When it comes to your best vegan dinner options, you’ve got endless possibilities for home cooking and for enticing vegan restaurant food. Read on to discover all sorts of terrific choices.
Making a Fantastic Vegan Dinner at Home
Cooking vegan dinners at home is remarkably easy. In fact, you don’t even need a cookbook to get started. Some of the most satisfying vegan meals don’t even need recipes. So let’s begin with a quick look at some dishes you can cook from scratch that only require a few minutes of prep time.
Easy Main Courses
Here is an assortment of vegan-friendly dishes, perfect for supper, that you probably already love:
- Soup with a half-slice or two of whole grain bread. There are several vegan cookbooks devoted to soups and slow-cooker recipes.
- Stir-fried veggies, served over brown rice.
- A dinner salad. Note that salads can be quite filling—as long as they include protein-rich foods like chopped nuts, tofu, beans, or seeds.
- Roasted vegetables. This is a delicious and healthful option for a hot meal. It takes only a few minutes to rinse and coarsely chop your vegetables.
- Spaghetti with marinara sauce. A few delicious toppings: nutritional yeast, roasted peppers, or vegan sausage.
- Beans and rice, perhaps with some guacamole on the side. Try making black beans with plenty of garlic. You can mix in some chopped cilantro just before serving.
- Sandwiches. An unimaginably easy yet filling meal that you can make in thousands of variations.
Recommended Cookbooks
If you’re looking for quick and easy vegan dinner recipes, 30-Minute Vegan Dinners is the perfect cookbook choice. But that’s only the start of your options, since most cookbooks are dominated by dinner recipes.
Vegan Everything is contains loads of easy recipes exploring a wide diversity of foods. Bish Bash Bosh is another popular all-vegan choice, and this title doesn’t skimp when it comes to offering up delicious side-dishes and desserts. Be sure to check out our guide to vegan-friendly cuisines if there’s a particular style of cooking that you crave.
Once you’ve purchased one or two cookbooks that cover your favorite niches, consider also buying a huge reference-style cookbook. That way, you’ll be covered for just about any style of cooking you wish to explore. Robin Robertson’s 1000 Vegan Recipes is definitely the biggest such offering, and certainly among the best. Veganimocon is another solid choice, and one that’s as famous for its desserts as its entrees.
The only difficulty you’ll have in selecting a cookbook is dealing with the overwhelming number of possibilities—there are hundreds of vegan cookbooks in print. So how can you choose the cookbook that’s perfect for you? Just visit our vegan cookbooks page, which features the very best titles from every niche.
Canned or Frozen Vegan Dinners
Even if you only have a few minutes prepare dinner, you have some excellent options when it comes to packaged foods. Here are some possibilities:
- Frozen vegan pizzas (Tofutti, Daiya, and Amy’s)
- Boxed or frozen vegan mac & cheese
- Frozen vegan burritos or enchiladas (Amy’s, Trader Joe’s)
- Canned vegan chili, served over microwavable frozen brown rice
- Veggie burgers
- Microwaveable chick pea curry
- Frozen veggies, sautéed with garlic or ginger, served over microwavable frozen brown rice
Accompaniments
Round out your dinner with these easy vegan options:
- Baked potatoes or sweet potatoes
- Roasted vegetables
- Salads (We highly recommend Follow Your Heart’s Organic Vegan Caesar or Annie’s Goddess Dressing)
- Sauerkraut or kimchi
- Sautéed greens with ginger or garlic
- Bread with vegan butter or hummus
Garnishes
Want to take your meal from good to great? The right garnish can make all the difference—adding crunch, tang, color or just the right intangible quality. So don’t hesitate to try out one of these garnishes the next time you cook:
- Nutritional yeast
- Gomasio
- Minced parsley
- Hemp seeds
- Dulse flakes
- A wedge of lemon or lime
- Fresh coarsely-ground pepper
Vegan Restaurant Dinners
In most cities, our vegan dining options range from good to spectacular. Learn how to discover the best options near you by reading my guide to vegan restaurant food.
If you want to take the fast food route, you likewise probably have some decent options there as well. Just see my vegan fast food guide.
Endless Vegan Dinner Possibilities
We’ve just reviewed some of the best vegan supper ideas. If you want to dive deeper into the subject, see our Vegan Cooking Guide. Just a little time spent learning the basics of vegan cooking will lay the groundwork for an endless variety of amazing vegan dinners.
