Healthy Meatless Pasta Bolognese

To encourage the girls to eat more vegetables and go easy on meat (especially red meat), I include lots of root vegetables, tubers and leafy vegetables in the dishes that I cook. For stews, I add carrots, sweet potatoes (yellow and purple), potatoes, onions, leek, celery, tomatoes, garlic, pumpkin, zucchini, mushrooms and lots of herbs (rosemary, Italian, bay leaves, cinnamon, etc).

Recently I made a meatless macaroni bolognese and the girls loved it.  If this dish was just for me, it would have been 100% vegan. But I wanted some protein in the bolognese for my growing girls, so I added boiled quails eggs and cheese.

My meatless bolognese sauce is composed of carrots and tomatoes (blitzed in my Blendtec), loads of red onions and garlic, bay leaves, Italian herbs, black pepper and a jar of organic tomato basil paste.

Meat is replaced with fresh jumbo BBQ Portobello mushrooms, white and brown Shimeji mushrooms, Japanese pumpkin, zucchini (yellow and green) and quail eggs.






My yummy bowl of low carb high fiber wholesome dinner, sans the pasta.  The girls had organic macaroni with it.








When asked which tastes better: bolognese with minced meat or no meat, the girls gave a resounding NO MEAT! They commented that the meatless version tastes no different than the version with minced meat. There you go, a meatless meal can still be yummers when you cook it with only plant-based ingredients and use lots of aromatic spices, herbs and allium (garlic and onions).

I'm one step closer to converting my girls to either lacto-ovo-vegetarians or flexitarians but I'll do it gradually 😉