We are both omnivores but we don’t eat a lot of animal products. Meat is often the most expensive ingredient in dinner and we were both raised by parents who were very frugal, so we never got used to eating a lot of meat.
We eat a lot of dishes that just don’t contain meat, like Thai and Indian curries and vegetarian nasi or mie goreng (Indonesian fried rice) and chili sin carne, burritos with beans etc. We also eat Dutch stamppot quite often in winter, which is mashed potatoes mixed with vegetables like boiled kale, boiled carrots, or raw salad greens like endive or purslane. Another oldschool Dutch winter dish is mashed potatoes with onions and apples (called hete bliksem) and we also eat vegetarian shepherd’s pie in winter. Those heavy, potato-based meals may be an acquired taste if you didn’t grow up eating them!
Growing up my mother often made veggie burgers - leftover vegetables shaped into the form of a patty and then fried, like they do in this recipe for carrot burgers: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/jun/14/california-food-recipes-roast-carrot-burger-avocado-salsa--rainbow-bowl
My grandma was also the queen of stretching small amounts of meat. Her meatballs were at least 50% very finely chopped onions and breadcrumbs. Another famous Dutch dish is our meat stew, which is supposed to contain 50/50 veggies/meat but it can be stretched much further than that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachee ) . If you want to go that way, I’ve got a whole book of wartime recipes that don’t use a lot of meat.
We don’t eat a lot of “veggie” meats because they’re high in salt but there are some on the market that taste so similar that you could serve them to meat-eaters without them noticing. I’m not sure if the Vegetarian Butcher brand is available in the US (I’m pretty sure it’s in the UK) but my sister served me some of their vegan tuna and I literally did not taste the difference. It may make the transition easier for meat-eaters. Their other fake meats are not exactly the same but come close. We occasionally eat “veggie” fried chicken (Valess crispy sticks, pretty sure that brand is Europe only) because we really feel it’s not ethical to eat real fried chicken from a fastfood outlet. We don’t eat factory farmed chicken. Valess is the brand that also produces all the veggie chicken for McDonald’s in my country, and very few people would taste the difference between a real McChicken and a veggie McChicken.
