By Neha Vivek, VRG Intern

When you’re younger, you are accustomed to eating the food your parents put in front of you, relying on them to ensure you are getting your nutrients, even if it means eating stuff you don’t like. However, as you get older, you develop more autonomy over your meals as your parents become comfortable, allowing you to be in the kitchen and help with meal prep. Yet, with the new capabilities comes an unknown world of nutrition and cooking, so to help you start your journey below I’ve listed a couple of vegan dinners I made as a high school student that are easy and healthy to prepare.

To begin with, a sandwich is a classic meal that is quick to prepare and hard to mess up. I like grabbing my favorite bread, whole wheat bread, a black bean burger patty, and vegetables such as tomato, spinach, lettuce, and olives and quickly assembling a sandwich with Italian dressing to add flavor. Another similar idea is using the same ingredients and making wraps with a crumbled black bean burger patty or black beans, vegetables such as tomato, spinach, lettuce, and olives, and a dressing of your choice, be it Italian dressing or something a little more creative like buffalo sauce. Both of these recipes are great because when you have a busy schedule, they don’t require a lot of time, ingredients, or thought to assemble, making them a great meal to introduce yourself to meal prepping and cooking.

While the basic level of these sandwich recipes is fairly no cooking, an excellent way to begin learning more cooking techniques is alternating the filling of the sandwich or wrap by preparing different sauces, roasting or frying the vegetables, or even trying to season the protein such as tofu or tempeh from scratch.

While it may seem intimidating, tofu is absolutely delicious once you figure out how to prepare it.! A family favorite is to press the tofu for 30 minutes, cut it into cubes, and coat it with various spices, including turmeric, paprika, salt and pepper, and nutritional yeast. After coating the tofu, we let it marinate for 20-30 minutes and then place it in the air fryer until it crisps up. Then, you have delicious tofu to eat with various meals, including wraps or salads that can be prepared in advance for busy weekday dinners.

Expanding to salad ideas, while cutting up vegetables can be daunting, a great way to incorporate more vegetables is by eating more salads, which don’t have to be bland! You can make the meal exciting and fresh by playing around with the sauces, vegetables, protein sources, and carbs. A good tip I’ve found is if you find chopping vegetables hard, there are vegetable choppers where you place a vegetable between two surfaces and press the vegetable down into a blade to chop it up, allowing you to speed through the chopping process.

Another meal I learned when I first started cooking is tofu scramble. While the recipe sounds daunting, it’s simple and requires little prep or time. First, grab a block of tofu and press it for 20 minutes. Next, crumble the tofu into pieces and season it with paprika, turmeric, salt and pepper, and nutritional yeast. Let it sit while you cut up some vegetables. For tofu scramble, I love to use bell pepper, carrots, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, and spinach with black beans if I feel like adding more protein for satiety. After you finish your vegetables, heat up some oil in a pan and begin frying the vegetables until they are nice and roasted, seasoning as necessary. Finally, add the tofu and continue sautéing until the tofu is heated as well. I usually split my tofu scramble into a meal for a couple of days and eat it with a slice of toast on the side.

Overall, while cooking can seem overwhelming at first, as you begin to explore the world of food making, you’ll find that it can be enjoyable and a form of independence to choose what you put in your body. The key is to start with slow, manageable steps like cooking a meal a week or prepping one meal for dinner for the next two days. Good luck and happy cooking!

For more ideas, see https://www.vrg.org/teen/#plans