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55 Best Vegetarian Meals

~ These vegetarian meals are the very best, most wildly popular, healthy vegetarian recipes from 100s of food writers, all across the Internet. They’re ideal for Meatless Monday … or any day! Easy vegetarian recipes that’ll even keep meat-lovers happy – perfect for the whole family! When someone asks me what are the absolute best vegetarian recipes, this is the post I refer them to! ~

Pinnable collage of 5 of the recipe photos, with text overlay reading "All-Time Best Vegetarian Recipes".

How We Picked the BEST Vegetarian Dinner Ideas

Way back in 2016, we polled hundreds of other food writers and bloggers, asking them to share the one – just one! – absolutely, positively most popular healthy recipe from their entire site. 

We sorted through those submissions to choose the most outstanding of all for our very first collection of 13 Best Healthy Vegetarian Meals.

But 2016 was a long time ago (at least in the Internet world), and soooooo many other amazing vegetarian recipes have popped up since then!

Search Our Site for MORE Healthy Vegetarian Recipe Ideas! Here’s How …

 

So, more than 4 years later, we reached out again – to hundreds and hundreds of food writers and blogging friends, asking them to share their ONE (and only ONE!) most popular vegetarian main dish. The very best vegetarian dinner recipe they had. 

The response was overwhelming! But once again, we’ve narrowed it down to the very best of the best, and added about 40 new, inspiring, easy, healthy vegetarian recipes to our lineup.

And we think you’ll agree … there’s absolutely no doubt why all these recipes are so incredibly popular! 

The Very Best Vegetarian Meals

Two Healthy Kitchens’ Favorite Vegetarian Meals

While we’re talking healthy vegetarian recipes and veggie-centric meal ideas, check out a few of our own personal favorites here at THK. These are all recipes I make again and again for my own family that we just love … and I’m pretty sure your family will love, too!

The Vegetarian Meal Trend

The current meatless trend is undeniable: even non-vegetarians are embracing the benefits of subbing out at least one meat-focused meal each week, in exchange for a vegetarian dinner.

Meatless Monday? Yup! It’s totally a thing! Everybody’s getting more excited about easy vegetarian dinner recipes.

And for good reason – vegetarian meals can be a great way to work more nutritious ingredients into your weekly dinner rotations.

But they’ve gotta taste amazing, right? So amazing that your family (even those meat lovers!) won’t care one bit about leaving out the meat and trying a vegetarian recipe instead.

Well, if all those recipes above aren’t inspiration enough … we’ve also got some tips that can make truly delicious, ultra-satisfying veg meals completely do-able!

Making Healthy Vegetarian Meals Satisfying

If you aren’t eating a lot of meatless meals yet (and you’re sort of in a “beginner vegetarian” phase) … or if you’re a vegetarian who’s looking for ideas that your non-vegetarian friends will like, too … you might keep stumbling against this question: What are some strategies for making healthy vegetarian recipes that taste just as delicious and satisfying as meals that include meat?

As you’ll see from our lineup of recipes above, there are lots of different ways to achieve this! 

• Some “all veggie meals” directly swap the meat for protein-rich “meat substitutes” like soy crumbles, tofu hot dogs or sausages, and other plant-based meat “look alikes” (think of  examples like Boca Burgers, Beyond Burgers or Impossible Burgers).

• Other recipes don’t really attempt to fake you out by tricking you into thinking you’re eating meat. They simply focus on high-protein ingredients like quinoa (one of the only plants that has all the amino acids needed to be a complete protein), or legumes such a beans and lentils.

• And some recipes basically just skip the meat altogether, focusing instead on satisfying grains, pastas, and loads of flavorful veggies.

Pinnable collage of 5 recipe photos with text overlay reading "Best Healthy Vegetarian Meals".

Whichever path you choose, I would argue that the most important goal is to make sure there are interesting textures and, especially, to make sure those vegetarian diet recipes are hugely flavorful – so nobody’s taste buds miss having some meat on the plate.

• You might focus, for example, on coaxing lots of flavors out of your veggies by grilling or roasting them (one of my favorite techniques!). The caramelization that happens yields big flavor!

• Or, layer on lots of flavors with terrific sauces and condiments. Maybe you’re shooting for rich, cheesy, homey flavors … or bright, citrusy, summer notes … or spicy Mexican or Latin flair … or … well, you get the idea! Huge, totally vegetarian flavor can come through your sauces and condiments and make your dish, ultimately, very delicious and satisfying (with or without meat).

• One of the things many vegetarian-based meals miss out on is the umami flavor profile found in meat. But, that umami flavor profile can also be achieved through things like mushrooms, soy sauce, cheese and tomatoes.

Lots of little techniques to try, along with so many great new recipe ideas!

Oh … and to keep that veggie-momentum cranking all year long, we’ve even got specific collections of vegetarian and vegan meals just for the holidays:

And don’t miss all the other super-popular recipes in our “Very Best Healthy Recipes” series!

(Originally published August 18, 2016; fully updated with many new recipes, photos, and additional tips.)

Pinnable collage of 5 recipe photos from the original 13 recipes featured in this post, with text overlay of the title.

50 Comments

  1. These all look so good! This is my kind of collection of recipes too! I can eat each and every one of them! Now, where to start?

    1. Haha – I know, Debi! I totally agree! It was sooooo hard narrowing down the list that other food writers submitted, to come up with just these top vegetarian recipes that I absolutely had to include. Every single one of them looks so marvelous and inspires me!

  2. Awesome recipes! Thanks a ton but am a bit disappointed that you didn’t cover Indian dishes – the land of vegetarians. Of course many of us are born vegetarians and so there are just plenty of dishes from Indian kitchens and I am sure you know this better than us!

    1. That’s a great point, Raghav. My family adores Indian food, and so many people in India are vegetarians, so there are many, many wonderful vegetarian meals to explore through the Indian culture. As it happens, none of the recipes that bloggers submitted for this post, as their very best and most popular, happened to have been Indian, but I’d certainly love to hear what your favorite recipes or resources are – and I’ll bet many of my other readers would be excited for your suggestions, too! Thanks so much for the feedback and ideas! ~Shelley

    1. Hi Walker! In addition to some of our family-favorite vegetarian meals that I list at the end of this article, we also actually have quite a lot of vegetarian recipes SPECIFICALLY for kiddos here on our own site. Here are a few you might like to check out: Hungry Hippos (Fun Sandwich Recipe), and “Veggie Faces” No-Bake Vegetable Pizzas and Wraps, and PB&J Pinwheel Sandwich Kabobs, and No-Bake Fruit “Pizzas”. If you want to look through all of our vegetarian recipes, you can click over to the vegetarian category on our site (that’ll give you suggestions for snacks, desserts, etc. that are vegetarian, in addition to just main course meals). I hope these suggestions give you some fun, ultra-kid-friendly vegetarian recipe ideas to try! Enjoy! 😀 ~Shelley

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