Weddingbee boards

The pita dish sounds yummy!  I will have to try that!  You can also make healthier sweet potato fries - cut them up, sprinkle them with salt, pepper, and olive oil and stick them in the oven for around 10 minutes.

Neither of these are vegan (we love our cheese), but they are vegetarian.

Eggplant Mozzarella Subs (A good one for meat lovers; it really fills you up):

Roast eggplant (can bread it first, it takes too long for me), put sub together by layering eggplant, tomato sauce, and mozzarella (fresh) in sub roll.  Put the subs under the broiler until the bread is toasty and the cheese is melty.

Pita Pepper Pizzas

Slice sweet peppers (whatever colors you want!) and onions, saute in olive oil.  Spread pepper and onion mixture on small pitas on a baking dish.  Sprinkle with shredded cheese and bake until the cheese is melted.

A really easy meal is just to saute some veggies - brocolli, peppers, onion and baby corn - in some olive oil and soy sauce and serve with some brown rice.

I just made a yummy meatless casserole, adapted from a recipe in The Joy of Cooking.  DH, who loves his meat, liked it too!  Best of all, it only takes one pot and a baking dish, so it's easy clean-up afterward.

Veggie and Rice Casserole

In a medium saucepan, cook 1 cup brown rice in plenty of water until almost done (you want it to have a little resistance because it will finish cooking when baked).  Drain in a mesh sieve and put into the baking dish.

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Bring some more water to a boil in the saucepan.  Parboil 1 1/2 cup broccoli florets and 1 1/2 cup cauliflower florets for about 3 minutes.  Drain and put aside with the rice.

Add a little oil to the pan and saute over medium heat 1 medium onion, diced, for about 5 minutes, until it starts to caramelize a bit.  Add 1 cup mushroom slices and 2 cloves of garlic, minced, and cook until the mushrooms start to look soft and juicy.  Add to the other veggies and the rice.

Melt 4 tablespoons butter in the pan over medium heat.  Add 1/3 cup flour, stir, and cook until the mixture is a deep golden color.  Whisk in 2 cups vegetable stock and 1 1/2 cups milk.  Continue cooking and whisking over medium heat for 5-7 minutes, until the sauce thickens.  Add salt and pepper to taste.  Optional: add 1 tablespoon of Dijon mustard to give a little extra kick to the dish.

Pour the sauce over the ingredients already in the baking dish and mix well.  It will be saucy, but the rice will absorb some of the liquid as it cooks.  Sprinkle bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese in a thin layer over the top of the casserole.  Bake for about 35 minutes, until the casserole is bubbly and the top is golden brown.  If necessary, switch to the low broiler for the last couple minutes to crisp up the top.  Let stand for 10 minutes and serve.

Some of my faves:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/health/nutrition/09recipehealth.html (amazing possibilities with the leftovers!!!)

http://www.bonappetit.com/magazine/2009/10/how_i_learned_to_love_kale

http://foodandspice.blogspot.com/2009/02/vegetarian-mushroom-bourguignon.html

http://foodandspice.blogspot.com/2008/12/wild-rice-and-portobello-mushroom-soup.html

http://vicariousfoodie.blogspot.com/2008/05/easy-brussels-sprout-gratin.html

http://www.thought4food.us/?p=1128

Simple fave dinner: brussel sprouts, small carrots, parsnips, delicata squash, yukon potatos, tossed with olive oil, roasted with chopped fresh sage and lots of fresh ground black pepper. So delicious!

@ Remi...I totally agree with you!  Actually there are quite a few slow cooker recipes in "Busy People's Slow Cooker Cookbook" that call for the Morningstar Meatless crumbles.  Two of my favorites in here are the rigatoni and lasagna.  FI is the type of guy that pretty much only eats meat, potatoes and pasta.  As he puts it, "nothing from the ground or ocean...no chicken or pork either".  When I make these dishes, he can't even tell...and I haven't told him either :)  One of the great things about this cookbook is it lists all nutritional information for each recipe, which is great for me because I'm doing Weight Watchers and I can figure out exactly how many points each serving is.

Anyway, I would definitely check-out this cookbook.  I found mine at Borders, but I'm sure Amazon has it too.

Two meals that I love because you don't need a recipe and they're super easy (and impossible to screw up, because they're so forgiving!) are ratatouille and vegetable curry, my go-to dishes for our "have-to-use-up-vegetables-before-the-next-farm-box comes" dinners. (We do one in the summer, one in the winter.) You can make both with recipes (and that might not be a bad place to begin---I imagine Epicurious or other cooking sites will have basic recipes for both) but they're also dishes that everyone does their own version of, so you can play around and not worry about it.

For ratatouille, you basically saute summer veggies (traditionally eggplant, zucchini, bell pepper, garlic, onions, bay, and miscellaneous herbs, plus tomatoes that I always add at the end so they don't cook down quite so much). You can use however much or little of those things as you like, and season it to taste (common seasonings are thyme or herbs d'provence, but I've also used basil or anything fresh that was floating around). We eat it topped with goat cheese with a crusty baguette on the side, and often use the leftovers as pasta sauce.

For curry, I also use any veggies in the house plus tofu, but favorites are butternut squash, onions, broccoli, cauliflower, and any greens we have. They get sauteed (starting with the squash and anything else that must get cooked to be edible---then the tofu till it's golden, and then any other veggies very briefly). To make the curry part, you can either add coconut milk and curry spice (we like Thai green and yellow curry) or you can even buy the jars of curry from Trader Joe's or an Indian grocery for a really quick meal. The longer you let the veggies and tofu simmer in the curry, the more pronounced the flavor, but in a pinch you can also eat it right away. (You can also make "real" curry with fresh herbs and curry paste instead of the premade spice, which is even better, but involves more steps and more ingredients so we only do that for dinner parties and such, or for weekend cooking where there's more planning involved.) We usually eat it over Jasmine rice but sometimes mix it up with quinoa or other grains. This is also an easy dish to make a veggie and non-veggie version of since the base is the same---you just split it into two pots and add tofu to one and meat (chicken or fish works well) to the other.

And a last favorite is the vegetable pot pie from the 1997 edition of Joy of Cooking. (I'll have to see if I can dig up the recipe---they took it out of the newest edition, sadly!) For that one (also very forgiving!) you take root vegetables---I've made it with everything under the sun, but I think the real recipe calls for celery root, parsnips, carrots, onions, rutabaga, and potato, or something along those lines---and saute them till they start to soften. Then you put them in a casserole dish and pour vegetable broth over them---just enough to cover them, or it boils over! They get topped with cheddar cheese biscuit dough---we use the recipe from Joy of Cooking, but I imagine any recipe works. It all bakes uncovered till the biscuits are baked and golden, and ends up something like a chicken pot pie without the chicken---the root veggies break down a bit to be heartier. It's one of my all-time favorite winter dishes.

I write a cooking blog that is mostly vegetarian - www.barefootandinthekitchen.blogspot.com - mostly recipes I've tweaked or created.  Tofu is best when it's marinated in a curry, soup, stir fry sauce, or tomato broth - and it's kinda gross on it's own :-p.  

Barbecue tofu/fake chicken in a crockpot - http://barefootandinthekitchen.blogspot.com/2009/06/bb-fu.html

Barbecue mac & cheese - this one is so good, my carnivorous friends went back for seconds and didn't even complain there was no meat - http://barefootandinthekitchen.blogspot.com/2009/08/barbecue-mac-and-cheese.html

Soups can be a great way to get enough veggies and proteins without a lot of fat - http://barefootandinthekitchen.blogspot.com/2008/11/minestrone.html

And we do a lot of stuff where my FI just adds meat to his own meal, or we make a meat version and a regular version - burger night, taco night (these are amazing http://barefootandinthekitchen.blogspot.com/2008/05/sweet-potato-tacos.html), etc.  Or he'll toss some bacon on whatever.  Those pre-cooked chicken strips you can get at Costco are also a great way to add some meat for the meat-lover in your life.