Vegetarian dinners that are the actual dinner

The complaint about vegetarian weeknight cooking is rarely that it tastes bad. It is that so much of it is a side dish being asked to carry a plate — a bowl of roasted vegetables, very nice, and everyone is in the biscuits by nine.

So these are mains. Beans, lentils, paneer, tofu, eggs and cheese are doing structural work rather than garnishing, and the protein per serving is printed on every one so the claim is checkable rather than implied.

Filtering is done on ingredients, not on a label. A dish is only listed here if nothing in it is meat or fish — which catches the things a tag misses, like a stock, a sauce, or a fish-sauce dressing on an otherwise vegetable dish.

Our pick

Agedashi Tofu

The one to cook for somebody who says they are not interested in vegetarian food.

30 min · Japanese · vegetarian, vegan, dairy-free, low-carb

More vegetarian recipes · 518 in the library

Recipe illustrations are generated by AI.

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