To celebrate National Vegetarian Week 2014, The Tofu Diaries has invited fellow bloggers to get involved and share! Today’s guest blog is from Matt who is taking on the challenge of cooking his first ever (intentially) vegan meal using my vegan spinach pancakes recipe. Matt talks us through the experience, pulls me up on one glaring error in the recipe (so shameful!), and gives us his verdict on eating vegan.So; first things first, my full disclosure is this: I am not a vegetarian. In fact; even the thought of a meatless meal fills me with dread. As the fantastically yellow family the Simpsons once sung, ‘You don’t make friends with salad.’ Well, in this case, they were wrong.

I’ve known Natalie for a long time; in fact we met whilst backpacking across Southern Europe. The sun was shining, it was exhausting heat but we befriended each other over a cup of Costa’s finest. This may or may not be true. The point is, I’ve met Natalie on a few occasions, and she’s lovely.

So after being propositioned I decided that it may be worth looking at something I had never considered before, and considering the rapid weight gain I seem to be unintentionally achieving, should have probably looked at earlier; a meat-free meal.

I’m not going to lie; the thought of this terrified me to my very core. Then again, I also like a challenge. So, after consulting with my better half, we decided after looking through a lot of delicious recipes that we would opt for the classic… Spinach Pancakes. Bear in mind I don’t even really like the idea of savoury pancakes so you can see how big of a step this was for me, but, as I said, I like a challenge. Thankfully, they turned out to be delicious.

First things first, Natalie doesn’t list the ingredients entirely correctly as I bought all the ingredients but when I was reading the recipes where the instructions were to add the tomatoes. I had no tomatoes. Now apart from that; I’m so thankful that this came my way as first off, I wouldn’t have ever tried it, and secondly, I now have something new that I can cook when my vegan friends come around! I feel very cultured. I will be applying for Come Dine with me now I possess this vital life skill.

Well, I had to refer back to the recipe but this was a pretty easy meal to do with relatively little that could go wrong. I managed to source most of the ingredients from my local supermarket so I was more than chuffed with that, and all in all it came to under a tenner so again, win-win.

I was slightly worried whilst stirring the spinach into the pancakes that the consistency felt a little thick, which was slightly true for one of the pancakes but the rest were perfect. To be honest though when I brought it out of the pan two of the pancakes looked like spinach bread, and I’m genuinely considering making these again to see if I can use them as a bread substitute; whether this is a good idea or not is another argument altogether. I was mostly worried about sourcing the products but as I say, they were all readily available. This has genuinely made me think I may cook one vegetarian meal a week just to build up my repertoire if anything!I took some pictures as I was indeed thinking that this could be a flop. As it turns out, it wasn’t. And it tasted better than I thought. So, not only can I say that I’ve enjoyed a vegetarian dish, but I also enjoyed savoury pancakes!

I may have burnt/over-cooked the topping a little, but apart from this (and the obligatory pancake flipping that I think I should have done maybe one minute later) there were virtually no hiccups. I also now know that me and my girlfriend own weighing scales.

Cheers for the challenge Natalie, I was sceptical, but I enjoyed it thoroughly!

Thanks to Matt for giving vegan cooking a go and for sharing his tale. I hope he has been won over to go meat-free for a meal every now and then! Be sure to check out his blog where he can usually be found charting his dining experiences around Leeds and his journey as a dad-to-be.