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In this article you will find simple vegan dinner recipes for beginners, aka easy vegan recipes for beginners no tofu! (Not that tofu is gross, I love it and so do my girls who have been eating it since babies, but it can be an acquired taste.)
Have you ever wanted to have a vegan diet, but didn’t know what type of meals you could eat? You just wanted an easy vegan simple recipe for healthy eating.
Well, I’ve been there, too! Vegan meals may seem intimidating to make at first, but they’re really not that difficult to make, I promise.
It’s not easy to change what you eat. And, when it comes to making sure you are getting enough of the right vitamins and minerals; that’s even trickier.
It takes time, persistence, and discipline to change your diet.
But, I’m going to help you out since I’ve already been through the struggle and don’t want to see you having to struggle, too!
Keep reading to find the 7 best quick and easy vegan meals! (In mine and my girls opinion, that is, mother and child approved! YAY!!) Because sometimes when you search for vegan meals, they don’t always look the yummiest.
If you’re looking for more healthy & delicious vegan meals & snacks, be sure to my email list to be the first to know when I publish new recipes! Sign up HERE and get a FREE Mini Ecookbook!!
Why I Know You Need Quick and Simple Vegan Recipes as a Beginner
My goal with you reading this is to help you find delicious looking, and delicious tasting meals that the whole family will love!!
I have been trying to change my diet towards a healthier vegan diet, or plant based, for over 5 years. So, I’m not going to tell you it’ll be easy, but hey everyone is different, so it might be for you!
Since I’ve started my journey, I have taken a nutrition course and sociology of food course in college, watched quite a few documentaries on the subject, been given half a dozen vegan cookbooks, and have been a little obsessed with eating healthier.
I may have had a little advantage over others when trying to cut all animal products out of my consumption; I’ve been a vegetarian since I was a kid. Not because I was made to or told to. It was my own decision, and I’ve kept it up for 20 years.
This vegan thing becomes even trickier when you have a family to feed, and when not everyone is willing or wanting to change their diet. But, if you’re the one who cooks, they don’t really have much of a choice, plus it’s better for them. The best tip I can give you for feeding a family that isn’t used to ‘vegan’ meals is to start with vegetarian meals and then start swapping out some of the ingredients to make them vegan.
Or, better yet, find some new ‘vegan’ meals everyone loves.
Kids may not care so much, unless you’ve already introduced them to cheese and they go without cheese for quite some time. (My 5 year old is like that.) Do you have any idea how addictive cheese is; it’s ridiculous how addictive it is. If you’re not already vegan, try cutting cheese, or better yet dairy, from your diet for a week. Let me know how it goes!
Finding the right meals for your family could take some experimenting.
It’ll take some time and patience; and, I’m going to tell you right now that you may not even like everything you cook.
But, it doesn’t mean you should give up. It’s good to try new foods and introduce new things into you diet. Especially when it’s new fruits or veggies, beans or rice, or maybe even tofu!The first like 10 times I tried making tofu, I hated it. About 6 months ago, I found a recipe I love, and now I eat it every week!
Whenever we try new things in my home, my 5 year old reminds us all of the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood episode when they try new foods. Then, she’s ok with trying it.
But, to get to what you came here for, here’s 7 Easy Vegan Simple Recipes for Healthy Eating and beginners (and just so you know, they aren’t in any particular order; they’re all awesome). These recipes are also family friendly and won’t make you hate eating healthy! Many of them are pretty quick to make, too. And, we all know how valuable our time is.
So, I might be a little biased with this recipe. I created this burrito recipe on a whim with inspiration from Moe’s (Southwest Grill). I only ate from the restaurant once, but I loved the food I had from there! So, I had to try to recreate what I had. And, after my family moved from the east coast to the west coast of the U.S., this restaurant is no where to be found.
Plus, this mealcontains complete protein (with the beans and rice combined), which is what most non-vegans complain about vegans not having enough of. Even my nutrition professor from when I was in college said to make sure you combine food together like this to get complete protein. What most non-vegans don’t understand though, is that there is protein in more than just meat and dairy products!
Click here to check out the recipe!
2. Easy Quinoa with Veggies
If you have never had quinoa before, this is a must try!
Quinoa boasts about being a complete protein all by itself. I know some people who have tried quinoa and didn’t like it, but I’m pretty sure the only way that can happen is if it’s completely plain.
This quinoa stewhowever, is anything but plain! It’s super simple to make! And, it’s filling! My husband even loves this recipe, and he’s not a vegan (and doesn’t appreciate that I try to make healthy food).
3. Pasta Salad
My first time ever making pasta salad was about two years ago. I don’t even know if I’d had it before then. I didn’t follow a recipe or anything like that. But, I wanted pasta salad. So, I made it.
I cooked some rotini pasta. Mixed together some fruits and veggies, a little olive oil and a little lemon juice. Then cooled the pasta and mixed it in. My husband even liked it; it was that good. And, if you haven’t read any of my other articles, one thing you should know is that getting my husband to like something, or even try something, I make isvery difficult. Check out the recipe here!
For even MORE Meal and Snack ideas, be sure to subscribe to receive Stress Less Be Healthy Newsletters and get access to over 100 healthy meal and snack ideas in a single PDF!! Sign up HERE!!
4. Avocado Tomato Sandwich
This is my alternative to a grilled cheese!
Whenever I crave a grilled cheese, I make one of these instead! It’s super simple and can be made in about 5 minutes or less. 2 pieces of toast, half an avocado to spread on both pieces of bread, 1 tomato thinly sliced, and some garlic and sea salt. Put it together, and it doesn’t even compare to a grilled cheese anymore; it is so much better, plus healthier!
My girls (2 and 5 years old) will eat these, as well. Sometimes my younger daughter will just pick the avocado and tomatoes out and eat those and leave the bread. But, she’ll also eat half an avocado plain and ignore a cookie on her tray, too. I’ve even tested this theory! Find the Recipe here
5. Minestrone Soup
If you’re trying to add more veggies into your diet but don’t know how; try this simple soup. You pretty much just add in any veggie you want, somepasta, beans, veggie stock orbullion cube and a few other items; it’s done when it’s warmand the pasta is soft.
It’s usually only myself and older daughter who eats this when made, so I usually cut all the veggies up for a full recipe and freeze half of them. Or, I make a full recipe of this soup and freeze half of the soup for a week, for sometime in the future. This soup usually lasts all week, or at least 5 days, with half the recipe.
For even MORE Meal and Snack ideas, be sure to subscribe to receive Stress Less Be Healthy Newsletters and get access to over 100 healthy meal and snack ideas in a single PDF!! Sign up HERE!!
6. Vegan Pizza
How can you go wrong with pizza?!
It’s a favorite in many households and there are so many different ways to make it. I know, one of the main ingredients to pizza is cheese. But, guess what. I replaced the cheese on my pizza with nutritional yeast (yay! now it’s vegan and full of the nutrients I need! Hello vitamin B12!) and it doesn’t taste too bad, either!
Actually, the only difference I really tasted was that there’s not as much grease. With adding veggies as toppings, it also gives you more nutrients than the regular cheese pizza that I used to crave. You could make it even better for you and add some beans on top. Maybe next time. I’m currently eating what you see in the picture below, and it is delicious!
(My 5 year old helped make it, she put the toppings on the left side.)
7. Vegan Mac and Cheese
This may bethe last meal listed, but that does not mean that it’s not the best!
This mac and cheese is one of the reasons it has been possible for me to stay vegan; I can still eat the comfort foods I grew up with, just with different ingredients.
This recipe was not the first vegan mac and cheese recipe I have tried. I’ve tried so many different mac & cheese recipes over the years, some that required tofu or squash in it, and they just didn’t taste like something I could enjoy, long term.
Then I created this super simple vegan mac & cheese recipe, that’s literally two ingredients. It was soo good, Iimmediately placed it on my meal list (the listI use when coming up with meal plans).
Check out these posts Quick & Simple Vegan Recipes for Beginners and Busy People (AKA Parents).
- 12 deliciously healthy kid friendly breakfast recipes for easy school mornings
- 12 Healthy Vegan School Lunch Ideas
- 11 Family Friendly Quick and Easy Vegan dinner recipes for Hectic Weeknights
- 22 Mouth Watering No Guilt Vegan Desserts Recipes
- 55 Easy Vegan Kid Meals (For When You’re Too Tired to Cook!)
(And, no, you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy the recipes in those posts; I simply find meals designed for kids are more appealing to us adults, as well!)
If you’re looking for more healthy & delicious vegan meals & snacks, be sure to my email list to be the first to know when I publish new recipes! Sign up HERE and get a FREE Mini Ecookbook!!
I hope this list of the 7 awesome meals for beginner vegans has inspired you to love the food you make and eat.
And, hopefully you have at least one new recipe to try and love, no matter which recipe it is!
All of these are some of my favorites, and like I said, I even got my husband to eat some.
So, good luck on your journey to becoming vegan or enjoying a vegan lifestyle the healthy way!
If you didn’t notice, one thing all these recipes had in common (other than being vegan) was that all contained 2 or more fruits and veggies in them! With the Standard American Diet (SAD) severely lacking in this area, this is so important!
Also, check out my meal planning guides;
How to Make a Healthy Meal Plan on a Budget
and
How to Meal Plan (when you have no motivation to do so)
Please share in the comments which of these easy vegan simple recipes for healthy eating is for your favorite!
