Vegetarianism Made E-Z (Recipes and Stuff - NO debate allowed here!)

[Monica]

I happened upon this while looking for something else, and I thought you folks might get a chuckle out of it:

Wow - this place is pretty great. Meat that looks like meat but isn't meat? What?!? The salmon sushi pizza we had looked like it had salmon on it - and texture was almost exactly like that of salmon. And yet, it wasn't salmon. In fact, I still don't know what it was. But it was GOOD.

The mixed "meat" platter. I'm still scratching my head over this one. The "pork" tasted awesome. It felt and looked so real! What is this stuff!?!
I really, really enjoyed the BBQ and roasted "pork", salty "fish" and the tofu and the "eel". It was all just really tasty and so confusing. Seriously. How do they do it?

It's from a review of one of those vegetarian Chinese restaurants, found in most Chinatowns. Houston has several that I know of.

For the record, such processed foods aren't necessarily all that healthy. But when one is transitioning to vegetarian and gets a craving for some favorite meat dish, hey why not? Looks, feels and tastes like meat! But no animal died to satisfy the craving.

Seriously, this review is right-on. Some of the dishes at the restaurants we went to seemed so authentic I almost couldn't eat them!

When cooking at home, I use 'real' food like tempeh, which is very hearty, but I don't bother trying to get it to taste like meat, because I no longer care about that. Here are my curried tempeh cutlets.