The sustainable vegetarian

i have a bit of a dilemma here.. I want to switch our diet to primarily vegetarian in '08. We want to downscale the meat, and ideally, only consume organic, pasture fed local meat. The trouble is, is that buying fresh veggies during the fall/winter means buying out of season produce shipped in by truck and paying a pretty high price for them to boot ( especially the organic stuff). Building up a kitchen stock based on vegetarian meals is hard! Until my garden gets established, we'll be buying tasteless, non-local vegetables. We'll buy organic as budget allows, but it's not always possible to do that all the time.

So I'm stuck with a set of priorities here:
primarily vegetarian for health and ethical reasons
sustainability
budget.

Not necessarily in order. Anybody have any ideas, or recipes, or sympathy? heheh. We love rice but I'm not sure how long or how creative I can get with rice until the kids start to groan. also.. if you were setting up a kitchen based on mostly veggie meals, what would you have around all the time? I'm talking spices, essentials, etc. Any input would be greatly appreciated. =)