Irish recipes: St Patrick's Day vegetarian style (of course Guinness is involved)

I know it's really about Guinness and dancing but I thought I'd gather together a few traditional St Patrick's Day recipes - vegetarian style.

The vegetarian society website have a few good ones as well as other sites. I've never cooked for St Patrick's Day but I might try making the Guinness and Tofu stew.

- COLCANNON which involves potatoes and cabbage

- VEGGIE POT PIE> which is also gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free and vegan

- CHAMP which involves onion and (more) potatoes

- MOCK 'CORNED BEEF' AND CABBAGE this looks really tasty

- ST PATRICK'S SOUP which involves lots of veg and oatmeal

- BOXTY this has cooked AND raw potatoes involved

- VEGGIE SHEPHERD'S PIE bit of a complicated recipe but looks like it could be worth it

- IRISH COFFEE one of my favourites

- GUINNESS AND TOFU STEW I really want to try this one

If you've got any St Patrick's Day recipes send them to me and I'll add them to the list...x

Quinoa recipes

Quinoa, herb and pomegranate salad

Quinoa rice pilau with dill and roasted tomatoes

Here's some more but I'll add to this soon...

Winter Olympics: Gold and silver medalist Hannah Teter on being a vegetarian and posing for Sports Illustrated

Loads of my Google alerts are about American snowboarder Hannah Teter at the moment. I'm not interested in snowboarding so I haven't explored them much but she said something really positive about turning veggie last year.

She said: "I started that last year and feel stronger mentally and physically, and springier." (Read the whole interview with People Magazine.) I sometimes wonder how different I'd feel if I ate meat and fish: would I be fatter/ thinner, more alert, have healthier skin, hair etc...?

Having been a vegetarian for so long I have nothing to compare how I feel with. I guess I need to read the book I blogged on yesterday about the life-long vegetarian who started eating meat for health reasons.

Anyway...back to Hannah Teter. She eats loads of Quinoa. Quinoa is weird but really good for you.

Check out the blog post I've written on Quiona recipes. If you send your recipes and pics to jokelly2@googlemail.com I'll add them to the blog too.

Going slightly off on a tangent (but it's still connected), I found a piece written today about how vegetarian diets don't limit athletic excellence.

Sarah Gross writes: "Vegetarian diets are growing in popularity among athletes, for numerous reasons.

" One study by the Yale Medical Journal found that vegetarians are often more capable of maintaining athletic endurance than their meat-eating counterparts."

It's really worth a read. You'll find it here.