When I first started eating vegan, one of the things that my friends and family wondered was how I was making meals for myself as well as the members of my family who aren’t vegan.

Well luckily, my partner went vegan with me and my oldest daughter was plant-based ten years before I was. In any case, we do have other family members in our house who like meat (don’t worry, we’re working on them).

To be honest, I used to be of the mindset that I had to make two different meals. But was I wrong. It took a while to get comfortable with the ingredients and what to sub out when, but here’s the process I went through when I cooked dinner for myself and one of my kids this week. There was barely an extra step in the entire process.

One of the first things to think about is which ingredients actually need to be swapped out. Also, at which point in the cooking process could you swap them out. The example that I’m going to give is Meat with Onions and Spices in Phyllo on a Bed of Feta.

If you cook a fair bit, you’ve likely realized how much easier things go if you prep everything in advance. I do this for everything I cook now. It keeps me organized and stops me from burning food (usually garlic) while I’m running around grabbing what I need.

So I knew for this recipe I needed the following:

• Ground protein
• Onions
• Garlic
• Spinach
• Rosemary
• Thyme
• Salt
• Phyllo Pastry
• Olive Oil
• Feta

I decided for the feta, we were both going to have cashew feta. Which is super simple, and I had some left over from a Spanakopita recipe the previous day…which is also why I was trying to use up the rest of the phyllo.

Cashew Feta takes no time to make, you just blend the following till smooth.

• 1 cup cashews (soaked in boiling water for 30 mins)
• 2 tbsp white vinegar
• 1 tbsp water
• Sea salt to taste

So once I had everything ready either on the cutting board or in different containers, I just halved the portions. Except for the protein of course. For protein I had some Beyond Sausage and some locally raised, antibiotic free, ground pork as my proteins.

I got two fry pans out and started heating up the olive oil. The one thing to be conscious of is that it makes things easier if one pan is progressing a bit faster than the other. I had one pan that I turned the heat down on so that it would extend the cooking time slightly. Other than that, I did the exact same thing but used the different proteins in each pan.

Once you’ve started working with the proteins, it’s important not to cross contaminate. For this recipe, I chopped all the veg on one cutting board and then when I started working with the proteins, I used a different cutting board to assemble the pork triangles.

I also made sure to bake them on different cookie sheets. Juices and fats seep out of phyllo pockets and would easily contaminate the other food if they were in the same pan.

Plating was also the same. I spread the cashew feta on both plates and then arranged the phyllo triangles and some roasted broccoli to round out the meal.

See, pretty simple! I’m happy to say this went over like a charm, and we were both super satisfied and full! Here are the bullets in case you missed anything above:

• Prep as usual and just separate out ingredients for the different dishes
• Use two frying pans, and have one cooking slightly slower than the other
• Use dedicated spoons for each pan so you don’t mix the meat in with the plant-based protein
• Use separate cutting boards if you are doing anything with the meat on a cutting board – when I rolled up the pork in phyllo I moved it to a plastic cutting board
• Bake them each in separate pans, juices will seep out of both types of dishes.
• Consider what actually needs to be swapped out. That cashew feta is absolutely delicious and is secondary in this dish, just adding some tang and additional brightness

Do you have any tips and tricks you use when you have to cook for both plant-based and meaty preferences? Please share if you do!