A Vegetarian Dish A Month – January 2024: Vegan Meatloaf
It’s currently April 4th, 2024. And like most people, I’m not usually one to maintain New Years’ Resolutions for more than a month or two.
But this year I’ve succeeded in one.
(So far.)
Since I was worried I wouldn’t go through with it, I didn’t write about it, but now that we’re a few months in and I’m not only keeping up with it, but I’m enjoying it, I decided it’s time to backlog some of my experiences!
(One of) My 2024 New Years’ Resolutions
They say one of the top things you can do to reduce your impact on the planet while simultaneously improving your health is reducing your meat consumption. Ever since I moved to Japan, I definitely cut back on a LOT of meat that I used to eat when I lived in the states for the first twenty-odd years of my life. And I wanted to take it a step further. But reducing meat consumption always felt so hard. I don’t know what to make.
I don’t know many vegetarian/vegan recipes.
Wait…I don’t know many vegetarian/vegan recipes.
Well there’s my problem. It’s not “hard”, I just don’t know what to make.
So I decided this year it was time to change that: I decided to make at least one new vegetarian or vegan dish per month for all of 2024.
One a month, just enough so that I can learn some new recipes and feel some pressure to do so, but not so much that I get overwhelmed. One a month? Easy-peasy.
January 2024: Vegan Meatloaf
I wanted to start with a bang, so for January, I decided I was going to try to make something that I really loved but haven’t eaten in a long time due to my reduced meat consumption and decided to go with…
Drumroll…
Meatloaf!
As a kid, I loved meatloaf. I used to make it on my own all the time. But is it possible to make a vegan meatloaf?
Turns out it is. And I wanted to try it.
So I did!
Here’s the recipe I used: https://www.noracooks.com/vegan-meatloaf/
If you guys want to make it, I recommend going off of her recipe, but for those of you who are just curious enough to want to know what goes in it, I’ll give you the short version.
The Recipe
Here’s the super quick version of the recipe I used:
- Saute some veggies in olive oil: onion, carrots, celery, garlic cloves
- Add in a bunch of food processor’d chickpeas (this is what replaces the meat!), some breadcrumbs, nutritional yeast and some flavor (soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup all mixed)
- Bake in the oven, then cover with some more of that sauce.
That’s pretty much it!
Unfortunately, I was so excited to try it, I forgot to get good photos of it, so I’ll just have to steal Nora’s. They’re way better than I could get anyway.
If you really want to see my actual meatloaf, here’s the one photo I had…
The Verdict
I would give my attempt a solid B. It wasn’t bad! Despite it being a little mushy for my tastes, the sauce did a great job of giving it plenty of meatloaf-like taste. It definitely wasn’t meatloaf, but it was flavorful, filling, and probably a lot healthier than regular meatloaf.
The Wrap Up
I’ve got 3 more recipes I’ve made this year, so I’ll be posting those soon. Hopefully I can get caught up. If you guys have any ideas for quick, easy, and delicious vegetarian/vegan foods for me to try, comment them down below! Making these dishes are starting to give me confidence that going vegetarian/vegan is not actually that hard…It just takes some learning.
