There are a lot of vegetarian-oriented tribes here.

If you're an omnivore, you may want to read through some of the threads to see if they're friendly to omnivores (vegans, especially, can be very fundamentalistic), but you can find them by using the search function at the top of any Tribe.net page, or you can visit my list of tribes, which I warn you is long.

Five vegetarian (in fact, completely vegan, or animal-free) foods and seasonings you can add to your pantry will revolutionize your menus and make you appear quite the health-food afficionado ;-) are these:

1. Bean curd, or tofu in Japanese. It's essentially cheese made out of soy milk instead of dairy milk. If you get the kind that's been curdled with nigari, it will have a somewhat crumbly texture, and if you get it extra firm, after you press the water out of it, you can cut it into strips or cubes that will have a consistency something like Indian paneer (soft cheese), or you can mash it and it will look something like scrambled eggs or egg salad. Tofu itself is rather bland and some people think it tastes like an eraser. If it's very fresh, it has a mild light taste that I have come to love. Tofu works very well added to stir-fries, I like to slice it thin and flat--not in strips--and pan-fry it in entirely too much oil until it becomes rather brown and crisp, and then eat the slices on sandwiches with lots of ketchup and onions and lettuce and stuff.

2. Tempeh, which is also a Japanese term, also comes from soybeans, which have been crushed but not mashed and rolled out into flat patties and then allowed to ferment until they are bound together like rice cakes, only still moist. Tempeh, too, is rather bland, but you can buy it pre-seasoned (you can buy tofu pre-seasoned as well). You can cube it or slice it into strips or bake or fry it in patty-size cakes, pretty much as you would do with tofu. A lot of people like tempeh with barbecue sauce or other punchy flavorings.

3. Wheat gluten, or seitan in Japanese. Gluten is what is left when you rinse all the starch out of wheat flour--it's the protein that gives wheat products their bulk, what allows bread dough to hold together as a mass of bubbles when yeast rises, and what allows pasta to hold together as a paste and to stand up to boiling. Seitan is about the consistency of Play-Doh and can be cooked in formless chunks or shaped and sliced or cubed. Like tofu, it is rather tasteless and so takes on the characteristics of whatever it's prepared with. Seitan is, I think, the "meatiest" of the three vegetarian staples I've mentioned so far, though it is more like bologna than steak, since there is nothing sinewy about it.

4. Texturized Vegetable Protein (TVP) is, I think, a brand name for protein that has been isolated from soy and freeze-dried, I think, and looks like crumbles of dry tofu. It makes a decent substitute for ground meat in vegi chili or vegi sloppy joe recipes. You just reconstitute it with water, and it has a texture reminiscent of loose hamburger. What a lot of people don't know is that a sizeable percentage of the ground beef served in many Taco Bell restaurants is actually texturized soy protein used as a stretcher for costlier beef. (The percentage of TVP to beef is determined by the individual franchise owners.)

With all meat substitutes, you will want to use more of most seasonings than you would for meat, because meat (the fat in particular) has a strong taste to it, but the milder-flavored soy and wheat analogs can handle lots of backup. The exception is salt--too much slat tends to overpower them. So I don't use sloppy joe mixes from packages, for example, when I make vegi sloppy joes.

The fifth thing I recommend is a seasoning:

5. Nutritional yeast flakes, which are a denatured (inactive) yeast that is a by-product of molasses production. The flakes may be flaky or powdery, depending on the supplier. (You can get them at Wild Oats stores, tho now that Wild Oats has been bought by Whole Foods, I'm afraid they may disappear--I've never been able to find it at Whole Foods, which is why I prefer Wild Oats. But that's really a separate rant.) I think the brand name they most often come by is Red Star, though I always buy them from bulk bins. Nutritional yeast is light and in fact yeasty-tasting, and it sort of dissolves in liquids and so can be used to thicken sauces. Vegans use it as a substitute for cheese sometimes, because of the yellow coloring and the mild sort of cheesy/nutty flavoring that many people find very pleasant. Nutritional yeast has a surprising amount of protein in it, and arguably (this is hotly contested) some vitamin B-12, which is not easily obtained by vegans. You can sprinkle nutritional yeast on popcorn (it has to have some kind of oil on it or the flakes won't stick) for a nice light taste that can reduce your need for salt or cheese corn, which usually has MSG in it. You can use it as a seasoning, as you might sprinkle, say, paprika or grated Parmesan on a dish, or you can use it by the measuring cup as a base for a sauce. There are some really good recipes for dairy-free mac-n-cheese-style dishes that use nutritional yeast to good advantage.

Nutritional yeast is not the same as brewer's yeast. It isn't produced by the same process and doesn't necessarily behave the same way in food preparation.

My understanding is that because nutritional yeast is inactive, it will not bother people with candidiasis, but one should probably check if that's a problem.

Try any of these, don't be afraid to experiment and don't give up on them if you botch a dish on the first or second try, and you just might revolutionize your menu.