I've gone vegetarian accidentally more often than I can count, but I'm pretty sure I've never endured a day without cheese or chocolate on my own volition.
I had a one-month stint with full-time vegetarianism in college, but it didn't stick. My grandmother offered me her beef burgundy, my favorite dish EVER, and I summarily resigned my veg ways and went back to my carnivorous self. I say that all to say that I knew I could go vegan, but I also know that I am, at heart, a meat and dairy eater to the core and that food habits die hard.
The whole point of this, for me, was to wholeheartedly invest myself in a vegan lifestyle for a day. If I was going to do it, I figured I should put forth all of the effort, research and planning that a real vegan would. I had a couple rules for myself:
- Eat one vegan meal that I would normally eat
- Order a vegan meal at a chain restaurant
- Cook with a meat substitute that isn't tofu (I've had tons of tofu in my life: I wanted to try something different)
- Drink a milk-substitute that isn't soy milk (I switched entirely to soy milk throughout college, so that wasn't anything new)
- Try a vegan ice cream
Now be honest, does this look vegan? For dinner I made baked tempeh enchiladas with rice and beans (and a salad too, not here in this picture)!
I cooked this dish all by myself from a recipe, representing the first time I've cooked a meal with a meat substitute, which just so happened to not be tofu, fulfilling objective number 3. I was so skeptical about this dish because raw temeph looks like a totally unappetizing slice of brain, but I was so unbelievably pleased by the outcome. Tempeh, when cooked correctly, has the texture of pork. Mark loved it as much or more than I did (surprise!!) and said I could cook it for him any time. Not kidding. This dish was to die for.
For dessert I had organic and all-natural "ice cream" made from coconut milk--no soy, no dairy, no gluten. You could have fooled me entirely with this one. The Amaretto-Cherry frozen treat was packed with it's stated flavors and fully satisfying as a dessert. It had the same texture of ice cream and 200 calories per serving to boot.
I learned a ton from researching, planning for and eating vegan foods. The main lessons were that eating vegan doesn't mean that you eat low-fat, all-organic or all raw foods. This challenge also showed me that eating vegan incorporates a lot of things that I already love, but that just require an extra step of thought. For the big kicker, vegan eating proved itself to be extremely filling--I didn't feel deprived all day.
Eating vegan did, however, buck the trend that I've tried to observe recently about trying to eat non-processed and local foods. Many prepared vegan foods are highly processed, as you can see with most any meat substitute. I guess we all, vegan or otherwise, pick our food battles.
Overall, this New Thing was a big challenge, a ton of fun and revelatory of the vegan lifestyle. I actually thought at the end of the day that with all of the vegan options, I should have tried to do this for a week instead of a day. How's that for a change of heart?
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I do have a secret that I need to confess. I had to go to Whole Foods to get many of the elements of my tempeh enchiladas. There, the staff was giving away samples of baked brie with fig sauce. I couldn't resist. I am only human.
