So for the last few weeks, I've been spending a good deal of time compiling useful vegan tips and recipes. Hopefully, in a week, all this work will pay off by making my life much easier.
I'm actually getting pretty excited for the switch. I guess all this planning is at least helping to mentally prepare me. I had the idea in my head at first that this was all going to be about limiting what I could eat. No meat. No cheese. No ice cream! And I would sit around, trying to think about things I could cook. This is how my thought process would go.
Omnivore Songbird: Ooh, I could do eggplant parmesan. That's vegan right? With just a marinara sauce, not a meat sauce, obviously. -feels so proud of herself-
Herbivore Songbird: Actually... the whole.. parmesan thing kinda makes that not vegan at all.
And it just continued to spiral through my head like that, until I was starting to wonder what I had gotten myself into. Now, I know that I only agreed to this for one month, but in my head, I think of it lasting well... forever. I don't know if I really will be vegan for the rest of my life, and I won't know till after next month. But if, after this month, I feel as good as I hope I will, I don't see myself wanting to change back. Which started to freak me out even more. No pizza. Forever? No mac and cheese? For the rest of my life? And I know in my head that its only food, and as long as I'm getting enough to eat, I'm doing better than most of the world. But it's very difficult to maintain that mindset in the culture we life in. Food is so much a part of our culture. Think about it. Every holiday has it's own menu. For our birthdays, get together and eat. To catch up with friends, we get together and eat. For business meetings, we get together and eat! We live in a world where food is synonymous with pleasure. We live to eat, rather than realizing that we should eat to live. It's a very difficult mental transition to make. Moving on. After having my minor meltdown, I started looking for vegan alternatives to the foods I love. Some of them have really great alternatives, which I'm eager to try. Some.. well.. they have alternatives.. but I'm not sure I trust them. And honestly, I'd rather just eat grilled veggie sandwiches every day than try to recreate a vegan mac and cheese and have it turn out awful. Call my unadventurous, but I don't like being disappointed with things I cook.
But as I looked for alternatives, I came to another conclusion. There are a lot of awesome looking recipes here that I never would have even thought of! You ever feel like you get stuck in a rut, as far as your cooking goes? Like.. "Well, we have ground beef. We can have tacos, spaghetti or meatloaf". I always feel like my weeks go in an unending rotation of mexican, italian, american, italian, american, with maybe a sprinkling of indian or thai in there. Once you get so used to cooking a certain way, its easy to just get stuck using the same recipes over and over. And cookbooks are so often full of variations of the same old stuff! However, vegan cookbooks are different. Because of the limitations of possible ingredients, vegan cookbooks take their inspiration from all over the world. And, they find some really creative ways to use ingredients you are already familiar with. For example, a ricotta cheese substitute made from ground cashews and tofu with some spices? I don't know if I trust it, but its extremely well reviewed! Another upside of the vegan diet is the sheer variety of friuts and vegetables out there! With meat, you have beef, pork, chicken, and maybe seafood occasionally, if you roll that way. And whatever meat you choose, you're limited to building a dish around that. With vegan food though, there are so many opportunities to work with ingredients I've never used before. Like eggplant or collard greens or spaghetti squash or a pumpkin! I've never worked with a whole pumpkin, unless you count carving a face into it, and there's a pumpkin ziti recipe I'm really excited to try. =)
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, whenever you're dieting, whether cutting out animal products, or just trying to cut some calories, it is so easy to fall into the trap of thinking about everything you can't have anymore. The key is to change that mindset and focus on all the wonderful things you can have! And the other key, is to be creative! Just because you're cutting calories doesn't mean you have to eat a bowl of plain oatmeal every morning! Take note of all the ingredients at your disposal and put them together to make something better than the scrambled eggs and bacon you would be eating!
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