I drank water out of this coconut and then left it unopen in a fridge for few days, and this happened - see the yellow film. It is sticky and the taste is neutral. Doesn't look like mold. Is it bad, or is it good natural process?   
Here's my tricks and tips based on 25 years of being a vegetarian and cooking for a spouse who is not:   Avoid meat substitutes entirely for most meals.  They just don't satisfy, and simply act to remind you of the meat you're missing.   Learn to cook & like cuisines that do not require meat, or only require it in small quantities, including Middle Eastern, Mexican, Chinese, and Indian.  Many cuisines are primarily about vegetables, fruits, and grains, and as such you may even have eaten vegetarian meals from them without realizing it.  Middle American cuisine is your enemy here. Get away from the idea of having a "main dish".  It's not an acccident that the low-meat cuisines also tend to have lots of small dishes instead of one big one.  Mollie Katzen calls these "side-by-side dishes". Learn to be bold with spices.  While you can't replace the meat flavor, you can add other flavors, and if a dish has 3 Tbs of 6 spices in it, you're a lot less likely to think it needs meat.  Smoked salt also helps. Where meat substitutes do work is the few dishes where the meat is more of an accent and there's an appropriate product.  I've had luck with spicy veggie sausages in a base for gumbo, for example, and "bacos" can replace bacon crumbles.  Meat substitutes work best for things where the meat in question was very processed in the first place (sausages, hamburger) and will be heavily cooked. Tofu, Seitan, and Jackfruit can be delicious and useful ingredients on their own, but they do not taste or feel like meat.  They can sometimes satisfy a craving for protein, but really they're better eaten in dishes where they would shine anyway, mostly Asian cuisine (although really you can put just about anything in a taco).  Also, most tofu and seitan you can buy in supermarkets is very low quality, which doesn't help.   Hope that helps! 