Cooking vegetarian goodness
It's one thing to cook meat, bivalves, crustaceans, fish, cephalopods (octopuses, squids, cuttlefish etc), birds, amphibians, arthropods, or cetaceans (seals, whales, dolphins, etc), it's another to cook vegetables, grains, gourds, herbs, berries, sugar, dairy, eggs, nuts or fruits.
As such if vegetarian you don't want a reputation of cooking any of the above flesh if you don't eat it, some of this flesh I do eat (bivalves, crustaceans, birds (chicken specifically), and fish), and plan on eating whales some day, don't get me wrong, carnists think it's wrong to eat a whalemeat steak, I'm not a carnist, I'm a pollo-pescetarian since I don't eat unprocessed pork and aren't supposed to eat processed meats, hence I'm trying not to even eat ham. In a separate body I would eat baked beans, fritz and yucky stuff, but in my body with my identity I don't eat that stuff and I avoid yucky foods, drinks and sweets. But here's where it gets serious: despite not cooking any of this flesh, vegetarians still cook, and what they cook is veg, tofu, sugar, yeast flakes, yeast extract, nut savoury, veggie savoury cuts (I'm not sure if those two ingredients are extinct now), Nutolene, nutmeat, veggie links, TVP, and all that low quality stuff that doesn't taste as light or as good as steamed mussels or a paella which, as this is uncommon, contains artichokes, a normal paella contains red peppers, prawns, mussels, saffron, and hardened rice, but not much vegetables or any artichokes, and it uses white rice not brown rice, vegetarians eat brown grains and brown vegetable plants like sugar instead of the white ones, the average carnist eats white rice which has the husks removed, the irony is brown rice eaters are fatter than white rice eaters.
So with all this in mind cooking non-flesh foods doesn't make any sense, but the reality is grains, vegetables and nuts have to be cooked, and vegetarians would also eat something else different, like a gazpacho with okra in it, and tofu sweet and sour with whole almonds in it, sweet and sour beef for example doesn't contain any almonds, although it's thickened with arrowroot, and sweetened with palm sugar and pineapple and contains rice wine vinegar if you wanna get authentic. Unauthentic versions exist, with brown sugar (not palm sugar), pineapple, and cider vinegar, and also tomato paste and light soy sauce, the above, with almonds and no animals in it, isn't authentic, it's a veganised version pioneered by Leah Leneman and now adopted in Asian or Chinese restaurants.
A vegetarian isn't just cooking special foods, but special foods with a whole bundle of vegetables, like artichokes, okra, broccoli, almonds, walnuts, soybeans, carrots, parsnips, turnips, onions, peas, beans, lentils and potatoes, all in what's tasty to a vegetarian. It's not about how delicious it is, meat is delicious but that doesn't mean I'm going to eat it, it's about mercy for the animals.