If you live in or near New York City, the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts is an excellent choice for a vegan culinary school. They offer a comprehensive 619 hour education that incorporates eliminates of vegan cooking, Chinese medicine and the raw food lifestyle. However, for those of us who don’t near New York, finding a vegan culinary school can be challenging.

Vegan Cooking Class

It’s true that most large cities offer culinary schools. Still, although many of these schools are attempting to meet the demand for healthier eating by offering vegetarian or vegan courses, the bulk of their coursework still requires use of meat, dairy and eggs. Vegan culinary schools often require more extensive travel and relocation plans for their students, which in turn requires a greater expense.

If you are in the market for a vegan culinary institution and such relocation is not in the realm of possibilities, consider one of the alternative ways of gaining a vegan culinary education.

1. Consider specializing in raw food.
The primary raw food culinary school is the Living Light Culinary Arts Institute, run by Cherie Soria since 1998. While attendance will obviously depend upon your feelings about the raw food lifestyle, it holds several advantages beyond being vegan friendly. Courses can be taken onsite, offsite or online, and are available to chefs with a variety of cooking abilities, ranging from beginners to experts.

2. Consider a vegetarian culinary school.
If a vegetarian school is closer or more affordable, investigate what their course requirements are. Some vegetarian schools block their meat/egg/dairy portions together, and you may be able to skip that week and still obtain your degree or certificate.

3. Consider a non-traditional degree program.
While traditional vegan culinary schools can be difficult to find, the more nontraditional model certainly isn’t. Schools that offer courses exclusively online or through correspondence courses continue to grow. Some examples include the School of Natural Cookery located out of Boulder, Colorado, the Vegan Culinary Experience and the Vegan Culinary Academy. Though not all of these schools offer degree or certificate programs, many of them do.

Three Tips For Getting a Vegan Culinary Education is from groovy vegetarian

1.  Vegetarian Times

Vegetarian Times magazine is a fun read, and a terrific resource for everyone from starting vegetarians, to long time healthy-eaters.  The recipes section of their website is quite spectacular.

They have so many recipes they had to include a full featured, intuitive search which includes categories such as your diet type (vegetarian, vegan, etc.), the appliance you’re cooking with, the season, and even special categories to select a holiday.  If that’s not enough to get you drooling, users can rate recipes, so you’re sure to find good ones.

Check it out here:
http://www.vegetariantimes.com/recipes/

2. VegCooking.com

What better place to find vegetarian recipes than a site entirely devoted to it?  While Vegetarian Times may be slightly quicker and more intuitive for quick recipes, VegCooking is more full featured, with shopping and dining guides, and more.

When it comes to recipes, the site has some delicious ones.  Check out their seasonal article on making a vegetarian Thanksgiving feast.  You won’t be disappointed!!

http://www.vegcooking.com/

3. VegWeb

VegWeb is much more organic in format to most other recipe locations.  Users submit recipes and photos and other users submit reviews.  The recipes here include delicious entries like “Double Chocolate Oatmeal Banana Cookies” and “Vegan Banana Pancakes”.  Strengths are its grassroots nature and the fact that it caters to a variety of diet types.

http://vegweb.com/

4. Savvy Vegetarian

This site has a lot of recipes.  If you can get past a garrish color scheme (at least on my browser) and are willing to dig into the less-intuitive (or at least less graphically pleasing) menus, you should find some good stuff here.

Categories of recipes include bread, beverages, vegan desserts, pastas, salads, soups, and tofu recipes.

http://www.savvyvegetarian.com/vegetarian-recipes/index.php

5. Simply Recipes

Simply recipes is a blog headed by Elise Bauer.  It has a massive list of neatly laid out recipes.  When looking for a random recipes the layout works very well.  Looking for a specific recipe might be slightly harder.  Still, there’s just so many good recipes here, with attractive pictures, that its hard not to love this site.

The site employs several culinary bloggers, so there’s lots of fresh creativity as well.

http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/vegetarian/

6. BBC Good Kitchen’s Vegetarian Section

BBC?  Like the British news station?  Yep!  The British Broadcasting Company, interestingly has a massive culinary page filled with recipes of all kinds.  To go along with Europe’s Vegetarian-friendliness, BBC Good Food indeed has a full page of vegetarian recipes filled with beautiful pictures.

The recipes are split into Dessert, Dinner Party, Main Course, Starter, and Vegan dishes.  More recipes can also be found under Occasions and Cuisines, but these are not purely Vegetarian, so beware.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/content/recipes/vegetarian/

7. The Food Network

I admit, I’ve been a bit of an addict of The Food Network at times.  Even if you don’t find cooking TV shows fun, its hard to deny their eye-catching website’s appeal.  Why do I rank it this low?  Well there’s pictures of meat entrees everywhere, which may turn off some.  And while there’s many vegetarian recipes, including a large soy section, there’s less than some places and they’re less sensitive to special diets like veganism.

Still it’s worth checking out, in my opinion:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/healthy-eating/index.html#tab3

8. Veg Kitchen

Veg Kitchen has an attractive website, easy to follow recipes and a lot of them.  The only thing that I was not a big fan of, and this is pretty subjective, is the lack of images to accompany the dishes.  I liked how some of the sites included tempting pictures to motivate you to embark on your culinary adventure.

Still this site is a treasure trove of some great vegetarian (and vegan) recipes.

http://vegkitchen.com/

9. 101 Vegetarian Recipes

The site “101 Vegetarian Recipes” is slightly deceptively named as it actually has more than 101 vegetarian recipes.  The site has no pictures, but has many good recipes, most of which are Vegan.

One minor note is the site pops up recipes in a new tab, which I suppose can be good or bad depending on your browsing preferences.

http://www.101vegetarianrecipes.com/

10. VegNews

This site wins points for creative appetizing recipes with beautiful color images.  Navigation is easy as well. The only drawback that makes it less than tantalizing, is that there’s only a small rotating selection of recipes and it’s hard to navigate to past recipes.

http://vegnews.com/ (recipes)

10 Good Sites To Find Vegetarian Recipes is from groovy vegetarian