I Cooked My Family Vegetarian Dinners for 30 Days and Here's What Happened

Pictured Recipe: Sweet Potato & Black Bean Chili

For someone with a picky-eater kid whose favorite foods are bacon, steak, A.1. sauce and chicken (in that order), you have to wonder what sort of thinking got into my head when I decided to cut meat from our family dinner rotation for a month.

It sort of started as a whim, but lately I've been feeling like our family is just eating way too much meat. It's expensive. Eating more plant-based meals is a healthy choice, better for the planet and could save us money too. So one day, when my husband and I sat down to tackle the weekly shopping list, I said, "What do you think about me cooking only vegan dinners this week?"

He blinked once and replied, "Sure? But what kind of food would we eat?"

"Lots of stuff!" I claimed defiantly and set to task pulling together a month's worth of vegan dinner ideas for families, including delicious things like falafel with tahini sauce and vegetable lo mein.

I showed the recipes to my husband and he got excited. He agreed: this kind of vegan eating looked really delicious. We planned out our meals for the whole week, choosing recipes that we were both excited to try. The Hubs even offered to make the sweet potato chili for dinner that night.

Day 1: Later, as we sat down to our meal, the kids did not cry. (Crying/not crying is my family's version of thumbs-up/thumbs-down when it comes to family meals. We're working on that. Every. Dang. Day.) In fact, they loved it. Score! I proclaimed proudly, "See? And it's totally vegan!"

"Oops," Hubs said as he pointed to two glasses of milk he'd just poured for the kids and the Cheddar cheese he had just dumped in everyone's bowls of chili.

"OK, let's take baby steps," I said. And we agreed that maybe we'd just focus on vegetarian for now. With two food allergies (tree nuts and eggs) to manage on top of everything else, that felt like a more reasonable goal for our family.

Vegan or no, this Sweet Potato & Black Bean Chili recipe is a perennial favorite in our house. We make big batches so that we have leftovers to freeze. This time around my daughter was so into it, she asked that I heat up leftovers in the morning to pack in a thermos for her lunch.

Day 3: Black Bean Tacos for taco night. I love to pile these babies high with condiments, veggies and avocado. The kids eat them plain with corn on the side. Everyone's happy.

Day 6: Spicy Vegetable Lo Mein. This recipe made me want to own a wok, but I made do with a large skillet. We served it with chopsticks to get the kids excited. They were curious about the shiitakes and even tried them, but ultimately picked them all out.

Pictured Recipe: Chickpea Curry

Day 8: This meatless dinner thing was only meant to be for a week, but I was rediscovering a new inspiration in our meals. I was enjoying looking for new recipe ideas—and eating things besides chicken and potatoes. The kids were doing ... OK.

So, as my husband and I sat down to plan our weekly grocery list, I said, "I want to try this vegetarian thing all month. Can we do it?" I knew I was asking a lot. But he agreed. Love that man.

Day 10: I'd be lying if I said it was all smooth sailing. There were a lot of tears in the second week, especially from my son who has a hard time with anything green. He cried at the falafel. But the rest of the family loved it. (Author's note: this story was originally written in 2018 and I'm pleased to say this falafel recipe is now one of his favorite meals. He will eat 3 or 4 in one sitting, dipped in ketchup, of course.)

Day 15: The third Sunday, the Hubs came home from the grocery store with a pound of bacon. It appeared my stalwart in this no-meat challenge was wavering.

Day 16: Taco night with beefless beef. A hit!

Day 17: Cheese lasagna (cue tears). It was the plainest, cheesiest lasagna I could possibly make. And he cried. Child, imploring, "Daddy, when can we have steak again?"

"Mom's doing a vegetarian thing right now."

"What do you like, Buddy? Because we know what you don't like, but is there anything you actually like?

"Um, I like steak."

"And pizza."

"And chicken."

Is this going well? Too early to tell?

At least we know what's for dinner tomorrow night.

Day 18: Pizza-cheese only.

Day 22: We went out to eat at a restaurant for Sunday lunch and everyone in the family ordered steak, except for me.

Days 23-30: The last week of our meatless dinner month, we pulled together all of the recipes from the weeks before that everyone had loved and had them again. Because, why make it any harder than it needs to be?

And yes, we did eventually eat the bacon, sprinkled on top of a cheesy soup, but I made the Hubs cook that night.

What did the kids actually eat?

I won't bore you with the list of foods that inspired tears from my children. That's not really helpful anyways. But here are the recipes that they actually LIKED!