Reddit reviews Mayim's Vegan Table: More than 100 Great-Tasting and Healthy Recipes from My Family to Yours

I went vegan sometime in November of last year, so I'm not really in the crop of new vegans you're talking about, but I hope you don't mind me sharing anyway!

My conversion involved very little outside influence. I had always had a bit of a haze in my head about the distinction between vegetarianism and veganism, and eventually I just decided to look up the definitions. After understanding the distinction that veganism makes about excluding anything that an animal produces, it seemed that that was a more consistent view than vegetarianism, and one that I could definitely get behind. Add a dash of "Do unto others..." logical deduction, and I decided to at least give veganism a try. After all, it could at worst be a mild inconvenience for me, which is nothing compared to the burden placed on animals by my then-current behavior.

After a week or two, and a few awesome recipe discoveries, I made it a permanent change! Most of my family has been amazingly supportive. My mother and sister colaboratively searched for a good vegan cookbook to get me that Christmas (this one). My grandmother likes cooking for everyone, and has casually mentioned a few times how hard it is to make stuff that I can have, but she still tries, and I appreciate it a ton (and I've also helped out by prepping vegan meals for the whole family, and nobody seems to mind). I've got the one cousin who texts me 'hilarious' comics about pigs being bacon-seeds and other such annoyances, but whatever.

One of the most unexpected pieces of awesome actually came from work! I had only told 1-2 people at work (trying to void being the pushy vegan lots of people seem to get an instant hate-boner for), so when they announced a cookout, I packed a lunch for that day. To my surprise, they had picked up some (unexpectedly delicious) vegan burgers for the one vegan in the 50 or so person workforce. I was blown away.

\ Note: I actually had a (staunchly omnivorous) family friend later confess that he only tried one of my vegan stuffed peppers out of a sense of politeness, being pretty convinced it would be terrible. He then went back for seconds, then thirds... and now he wants my three best recipes, and he plans to give then a try! He's a regular hunter, and he wants a selection of vegan recipes. Wonders never cease.

Anyway, to answer your questions:

• They've been super supportive (for details, see above), and their attitude hasn't changed much at all (the above mentioned cousin has always been a bit belligerent, so me going vegan really just gave him something new to aim at).
  
  
• The vegan chili from Mayim's Vegan Table is amazing (especially after I discovered how well it went with some slices of avocado). Also, most stuff I've tried from the Minimalist Baker has been pretty awesome (these stuffed peppers are one of my favs).
  
  
• I haven't really been asked about it much, but mostly because I don't mention it very often. Most people only seem mildly interested, so the questions are correspondingly mild.
  
  
• This sub has been a good source of encouragement. It's nice to have a group of like-minded people to "hang out" with, even if I don't post much. There's lots of subtly different interpretation of the "edge cases" of veganism that I don't think I would have thought much about without the provocative conversations I've seen in the threads here.
  
  
• For the first couple weeks, I allowed myself a few vegetarian-level slips when I've gone over to my grandparents for the weekend, then decided that the nice tasting food wasn't enough to make up for the mild pangs of guilt after each of those slips. (Especially when there's plenty of nice food that doesn't have that problem!) I miss doughnuts a ton, though.
  
  
• I have done a cursory glance at my current posessions, and haven't found anything obviously non-vegan. Even if I had, however, I think I would have kept it until it "wore out". There's enough waste in this country that I would feel just as bad contributing to it as I would consuming something non-vegan. (Actually, I suppose I could just donate whatever it was to Goodwill or something, and repurchase the vegan version. Hadn't thought of that before.)
  
  
• Not too much, but it has brought a sense of mental assurance. I think i may have always has a vague sense of unease about eating meat, if not other innocent-seeming substances like milk, and going vegan has given me a general feeling of ease. Sort of like, at the very least, this is one thing I can be pretty sure is the Right Choice.
  
  
• I think I would tell myself to be less hesitant to try new things! I didn't hit several awesome vegan recipes because they contained ingredients I had always thought were sort of icky, but never actually tried. (non-dairy butter? soy milk? tofu?!?)
  
  Thanks for reading this far. I have no idea how to tl;dr that mess, but if you read this far, you're an awesome person! (Even if you didn't you're still pretty cool. Not everyone has time for a wall of text that size.)

As a different approach, try involving him in the food preparation process. Allow him to explore cleaning and preparing vegetables in various ways to help prepare food he'll be eating. Vegan food is fun to prepare because the taste-tests are always safe (no salmonella poisoning!) and delicious. See about growing plants with him or visiting a greenhouse, or looking up pictures of where food comes from online (I even do this sometimes, you would not believe how a cashew grows if you haven't seen it before). Also, it might be taste aversions, but it could be texture aversions too. Try a few different ways of cooking/preparing foods (e.g. peppers taste and feel way different depending if they're raw, stir fried, baked, etc) to see what he might like and talk to him about all of it so he can convey to you what his preferences are through his experiences.

If you want a vegan family-friendly cookbook, this is from Mayim Bialik. I haven't actually tried anything in it though...