, or molasses as sweeteners, when the recipe calls for white sugar, substitute ½ the liquid sweetener and reduce the liquid contents of the recipe by ¼ to make up for not using solid white sugar.
- Plain yogurt can be substituted for any milk amount called for.
- To thicken soups, broths or aspics, agar-agar, arrowroot or instant tapioca can be used instead of cornstarch.
- For butter or margarine use equal amount of sesame oil, tahini (sesame seed) butter. Remember they have slightly different tastes than dairy.
- For chocolate, substitute carob in equal amounts.
- For “all purpose flour” substitute unbleached wheat may not give you the consistency you are looking for unless you use it half and half with unbleached wheat.
- For hydrogenated fats, shortening and refined oils use cold processed unrefined oils. No palm kernel or cottonseed as these are low quality compared with coconut, safflower, sunflower, etc.
- Commercial peanut butter can be changed to 100% nut betters that are unhydrogenated like sesame, almond, chashew, sunflower and pecan.
