VEGGIE-LITE What to have on toast?

I know this is going to sound ridiculous to almost everyone else in the world, but what I love to eat on toast more than anything else is Bovril. I can picture you all screwing up your noses in disgust. For most people, if they have even heard of Bovril, it's something you drink diluted with hot water, probably when it's very cold or you're not feeling well. But I have been eating Bovril on toast. Apart from a short gap when I was pregnant and there was some beef crisis - can't have been Mad Cow so it must have been Foot and Mouth. It was almost impossible to find Bovril then and when I did people questioned whether it was a sensible thing for a pregnant person to eat. Then they did away with beef in Bovril altogether and made a kind of runny marmite with the Bovril name on it instead. It was a huge relief to me when proper Bovril reappeared in the shops, labelled Beef Bovril, just to remove any possible doubt.For a lot of new vegetarians, bacon is the thing they miss, but for me it's going to be Bovril. I simply do not know what to put on toast instead of it. I'm currently giving Marmite a go, but I'm not a fan yet. It's too close and not quite there, I think...

Other than that, we had a pretty good first veggie week. Wednesday's pasta with broccoli was OK, bit boring, not all that filling. The Moroccan chickpea soup we had on Saturday was fantastic. I made flatbreads to go with it, but they were slightly disappointing. Must practise.

Moroccan chickpea and spinach soup       

 (A Soup for Every Day New Covent Garden Food Co)

We couldn't be bothered with cooking pea and charred spring onion fritters on Saturday night so just had salad and poached eggs (probably too many eggs this week!). That means we have a ton of spring onions that I'm not sure what to do with but they last for ages so I guess I'll figure it out. Still coming down quite heavily on the cheese too, but we're trying to think our way around that a bit next week. So far it's kind of time-consuming, kind of fun, making us give more thought to what we're eating and buying. Not too many of our default quick meals turn out to be meat-based. In fact I'm starting to think that we've probably always relied a bit too much on eggs and cheese. There's no way I'm going vegan - this is hard enough for me and I don't see the necessity - but I think we need to start thinking past the eggs and cheese.

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Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.

Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.