October Vegan Last Day

This was it.  THE LAST DAY!  Mom and I have completed the 31 days of our no animal products trial!  In celebration, and in preparation for the morrow, mom went to the store and bought all sorts of dairy for herself – whole milk (for cereal), half and half (for coffee), and fage yogurt (the thick greek style yogurt, for breakfast).  I’ve never seen someone so excited about dairy.  Mom’s take aways: she can live very happily without meat (and shall continue to do so for the near future), must have dairy (as that is what brings joy into her life), and soy products don’t agree with her body.  My take-aways: I thoroughly enjoyed myself and the foods I ate, really liked how my food choices changed up and what being vegan caused me to eat everyday, and have mostly not missed meat, dairy or eggs (that much).  I feel good.

I finally got to make miso soup today, and I think it turned out very good, though not quite as good as what you get in restaurants (they probably use animal products, like fish stock, CONFESS).  Poor mama took one sip and was all like “Oh NO I cannot eat that, ugh”.  Bless.

So what happens now?  Am I running out in the morning and having an animal product free-for-all? Am I going to cover everything I eat in cheese?  Am I going to tackle the first cow I see and start gnawing on a leg?  The most popular question I’ve been asked is “DOES YOU WANNA HAS A BIG STEAK?”, to which I’ve mostly answered “not particularly, thank you”.  Come on now.  Really.  SO?  What happens next?  File this away with other unanswerable questions, like how did the Egyptians build the pyramids, and how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop.

I just don’t know.

Today’s Menu:

• Breakfast: oats/maple syrup/cinnamon/flax oil, coffee with soy milk
• Lunch: went out to eat with a group from church, had a veggie wrap (uber good), baked chips, and unsweetened tea
• Dessert: two (or three) of my homemade vegan cookies (they have grown on me)
• Dinner: miso soup and a salad
• Drink: coffee with soy milk

One more day, what what?

Tomorrow is the last day of our month long trial!!  I can’t believe it’s already here.  Man … October is a quick month!

Saturday.  Slept in.  Glorious.  Enjoyed my coffee in my pjs.  Heaven.  Went to a baby shower in the afternoon, where I soaked up some girlie time with friends, ate fresh fruits and veggies and punch, and sadly did not eat the homemade amazing cake made in the shape of a baby popping out of a present.  Super cute.  It looked really tasty.  I could tell I was starting to focus in on the cake like “doesn’t that look good, I wonder what it tastes like” and “look how happy everyone looks eating that cake”, then the self pity started to flow “I can’t believe I won’t get to have any, what kind of freak am I?” and “I feel so left out”, but then I took myself under control and stopped thinking about cake all together.  Catastrophe averted.  Instead I positioned myself close to the mommy-to-be and watched her open her mountain of presents.  Ah, presents.  The part of me that’s still a little girl and the part of me that wants to be a mother were equally delighted by all the little baby items, the baby socks, the darling outfits with ruffles on the butt, etc. etc.

Saturday means baking, and doubly so as last weekend I was all at work and junk. Triply so as I needed to reward myself for not having baby shower cake.  I had two recipes selected, both from the new cooks books.  I decided to go with the cookies first.  Everything was going so well, until I had to cream together the butter/sugar mixture with soy milk.  The recipe said to beat until creamy.  In real life, the soy milk completely separated from the butter and refused to be integrated, no matter how much I beat it.  I was left staring at a disgusting heterogeneous mixture thinking “I’ve failed again”.  Why does vegan baking hate me?  My resolve hardened.  I wasn’t going to get upset.  I equally wasn’t going to give up.  I was going to win.  I carefully reviewed the directions, the measurements, and what precisely I had done, and landed on what I thought was the failing point.  I had added cold soy milk to the butter/sugar batter.  I thought cold milk may have caused the butter to reject being all creamy and happy.  So I dumped the nasty science experiment down the drain (not the easiest decision as I was tossing like 4 bucks worth of vegan ingredients) and decided to start over, this time with room temp milk.  Guess what?  I got the same results.  Lumpy butter ick floating around in murky brown liquid.  Fine.  If it was going to act this way, I wasn’t going to let that stop me, and I added the dry ingredients, then the dairy free semi-sweet chocolate chips, spooned it up on cookies sheets, sent them to their fate in the hot oven, and make myself cookies by force of will.  Granted once the dry (flour and oats and whatev) was added, the batter strongly resembled real cookie dough, so that helped.  Results?  Decent cookies!  Not very sweet, though, so no one was thrown into ecstasies by eating them, but at least I would feel no shame in feeding these to people.

Today’s Menu

• Breakfast: coffee with soy milk
• Lunch: one piece of toast with peanut butter and strawberry jam
• Snack: baby shower food: veggies and little fruit kabobs and punch and bread rounds with tomato bruschetta on top
• Snack: half an apple and an Izze
• Dessert: cookie dough and one cookie
• Dinner: homemade pizza
• Drink: coffee with soy milk

 

Look pretty good, don't they? They remind me more of scones than chocolate oatmeal cookies though. The good thing is you can really eat um up as they don't feel bad for you.

 

The 29th Day of Vegan-ness

I feel bad – I keep going out to eat, and then brining my leftovers home all like “here Mom, you can eat this for lunch”.  That can’t be enjoyable, always eating someone else’s leftovers.  Reheated.  Ewe.

Friday is a happy day.  All my coworkers brought their kiddies in at the end of the day to trick-or-treat from office to office.  I like to see all the kids dressed up, especially the little ones.  We also had a costume contest, and I go to be a judge.  The participation was low, but the ones who did were really into it.  The Scooby Gang won.  Amy Winehouse came in second.  I kind of wanted to eat Halloween candy.  It was seriously everywhere.  Of course I didn’t – I’m not going to fail my trial now at the end like a ninny!!

Today’s Menu:

• Breakfast: oats/maple syrup/cinnamon/flax oil, coffee with soy milk
• Snack: PURE bar
• Lunch: half a peanut butter sammich, humus and carrots and bell pepper slices (see picture!), Izze
• Snack: v8
• Dinner: avocado enchiladas, chips and salsa, pomegranate margarita (I went out to eat again)

Veggie overload with humus - so crisp and tasty!

4 Weeks In

Thursday.  The sky looked like neapolitan ice cream – light sky above me (the vanilla), pink strip lower down (the strawberry), and then the dark horizon (the chocolate).  It was lovely, and thinking of it as a carton of neapolitan ice cream was funny.  And I laughed, demurely.

Today’s Menu:

• Breakfast: oats with maple syrup, cinnamon, and flax oil, plus coffee with soy milk
• Snack: soy yogurt
• Lunch: Nana’s red cabbage, 5 bean salad, Izze
• Snack: cornbread muffin
• Dinner: went out to eat with friends to a tex-mex kind of place, had vegetable fajitas, guacamole, and loads of chips and salsa

27th Day Vegan

I’ve been vegan one day for every year of my life.  I haven’t had MEAT in almost 4 weeks!  Nothing is as it was!!!!!

I’ve pre-ordered my Josh Groban CD, coming out next month.  Illuminations.  Have you?  If not, go, leave this blog, don’t finish reading, HURRY, and get your CD right away before it’s too late!!!  Too late for what exactly, I don’t know, but it’s a bad thing!

Today’s Menu:

• Breakfast: oats with CINNAMON (yes we finally have more) and maple syrup and flax oil, coffee with almond milk
• Lunch: 5 bean salad, Nana’s red cabbage, and a too sweet corn muffin
• Dinner: veggie chili, with soy cheese and tortilla chips
• Dessert: 2 Newman O chocolate cream filled cookies, with coffee and soy milk

October Vegan 26 and 6 Lost

I finally remembered to weigh myself, maybe it was Monday or Tuesday, and according to the scale have lost 6 pounds.  Calculating on my fingers quickly with the original 2 pound gained puts me at 4 net pound loss-age.  Thats grand and all, but not really telling, either for good or for bad, on the vegan lifestyle of less than 4 weeks.

The sky looked off today, like it was up-side-down, like I was seeing a reflection of the true sky, and if the ground and trees and buildings hadn’t have been firmly in their proper positions around me, I might have been convinced the sky was right and I was the one turned the wrong way.

Today’s Menu:

• Breakfast: what’s quickly becoming a routine – the oats/maple syrup/flax oil concoction, with coffee and soy milk
• Lunch: went out to eat at Nothing but Noodles (don’t get me started on that name, they sell loads of non-noodle dishes, and I hate bald faced lies), and got the spicy Japanese noodle dish (had to sub for rice noodles though as the manager thought that they were “safe” and the other were not) and it was really good.  I had looked up the menu before going (of course I did, I’m that person now) and googled a couple search terms to try and find something that said “you can eat this without worry” but totally failed to find that written approval.  I did stumble upon a great blog (which I’ve linked to MY blog) that says the only way to guarantee the food you’re eating is animal product free is to make it yourself.  How true.  I also had ice tea.
• Snack: tortilla chips and an Izze
• Dinner: boca burger decked out to the max
• Dessert: Rice Dream ice-cream cookie sandwich (wowza, that was good! however I looked at the nutritional info while I was eating it, and it’s loaded with fat and calories – wowza again)

Vegan Day 25

Monday.  So I was in the baking mood again tonight – for vegan cornbread.  Made a recipe from a certain cookbook (that also produced the failed pumpkin bread), and knew instantly that something was wrong as the batter was way too runny.  Then I tasted it.  It was also way too sweet.  DRAT IT ALL!  I went into recovery mode, and decided to add more cornmeal until the batter became the consistency of, say, pancake batter.  Now I had too much cornbread – I filled all 12 muffin cups and had leftover. Mom said just to toss it, but I don’t like to waste food (especially the expensive vegan varieties), so I decided to fry it in a pan with vegan butter.  Despite severe misgivings, intense feelings of failure, and utter disbelief that it could happen, the cornbread muffins and fried corn-cakes turned out nice and golden and perfect, except for one tiny detail.  THEY ARE WAY TOO SWEET!!!  Oh, and mom won’t eat them that way.  What does one do with overly sweetened cornbread?

Today’s Menu:

• Breakfast: oats/maple syrup/flax oil, coffee with almond milk
• Lunch: peanut butter and agave nectar sandwich, with an Izzy
• Drink: grande soy latte
• Dinner: red cabbage, homemade 5 bean salad, and two of the corn-cakes
• Drink: green tea

It looks so harmless now, but just wait.

A little crumbly maybe, and if you can get paste the super sweet, very good this way.

The finished product - 12 perfectly cooked and perfectly inedible muffins.

Day 24 – Midnight Flash Lightning Show

Worked all day AGAIN, and this time on a SUNDAY which is somehow much worse than on a Saturday.  I missed church.  The project I was working on was successfully completed, so at least there’s that.  I was given a gift though, as I was driving home near midnight.  A storm was moving in – a midnight sky is always dark, but it was darker still as the clouds were covering the stars and hiding the moon. And then FLASH a brilliant shot of lightning veined it’s way within the clouds, illuminating for that brief moment the complex layers and patterns high above us, in astonishing blue and purple and silver.  Again and again this happened.  It was like magic.  I almost couldn’t believe it.  If I hadn’t been up that late, driving home, I never would have seen this extraordinary flash lightning show, and that totally made it worth it.

Bonus: I wasn’t the only one awake and watching – a facebook friend was out with his CAMERA and totally capture this awesome photo:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/adam_oldacre/5113500604/

Today’s Menu:

• Breakfast: oats with maple syrup and flax oil, coffee and almond milk
• Snack: Larabar
• Snack: cashews
• Snack: Snapea Crips
• Dessert: Dark Chocolate Coconut Bliss
• Dinner: veggie chili and a hunk of sourdough bread

October Vegan Day 23

Worked all day on a Saturday.  Did not feel completely well as my allergies had their way with me.  Experienced loss of appetite.  Experienced crushing disappointment when I found out that Mellow Mushroom pizza dough/crust contains dairy, and thus I could not have the envisioned pizza goodness for dinner.  Ate little, worked much, lazed none.

Today’s Menu:

• Breakfast: oats/maple syrup/flax oil, coffee with almond milk (I’ve decided that of the “milks” out there I like soy best)
• Lunch: veggie sandwich (see picture, it was divine!)
• Drink: venti soy latte (did not finish, but it was extra good)
• Dinner: salad from Mellow Mushroom (yes, I was that person who goes to a pizza place and gets a salad – lame to the millionth degree)

 

I can't tell if this looks appetizing or not, as for me who has tasted it's goodness, this sets my mouth a watering.

 

 

Romaine, artichoke hearts, black olives, sun dried tomatoes, tofu, banana peppers, cucumbers, broccoli, and I think that's all.

 

22 Day Vegan eats Indian

October Vegan Day 22!

My allergies plague me.  I carried a box of tissues around with me … AT WORK. (Not really, the box wasn’t walking the halls in my arms or anything, but it was prominently displayed on my desk AND I did carry it INTO work this morning and a coworker totally saw me and was all like “WHAT IS UP WITH THE BOXEN OF NOSE PAPERS”. So there.)  I have a big project going live on Monday, so I worked late tonight, and will be working all day Saturday and Sunday.  Thus, the only entertaining topic related tidbit I can share is this: while scanning the internet for vegan medicine to relieve my sufferings, I came across some random post in some random forum that said “DON’T FEED THE VEGAN”.  Loved it.  Want a sign of it.

Today’s Menu

• Breakfast: oats/maple syrup/flax oil, coffee and soy milk
• Lunch: went out to eat, to and Indian cafe, and had a dosa crepe filled with potatoes, yellow curry, and mustard seeds, along with a spicy vegetable soup (this was heavenly, although the soup made my eyes and nose water, sorry I was too spastic to remember a photo)
• Snack: PURE par
• Dinner: stir fry over brown rice (I wasn’t hungry at all, so I only had a few bites )
• Drink: Starbucks venti soy latte (yay)