One Way to Make a Difference When You Make Dinner

If you’re concerned about the environment, you may know that one of the best choices you can make for the planet is to eat a more plant-based diet.

But what if you or someone you love really loves meat?

I’m not a huge meat-eater and, despite my weakness for dairy (I love cheese and ice cream), I sometimes eat and enjoy vegan meals. (If you’re looking for a great vegan meal, I highly recommend this stuffed delicata squash recipe from the Washington Post.) My husband, however, feels strongly that a meal isn’t complete without meat.

While I sometimes make vegetarian or vegan meals for dinner despite my husband’s preference, I do try to make most of the meals we eat with some meat in them.

But I don’t necessarily use a lot of meat to make dinner.

You don’t need to use ground beef by the pound.

Instead of meatless meals, we often eat meals where meat is more of a condiment than the main portion of the meal. I do sometimes cook meat-centric meals, but most of the time, the meat isn’t the main event.

I suppose if I were the sort of person who just cooked without a recipe, I could just do this on my own, but I almost always use a recipe to at least guide my cooking. So I turn to recipes that aren’t for traditional Western meat-and-potatoes-style main dishes. I’ve found many of these recipes are on budget-friendly cooking sites (I’m a big fan of Budget Bytes) or in international cookbooks (such as Extending the Table).

How much meat do these recipes use? To give you a few examples, Budget Bytes’ bibimbap recipe, which my family enjoys, uses half a pound of ground beef for four servings. The feijoada recipe in Extending the Table serves eight people and calls for as little as a quarter pound of sausage. And bang bang chicken, also from Extending the Table, feeds four people with just one chicken breast.

Note: The sources I mention here also include plenty of meals that use a pound or more of meat, so you have to search through them for meals that use less meat, but the recipes are there, and they are delicious.

The secret’s in the sauce (sort of).

These low-meat dishes tend to have a few things in common, all of which contribute to making them satisfying alternatives to meat-heavy meals. First and foremost, they’re flavorful. Bang bang chicken uses garlic, ginger, peanut butter, soy sauce, and red wine vinegar for flavoring. Budget Bytes’ one pot sausage and sun dried tomato pasta, which uses 8 oz. of sausage, gets its flavor from garlic, sun dried tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, and (if you like) a pinch of red pepper.

The meals all combine meat with grains and/or vegetables (often both) to make them filling. Bibimbap includes rice, ground beef, sautéed spinach, shredded carrots, cucumber slices, green onions, an egg, and a sprinkle of sesame seeds. Feijoada uses beans, meat, and different vegetables (you have several options for those) and is served with rice and slices of orange.

Often, too, this dishes combine different textures. Think of the different textures you’d encounter in a bowl of bibimbap. Or, in another Budget Bytes’ recipe, imagine the combination of shrimp, corn tortillas, a crunchy cabbage slaw, and a creamy mayonnaise-based sauce. The complexity of these dishes makes the meals interesting, so that even a meat-lover like my husband is happy.

Eating lower on the food chain is a wonderful goal, and if enough of us pursue this kind of eating, it can make a difference for our planet. But you don’t have to give up meat entirely. Moving from meat-centric meals to meals that include meat as just one component of the dish can significantly reduce our meat consumption if we make them a regular part of our diets.