Not Easy Being Green

I've been moping around this past week, complaining of being over tired. 

Who am I kidding, I do that every week. 

But I had a doctor's appointment coming up today anyway so I started adding to my whine, "I wonder if I should just get my iron checked."

"They're probably just going to tell you to stop staying up until 1am," husband informed me.

"You shouldn't be anemic if you're eating enough vegetables," husband's best friend, who is Vegan, added.

Men.

I knew they were right on both counts.  Hate it when that happens.  I can give you 803 reasons to justify staying up until 1am, but not eating enough vegetables as a vegetarian...yeah. That's totally my bad.

When I started this lifestyle, I was excited to load up my grocery cart with green things.  I was inspired to discover how to do this healthy, ethical-eating thing.  And I did well.  But then I got lazy.  I started eating like a preschooler again.  The priority was horking down the cheese and the carbs before even considering a vegetable or even a fruit, because they tasted better.  Kids eat up all the pears?  I play the martyr and "let them eat them all," as they do, after all, come first.  What?  Have an at-the-ready apple instead?  Uh, no thank you.

Bad. Bad bad bad bad bad. I also think I get my water needs met through coffee and the milk in my cereal.  So. 

I had my labs drawn anyway today; my iron is fine, but we're still waiting on results from folic acid levels, which can be more accurate in diagnosing anemia.  In the meantime, I went on a grocery run today and stuffed my cart with green.  Okay, it wasn't stuffed with green, but at least five items were, and that's four more than I've been tossing in there.  I strategically placed them on the check-out belt first before the check-out clerk, who most certainly doesn't give a flying head of cauliflower what I purchase, could cast a judgemental glance at the Scooby-Doo snack crackers and Oreos that came just behind the bag of spinach.

Maintaining this vegetarian thing isn't easy. But today I'm returning to kicking myself in the fatigued butt, folic acid be damned, and working harder to enjoy what really should be on my plate.  And considering the baked goat cheese and herbed tomato bruschetta with Caesar salad and fresh parmesan dinner I had tonight, really, I think I'll be okay.

Quichey, Quichey

1) Yes, I'm still here.  December was...was...a whole lot of ink on the calendar and endless post-its of to-do and to-buy and to-call lists.  To-blog didn't make the cut.  I still have Christmas cards to mail.

2) Yes, I'm still a vegetarian.  I considered a meal or two of exception with the holidays, as our family's traditions include Swedish meatballs on Christmas Eve, and it's like eating a memory, a very tasty memory.  But in a timely twist, my sister decided to mix it up and cook up something totally different.  And while her pecan-crusted fancy-pants tenderloin made me drool right onto my salad, I held my own and stuck with the comfort food side-dishes of lefse, mashed potatoes, fruit salad with fruit-cancelling marshmallows, carrots, more lefse, some lefse, a bowl of cranberry-squash soup my incredible Mama bought just for me, Oreo truffles, and some lefse.  I fared just fine.

Still bewildered by last month's aftermath, I find myself unable to travel down any written path considered thought-provoking, so I'll just stick to something simple: what I had for dinner tonight.

I got a fantastic cookbook for Christmas: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, by Mark Bittman.  I flipped through this food-version of War and Peace and landed on a chapter about eggs and cheese.  There I read about quiche.  Quiche!  Of course!  I like quiche!  Why haven't I thought about making this before?  Here is my simple cheddar-and-feta quiche with Rosemary.  (Of note: I might have used my favorite Pillsbury cheater pie crust again, as I did in the Indian Pot Pie that I blogged about last year in 2013). 

And yes, that is roasted broccoli you see there.  It still hasn't killed me.  Which is good, because then my blog site moniker would be all kinds of wrong.

My first attempt at this dish?  Come over here, pucker up and gimme another quiche. I did good.

Hello, Avacado

As mentioned in my opening post, the biggest challenge I face in becoming a vegetarian is that I hate vegetables.  Most vegetables.  As in, the ones that taste like...vegetables.  Tomatoes, corn, beans, yes, of course, nobody's really repulsed by something that tastes more like a carb.  But branching out into the green is difficult for me.

So I'm exploring one new vegetable at a time.  Because seriously, if you tell me, "oh, just load up a bunch of veggies onto a pizza," or you make me a stir-fry, or tell me to put peppers and cucumbers and sprouts on a veggie sub?  Not gonna eat it.  I need to make peace with one plant at a time.

It's working.  Since my first post about not dying from the consumption of broccoli, I have voluntarily purchased said broccoli twice, and actually looked forward to eating it.  Say whaaaaaaaa?  I literally used to gag on it.  And now?  Dare I admit this...sometimes I actually have a broccoli hankering. 

Today I arranged a meeting with the avocado.  What? But don't you just love guac? you ask.  No, I don't.  I think I haven't liked avacado for the fact that it's 1) green 2) is high in (good) fat and yet doesn't taste like much of anything, which then makes me think of something akin to lard, 3) it's creepily smooth for a vegetable, like baby's butt smooth, and that's just weird, and 4) it's a vegetable. 

But I decided to try a recipe that included avocado today; this was referred to me by my friend Kelsey, who generously shared a whole batch of veggie recipes for me to try after reading my blog. It included avocado, yes, but it turns into...hold onto your britches... avocado cream sauce!  And anything paired with "cream sauce" is worth trying.  Here is the recipe for black bean patties with corn relish and avocado cream sauce:

http://www.annies-eats.com/2012/01/23/black-bean-patties-with-corn-relish-and-avocado-cream-sauce/

Before making the sauce, I bravely took a baby-sized bite of avocado.  What was I so afraid of?  It wasn't that bad.  In fact, it tasted vaguely like a nut.  It's still a weird texture, but maybe I can look past that; the taste was actually okay.

The whole recipe, on the other hand....was more than okay!  Michael consumed his meal before I ate mine, and with a twinkle in his eye and a mischievous smile he said, "This is fantastic.  A+.  Seriously, you're gonna love this."  And love it I did. 

Pass the sauce, please.  Avacado: we can be friends, after all. 

Four and Twenty Vegetables

A beautiful thing has happened.

Not only am I thinking about vegetables now, but I've got you thinking about vegetables, too.

I've heard from a lot of you that you're not vegetarian, but would like to be headed that direction.  Or at least on the frontage road.

I've also heard from a bunch of you that when you think about your favorite recipes...well, how about that: they happen to be vegetarian!

This has resulted  in 1) You sharing your favorite recipes with me  (thank you!) and 2) You wondering: what am I eating, and can I share the recipes with you?  (why yes, I can!)

Today's recipe comes from my friend Julie.  She says this recipe is a staple at her household.  I tried it because Julie and her family are not crazy, so if they like this dish, it couldn't be that bad.  I also tried it because the recipe has the word "pie" in it.  (Aren't you glad I didn't say "pot?")

Literally, this recipe called for pie crust.  Well, okay, "pastry sheets," but let's be real, it's pie crust.  My sister gave me props because when I sent her a picture of it, she said it looked like a magazine shot.

 Then she went on to say how afraid she is of making pie crust.  Ohhhhh, nononononononono, I interjected- I bought the pie crust, thank you very much.  A lovely little box of pre-made crust; all you have to do is unroll it off of the parchment.  I've made pie crust twice before and while it turned out in the end, there was a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth during its production.  So do yourself a favor and unless you're Mrs. Pillsbury, or have four hours and lots of emotions to spare, buy the dough.


So how do four and twenty vegetables baked in a pie taste?

Survey says: DELICIOUS. Thumbs up from me, the hubs, and one out of two children (the one nay-sayer never met an unprocessed food he wasn't suspicious of, so he doesn't count).

Here's the link for Indian Pot Pie.  Thanks for sharing, Julie!


http://www.vanilla-and-spice.com/2011/12/indian-pot-pie.html

Learning Curve

It's been almost two weeks since I sat crying and convicted after learning some difficult truths through the documentary "Vegucated," and I'm happy to report that I'm still a vegetarian.

Well, almost.

The resources available through social media, the interweb, and yes, the library, mean that I have all the information I could ever desire on going vegetarian, right at my hungry fingertips.  But the plethora of information causes me to stumble back, overwhelmed, a bit timid to fully jump into getting vegucated myself.  I'm afraid I might drown.  So I've dipped a toe or two into some websites, thrown out a question here and there on Facebook, and ordered a couple of magazines on how to get started on the road to eating more compassionately and getting healthier.

Most of my research so far, though, has been within myself.  I'm thinking a lot about the recipes I usually make, and if meat is part of why I like them.  I have courageously started to think about what I might miss- not about meat in general, but about specific dishes.  I have a killer healthy recipe for baked sweet and sour chicken that my whole family devours.  It's so good that it's actually worth the almost hour and a half it takes to prepare.  And then there's burgers.  When I go out to eat, which is not very much, I just crrrrrave a good burger.  A burger and fries.  And the blissful burger-fries-shake combo.  It's not often that I do that, but for the special occasions when I do...I'm going to miss that.

No doubt there are eager veggie readers who are saying out loud as you read this, "oh, just roast cauliflower instead of the chicken and use the same sweet and sour sauce!" or, "you can still have the fries and shake, and even the burger- just make it a veggie burger!"  I know, I know.  There are meat substitutes of every imaginable kind.  There are modifications to any recipe.  You can make any favorite dish by just altering a couple of ingredients.  I get it.  But you know what?  It still won't be the same.  I am certain that there will be times where I just want that one certain thing.

But then I revisit the reasons that have led me to sacrifice those certain things, and still feels like the very right thing to do.  Will I have the occasional burger?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I'll just have to see.

Learning how to go vegetarian (and especially vegan, which I'm not, for now) takes time.  I prepare all of the meals in our household, and I'm often cooking for six under our roof.  I'm a coupon-er, a meal planner, and very meticulous about my battle plan for groceries and cooking.  It takes a lot of time.  And now I'm adding in this whole new component of vegetarian.  Do I just make what I normally would and make my food different by omitting meat or using a meat substitute?  Do I alter everyone's meals?  Do I research a whole new batch of go-to's?  I'm still figuring it all out.

So far, I haven't been courageous enough to try out the "real" vegetarian foods like tofu, tempeh, lentils, flax seed, and crazy making like that.  (I am apparently justified in calling these foods crazy, as my spellcheck doesn't even think "tempeh" or "quinoa" are real words. So.)  Oh, no, wait- I did try quinoa, with fairly good results- more on that later.  I did my research about tofu and bought a package, and it sits in the sandwich drawer of my fridge.  I checked the expiration date so I know what day I must be brave by.  You can expect a tofu-themed blog on December 16th, and no sooner.

Basically I'm making meals I'm familiar with but without the meat, and being creative with the recipe.  We had soft shell tacos, for example, and instead of taco meat, (and instead of gathering my courage for veggie crumbles), I blended taco seasoning in with plain Greek yogurt (which we use instead of sour cream).  Success.  I'm also finding that a lot of "comfort" winter-y foods are vegetarian, and was excited to try one out: a tortellini soup. 

"What's in this?" Michael asked between slurps.
"It's soooo simple, and so tasty," I say.  "Jarred spaghetti sauce, chicken broth, and cream cheese.  And pre-packaged pesto tortellini."
"Chicken broth?!"
"Yep!  I know it sounds weird, but hey, it's tasty-"
"Chicken broth?""
"Um...."
"Doesn't chicken broth come from....chickens?"
(Hence my comment about being almost vegetarian this week.  Whoops.)

And then I cried, and puttered around the kitchen for something else to eat.  Seriously, how could I have made such an obvious mistake?  I wasn't upset about having eaten it the night before and "ruining" my record for going without meat- okay, maybe I was, just a little- but I was more upset knowing that I do need to sit down at some point and figure this stuff out. I'm eating too much dairy- vegan or no vegan- I know that.  And my sodium intake is probably off the charts.  I wanted to start by focusing on what I could still eat, to stay positive; so that has included salt and vinegar almonds, popcorn, a lot of cheese, yogurt, and some more cheese.  At some point I need to be exploring those legumes and tempeh.

I will, however, proudly shout from any dining room tabletop that I have increased my fruit and veggie intake from two servings a day (ahem- yes, I know) to five to seven a day.  So that's awesome.  I knew I was doing something right last week when I was grocery shopping and, after having walked away from my cart, returned to it and had to do a double take.  I wasn't sure it was mine at first.  But it was, in all of its rainbow glory, filled with good things for my body to ingest.

Another sign that I'm doing okay is that this week, my kids, including picky picky picky picky picky (did I mention picky?) eater Oliver, have been requesting fruit in between meals.  They even sneak it, thinking they're being mischievous.  Charlie drags around a container of baby tomatoes all around the house and today I found him sneaking a bunch of grapes, looking like he got caught in the cookie jar when I found him.  Oliver asked me for grapes the other day and I said, "um, we don't have any in the house today."  "Okay," he said, "Can I have an orange then?" And yesterday, he actually asked if he could "pleeeeeease" have a banana, then cheered like he won the state lottery when I gave him one.

"That's because of you, " Michael said, "you did that. "

And then my eyes welled up again.  This time,  I did something right.

This, my friends, is good.  This has happened in less than two weeks.  I can do this for my kids.  I can do this for me.  I'm ready to learn more.

Help! There's Something Green In My Blender!

Gotta love Pinterest.  You find a pretty picture and find fantastic promises about it underneath- and because someone wrote it, it must be true.  Loose all your belly fat with this five-minute workout five days a week!  Break open a glow stick in a jar with glitter and you get fairy dust!  A 2-ingredient meal that takes one minute that your family will love!

I admit being duped by the fairy dust, and a red-white-and-blue layered 4th of July Drink that turned into a muddy purple, so have come to be a little bit cautious about their claims. 

When I decided to try to make friends with vegetables last week, there was a bag full of spinach in my fridge which triggered me to remember that I had a pin with a Grinchy-green smoothie on it.  I looked it up, and it instructed me to "drink this every day and watch the pounds just slide right off! Gives you so much energy!  I LOVE green smoothies!"  I half-believed one of those statements.  The one about the energy.  Certainly not the one about loving green smoothies, that couldn't be right.

The one time I had a bite of seaweed-wrapped sushi, all I could think of was "sick, this tastes like SEAWEED!" and I dry-heaved.  More than once.  At the table.  At a formal church benefit dinner.  After Charlie was born, in hopes of getting my breastmilk to come in, I mixed this mega-vitamin Yelixir crap into flavored water and chugged it down three times a day.  The lactation consultant told me it would taste "green."  It tasted like a cross between cabbage and grass and  I ha. ted. it.   I still can't drink any flavored water without gagging.

So the idea of drinking a green smoothie was not appealing.  But the Pinterest promise of more energy was a bit tempting, and I liked the other ingredients, which were not green:  applesauce, orange juice, a banana, five strawberries, and a cup of yogurt.  The green part was 2 handfuls of spinach.  Groan...handfuls? Plural?  I pretended to have tiny little porcelain doll hands and gingerly dropped the spinach into the blender, piled high with fruit.

Okay, I admit it.  It looked kind of pretty.

Until I blended it together.  It was the color of ectoplasm, or the boogers you have on your sixth day of a cold, or moss - which was precisely what I expected it to taste like.

I put a pretty straw in it to make myself feel a little better about drinking it.

I am thrilled to say that not only was I able to drink this stuff, I didn't gag, and- hold onto your plants- I liked it.  I liked it!  If it were in a cup that wasn't clear, I would have thought you handed me a plain 'ol fruit smoothie.  Can't taste the spinach at all.  In fact, I've had one every day for the past three days, and my boys love it too.  I'm sure I've lost at least 45 pounds so far drinking spinach smoothies, because Pinterest said I would so it must be true.  I LOVE green smoothies!

In The Beginning

This is me.  (Hi.)

 

This is the beginning.

I hate vegetables.

Do I sound like I'm four? 

I also eat like I'm four. 

I love breakfast, and if I ate breakfast foods for three meals and two snacks a day I'd be very, very happy.  I love carbs, I love dairy, and I adore baking.  Fruits are fine but I'll always eat the cheese or crackers or peanut-butter slathered sammich first.  I'll make sure peaches or bananas or oranges or pineapple get on the plates of the four kids in my house and if there's some leftover, I might get around to eating it after I get the dishes done and the crusted food scrubbed off of the children. 

Meat's okay, but it's best in the form of pepperoni on a pizza, or chicken all tucked into a bed of marinara and cozied under a blanket of fresh mozzarella.  Oh, and I do love me some hamburger- though I have made the switch to ground turkey to be healthier.  If we go out to eat though, you can bet your 2 for $20 deal that I'm going for the real stuff, likely paired with, you guessed it, cheese.  There's this one burger at a nearby restaurant where the meat lives in between two pieces of cheesey, herby foccacia toast and has, like, 26 forms of cheese spilling itself all over it.  I just wiped off a little bit of drool off my keyboard.

Oh, and remember, I hate vegetables.  I just don't like the way they taste.  I'll eat green beans and peas because they don't taste all that veggie-like to me.  Oh sure, I'll eat tomatoes and corn, too.  I'm not an android.  What's that you say?  I must like carrots, because everyone likes carrots?  Wrong-o.  I think carrots taste like Palmolive soap.  I will use them, along with similarly-soapy celery, as a catalyst to get ranch dip into my mouth, and that's how I get them down.  But if they're texture is anything but super-crunchy, I won't touch them. 

At the end of a long day of eating awesome like this, when the kids are in bed, I'm usually unwinding by watching something in my Netflix queue, or at least have something on in the background while I'm doing something else (like alternating pinning recipes for cheesey carbey baked stuff and articles about clean eating and squats).  Two nights ago I was doing just that, having chosen to watch a documentary called "Vegucated."  The independent film followed three volunteers who agreed to go Vegan for six weeks and learn about its history, philosophy, and benefits.  I'm always up for a good documentary.

I pinned nothing for the next hour and a half.  I was captivated. 

It was a smartly-done, very entertaining look at being Vegan; but not only was it a really well-made film...it actually Vegucated me.   I can look at a pig and say, "that pig will die so I can eat my bacon."  I can look at a cow and have no trouble ordering that patty melt goodness I mentioned.  I'm a subscriber to the cycle of life as God has created it.

What I didn't know was how that process has evolved over time.  Due to increasing demands of consumerism, things have to be done more in mass;  animals are suffering through the process, a very real suffering; and the pollution this is all creating is staggering.  And that is as far as I'm going to go with the information, because I want to be clear that whatever your choices are in your eating lifestyle, I fully support you.  I have farm friends, I have vegan friends, I have vegetarian friends, I have meat-obsessed friends.  I love all of you and am happy to eat dinner with you any time. If you're interested in the information I learned about, you can look it up yourself.  The purpose of this new blog is not to Vegucate you; it's for me to be very public about my limited palate, and my journey into making better choices.  I hate vegetables.  I am becoming a vegetarian. 

Yep, I said vegetarian, not vegan.  You're welcome to point out the obvious here that if animal compassion is a big part of my decision to do this, really I shouldn't be eating dairy products either.  I don't love cute little chicks any less than Wilbur.  But I need to start with something I can stick with, and I start to weep over the absence of egg salad, goat cheese on my salad, and really, cheeseless pizza?  No.  Just, no. 

But becoming a vegetarian.  I just might be able to do this.

Buoyed by lots of support and ideas and resources by a single Facebook post, I started small the very next day; I walked into Cub for milk and bananas and came out with broccoli, cucumber, spinach, zucchini, and tomatoes. 

My aunt suggested I start by appreciating the color of vegetables.  Which made me remember that while some people think it's weird and maybe a little annoying, I love food photography.  Food sits still.  Food doesn't worry about where to put their arms or how to get rid of their extra chins.  And, you know what?  Broccoli really is a lot prettier than a casserole. 

Oooh, pretty.

But, oh, I just still hate broccoli so much... I don't like it raw, I rreeaaaally don't like it's mushy nastiness when thawed from a frozen bag.  Broccoli cheese soup, you ask?  I must like broccoli in that form, at least.  No. No, I don't.  It still tastes like broccoli.  But most of these encounters were prepared by other people.  Maybe, just maybe, if I prepare the stuff, I can make peace with it and approach it with a little less judgement.

Another helpful tip from a friend who is, by profession, and nutritionist, is to start by pairing vegetables with a little bit of fat- say, a pat of butter.  Now, butter?  Butter I can do!  I steamed the broccoli, because that seemed to make it look a little more appealing.  And then I put on that lovely little golden square of...buuuttttterrrrrrr.....just drooled on my keyboard again, slurp, slurp.

I took a bite.  And you know what?  I didn't die.  I might have even enjoyed it a bit.  Don't go crazy; I said a bit.  The point is, if I didn't die from broccoli, then there is hope, one buttery green at a time.