Since deciding to be vegetarian I can honestly say I don’t miss meat.  Even as a kid I was never a big fan.  I never enjoyed the texture or flavour much and even in my young mind I could never reconcile eating what was once a living creature.  I grew up with pets and couldn’t understand why people thought there was a difference between eating a pig and a dog.  To me, a life was a life and it wasn’t mine to take ‘for the sake of a snack’.  I also know that vegetarian is not vegan.  And if it weren’t for cheese I could, without hesitation, be vegan.  I use almond milk in my tea and porridge.  I’m learning how to use flax eggs and aquafaba in baking.  There was something someone said on cookery tv programme the other day – he was making a dish with veal and said that if you use milk/milk products then you shouldn’t have a problem eating veal as it’s a by-product of the milk industry.  I can’t really explain why this hit home as much as it did.  I can’t deal with the heart wrenchingly horrifying images that people put out there of calves being taken away from their mothers so I do my best to avoid them with an ignorant fingers in ears ‘lalala can’t hear you’ response.  Pathetic I know.

I’m also trying really hard to not sound judgemental here.  These are MY opinions.  If you decide you don’t want to eat meat, for whatever reason, I believe it’s a conclusion you have to reach on your own.  Maybe there’ll be a tipping point, maybe it’ll be a passing comment that sticks with you.  But it’s like trying to lose weight/give up smoking etc.  You HAVE to get there by yourself.  You already know why you do/don’t eat certain things.

And so I’m on a mission to find vegan cheese alternatives.  But this is a process (a truly great process but a process all the same!) and I’d already developed this recipe (and a few more to come) before deciding that I need to find a way to live without cheese.

These days it’s even easier to eat meals without meat because there are just SO many great tasting alternatives.  In fact I’d go so far as to say Linda McCartney’s vegetarian sausages are actually waaaay better than their meat counterparts.  There’s no tough blergh chewy skin, no strange gristly bits and they crisp up just fantastically making THE best sausage sangers!   This vegetarian sausage and halloumi bake, however, is all about that goopy tomato sauce – just some passata and vegetables and you have a deliciously rich sauce that’s (very) mildly spiced and makes you just want to sit there with the whole pan and a spoon.  And maybe an obscene amount of crusty bread just to make sure you mop up all that goop.

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