GC has been a vegan for two days now. I was only a vegan for a few hours, then I downgraded to vegetarian because I needed dairy products in my coffee. We’ve been wondering about vegan/vegetarian menu planning. Like…what do you eat? So far we’ve been eating oatmeal and salads and pumpernickel toast and fruit and stuff, and for dinner we’ve been going to The Table. But we can’t go to The Table every night. What should we make for dinner?
We were both averaging over 15,000 steps a day throughout January, February and March, which would have put us on track for six million steps this year. We lost momentum and slacked off in April and May. Yesterday I walked just over 5,000 steps. We need to somehow get back on track soon, since we signed up months ago to walk the half marathon on May 29th. That’s about 30,000 steps.
For those of you who were wondering what the Melting Snow Pile prize was, Valerie blogged about it.
GC’s son got accepted into medical school yesterday!
Shhhh. There’s going to be a Surprise Going-Away Bloggers Breakfast Party for XUP on Saturday June 11th. Email me for secret details.
Why not borrow some cookbooks from the library? There are a kajillion veg*n cookbooks to explore.
Or local blogger http://www.itaintmeatbabe.com can provide you some inspiration and, again, there are a bazillion veg*n bloggers to explore.
To answer your question I’ll tell you what I ate yesterday.
Breakfast: Homemade granola (with soy milk) and black coffee (though Silk does make a soy creamer, btw). I make one batch of granola a week, it’s easy and you can tailor it to your tastes.
Morning snack: Raw walnuts
Lunch: Quinoa salad with kalamata olives, sundried tomatoes, spinach, sliced toasted almonds, and a dressing I whipped up with fresh parsley, olive oil, etc. (I made a big batch of this quinoa on Sunday and eat it on top of fresh spinach each day for lunch.)
Supper: Big bowl of red lentil and potato soup (I threw this together with what I had lying around: coconut milk, little red chili peppers, onion, garlic, a can of roasted tomatoes, and lime juice) over brown rice. (I made a huge pot of this and froze individual servings for brown bag lunches or dinner another time.)
Dessert: Mexican snickerdoodle cookies (from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar) for dessert.
Enjoy!
I’m far from being vegan these days (what with counting turkey eggs and planning turkey dishes for next winter) but I suggest you go to the library and look for some good macrobiotic recipe books. Macrobiotic isn’t specifically vegan, but a great deal of it is, and it is based around the seasons, local foods, intensely nourishing, and satisfying.
Thing great grain and bean casseroles and soups and big salads that incorporate grains and beans too.
Where you stumble with it all is in not being able to plan ahead – you want to take some time to plan on soaking beans, and almonds, and making sprouts. A good macrobiotic recipe book will be full of quick ferments like pickles that are ready in a few days. My favorite cookbook author is Michio Kushi – check out this site (wish I’d had the internet back when I was vegan!) http://www.kushiinstitute.org/
I was about to recommend a certain blog, but I see someone else beat me to it!
The way I decide what to eat on a regular basis is by making sure all my meals have three elements: protein (beans, tofu, nuts, seitan if you’re fancy
fruits/vegetables (lots of greens, sweet fruits, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, zillions more) and grains (brown rice, quinoa, whole grain breads, pasta, etc). I do that for every meal and it keeps me well fed.
Yesterday I had a banana smoothie and a whole grain pita with tahini and honey for breakfast, a rice and lentil and vegetable dish for lunch, walnut oatmeal muffins and pineapple for a snack, and roti with carrots, potatoes, and seitan for dinner (David made that, I take no credit!)
Good luck! And we would happily have you over for dinner some time if you’d like!
J.
My favourite vegan cookbook is vegancomicon. it is just excellent! i keep trying more recipes and they are mostly hits.
Also, there are excellent vegan blogs out there such as
http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/
i’m not a vegan but i enjoy cooking vegan – takes a little more imagination and we end up with healthier yummier more nutrient dense meals.
My favorite veg cookbooks are The Student’s Vegetarian Cookbook, by Carole Raymond, and Love Soup, by Anna Thomas, who also wrote The Vegetarian Epicure.
I hope Peter’s recent return to health has been an inspiration! His starting vegan cookbook was “Get healthy, go vegan” by Neal Barnard, MD.
For dinner, we cook rice or noodles or potatoes as a starch and then pile any vegetable we have in the house on top, add whatever other flavour you crave (ginger, garlic, curry, soy sauce, you name it) and enjoy. Sometimes, I just want a meal of boiled potatoes, carrots and broccoli with salt and pepper. You can add a little olive oil for fat and flavour. I am not totally vegan so I like to shave on some curls of parmesan for flavour. A pan full of fried mushrooms is delicious! And they don’t need fat because they make a lot of liquid while they are cooking.
Being mindful is the key. Sit quietly and enjoy each mouthful. Give thanks for the vegetable that you are eating. We also don’t substitute. I don’t like soy pretending to be meat. And there’s nothing better than a carrot pulled straight from the ground (of course, if you are fruitarian, that would be murder, so thank goodness we are not that!)
I’ve been vegan on and off. Most things are vegetables. There are more species of that than animal species we often eat. Mushrooms, maple syrup, all kinds of pastas and grains, lentils and spices.
Most of what I blog at EatenUp is vegan. A lot of nuts, fruit, veggies. For coffee creamer there is a soy alternative. And an almond milk concentrate too.
Going away breakfast makes sense since XUP has gone away from blogging
I don’t want to start a food fight but you may want to consider doing some research on paleo/primal eating as an alternative to vegan/vegetarian. There’s some pretty solid evidence that ditching the grains in favour of ethically and biologically-appropriately raised meat products and veggies has many beneficial effects on health. It’s also not all about the meat, I eat more veggies on paleo than I ever did as a wannabe vegetarian.
Oops. Guess what happened while I was on vacation! Woohoo. She is back!
I read your blog, so I guess it’s not supposed to be a “secret” surprise breakfast. What are you and Rob going to eat at the breakfast? And why such a drastic change in your diets? Sometimes it’s better to do these things slowly – eliminate one food group at a time so it’s not such a big shock and you’re not totally lost as to what to eat. So, maybe eliminate dairy – find ways to deal with that and when you’re comfortable, pick something else to eliminate. I think it’s got to be better for your system, too, to not deprive it of everything it has become used to all at once.