How to Cook a Roast Dinner for Vegetarians and Meat Eaters (on a Weeknight)
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Mondays I cook with my daughter. Tuesdays with my son. It started as a way of getting the kids into the kitchen and it has quietly become the fixed point of our week: one night each, their choice, my supervision, everyone eats what we make.
This Tuesday he chose a roast. I'm not going to give you a roast dinner recipe – you know how to make one – but I do want to tell you how we got a full roast onto the table on a school night, for a family that no longer eats the same thing, without it turning into the usual chaos. Because roasts stress me, and it's never the cooking. It's the timing, and then the plate-up, when six things need to be hot at once and someone is asking about the allocated yorkshire pudding to person ratio or where the gravy is.
Who's eating what
This is the bit that makes a roast complicated in our house now. I've more or less stopped eating meat – about a quarter of my life has been meat-free, on and off, and this time it seems to have stuck, so I'm pescatarian. My daughter stopped eating chicken in March and has since gone properly vegetarian. My son and my husband are, as my son puts it, omnivores.
So the table was: crispy pork belly for the boys 🍗, and for me, for the first time in my life, a fully vegetarian roast dinner 🌱. I went in expecting to feel short-changed. I came out chuffed. More on that below.
The rule: three things done properly, three shortcuts, no apologies
A weeknight roast for a split table only works if you decide in advance what deserves effort and what doesn't. Here's how we split it.
Done properly
Roast potatoes with garlic and thyme 🌱 – Parboil, drain, shake them about in the pan with the lid on to rough up the edges, halve, season with salt and pepper. Meanwhile heat rapeseed oil in a roasting tin in the oven with a handful of garlic cloves, skin on, and a few sprigs of thyme from the garden. When the oil is properly hot, toss the potatoes in and leave them for about 40 minutes. They come out crisp, and the garlic – this matters later – comes out soft and sweet inside its skin.
Air-fryer carrots 🌱 – My son was on veg prep and I wasn't going to hurry him, which meant the carrots were cut later than the plan said. This is exactly where an air fryer earns its place on the worktop (ad) : it forgives late prep, and it frees up the oven for the things that actually need it. Chunky batons, tossed in olive oil, salt, pepper and rosemary in one of the big metal mixing bowls I use for everything (ad), then 15 minutes at 185°C. Because they were cut big they kept a bit of bite in the middle, which is how I like them. I have no time for a soggy carrot.
Brussels sprouts with pecans and cheddar 🌱 – Halve the sprouts and toss them in the same metal bowl, in whatever oil, salt, pepper and rosemary the carrots left behind; no need to wash it. Put them cut-side down in a hot cast iron frying pan (possibly my favourite item in the kitchen at the moment, my 28 cm Le Creuset Toughened Non-Stick Shallow Frying Pan (ad)) until they've browned and are more or less cooked. Tip them into a roasting tin, break some pecans over the top, grate over mature cheddar, a crack of pepper, and give them a few minutes in the oven to finish. This is my Christmas sprouts recipe. It makes all the difference to a vegetarian roast, and it's less work than it sounds.
Shortcuts
Frozen sweetcorn and green beans, microwaved 🌱 – I debated steaming them for about four seconds. Fewer pans.
Yorkshire puddings from Lidl, 64p 🌱 – I love making my own. On a Tuesday, with an 11-year old cooking beside me, they are not worth the extra stress. Nobody at the table noticed or cared.
Gravy from a tub – Bisto, a Pyrex jug, our trusty tiny whisk. I'm not going to pretend I've ever made my own gravy from scratch.
The boys' bit
Crispy pork belly 🍗 – The secret is not doing much. Himalayan salt rubbed into the rind, a generous amount of pepper all over, then into the oven skin-side down at 195°C fan for about 45 minutes, flipping it halfway. You know it's done when it's golden and the skin has bubbled up. Let it rest for a couple of minutes before it goes on the plate – that's what keeps the crackling crisp.
The plate that surprised me
When everything was up – mash, sweetcorn, beans, stuffing, two Yorkshires, roasties, the whole roasted garlic cloves and the sprouts – I looked at my plate and thought: that is a properly good dinner. Not a roast with the best bit missing. A roast.
Two things did it.
Texture. The thing I find hardest about vegetarian meals isn't flavour, it's crunch – the crackling, the crisp skin, the bit of fat that a roast is usually built around. The pecans on the sprouts did that job completely (if you're a meat eater rolling your eyes at me right now, don't worry, I respect it), with the mature cheddar underneath giving it a savoury depth I'd normally get from the meat.
Garlic. This is where I have to explain something. I'm Mauritian, and the Sunday dinners I grew up with had a French accent: whatever the meat was, it was generously flavoured with garlic and herbs, with potatoes dauphinoise and a salad rather than anything you'd recognise as a British roast. When I still ate chicken with a roast, I made it that way – plenty of garlic, plenty of thyme. So sitting down with a plate that had those whole roasted cloves on it, soft enough to squash onto a potato, I got every flavour I used to go to the chicken for. Without the chicken. I'm not saying I missed meat; I really didn't. I'm saying I'd been getting the wrong thing to carry the flavour all along.
And the verdict from the table
The pork belly was as crisp as intended and the boys were happy. The sprouts – which we only had because my daughter saw them in Lidl and asked for them – were a hit (with the adults anyway).
My daughter tried one and promptly pulled a face, telling me she preferred the ones from the school canteen (ouch!). Her sprouts were absorbed into my plate, which suited me fine.
We cleaned as we went, so the kitchen wasn't a crime scene afterwards. Everyone ate. That's a Tuesday I'll take.
If you've cracked the texture problem on a vegetarian roast some other way, tell me in the comments – I have a feeling this is going to be a series.
I'm Lorna — Mauritian appetite, Midlands postcode, and a habit of planning holidays around lunch. I write about the food that got me here and the food worth travelling for.
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