Vegan with jam

Category: Meals

  • End of First Week

    The first week was a great success. Food bills are substantially less. I’m losing weight. I feel better. It’s just as much fun to cook. I must be healthier, though that will take a little longer to determine for sure. My back doesn’t hurt as much, certainly a result of losing weight. And I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.

    Here is what I had yesterday:

    Breakfast: Tofu scramble. I have found it is best to put the tofu in early and then pretty much just let if dry out some. It seems to caramelize a bit, but maybe my color vision is not quite right. At any rate, it is very hard to distinguish this dish, when done right, from scramble egg with veggies added. Oh, and my standard recipe for this is to saute chopped onion and green pepper in a tablespoon of EVOO, to be joined by a half dozen hearty cloves of garlic, seasoned with black pepper and salt. Add the squished up tofu (I squeeze it between my fingers – and it makes a mess) before the garlic burns, and let it cook until sufficiently dry.

    I also had WW toast with Earth Balance spread and Welches Grape Jelly. Coffee of course.

    Lunch: We headed downtown after breakfast and took a bunch of pictures in the art district. Also revisited the WWI Memorial for pictures of the city. Some of them came our very nice. Mary did her exercise walk with her “buddy” and came back as I was finishing up at the Liberty Memorial. We then drove down to the art district, followed by the city market. A pretty full morning. We bought some spices at the market and a few other things.

    Back home for lunch and had a PB&J with an apple. Spent the remainder of the afternoon going over the pictures.

    Dinner: Had the lentil/kale stew. I think Mary has already posted the recipe for this, now one of our favorites.

  • Dissertation on Being Boring & Comments

    First things first. I’ve just discovered to my surprise (I guess discoveries are typically surprises) that anyone can post to this blog. The surprise is that I thought I had set write permissions to only members of the blog. So far, that would be Mary and me… with Casey pending. And the reason I did this is to prevent spammers from posting derogatory remarks, advertisements for performance enhancing drugs, and great deals on mortgages. I have seen this happen on our Rotary Club blog and don’t need that aggravation.

    Now that it is the way it is, I’m going to leave it. Certainly friends and family are welcome to the club and may comment at will. Mary and I enjoy the chatter. However, if we find any spam, I’ll need to make all our friendly commenters members of the blog and restrict access.

    This blog is unpublished and not secret. Meaning that so long as nobody thinks to look under this stone, they’ll continue to walk on by. However, anyone that knows the URL can readily read on and therefore by extension, post at will. So, though it might be fun in some sense to share our experience with a bunch of web-surfers, I’m not sure that would be productive at this point. The message here is to avoid sending the link to the i-am-a-vegan-too list. 🙂

    Boringness: It occurs to me that my diet has been fairly boring. And I don’t mean since the beginning of the year, now only six days old. American Meals typically center on “some kind of meat” dish. And those meats are typically beef, chicken, pork, and fish – in that order. So, just taking the first one on the list, beef ground-up is hamburger – OK, there’s lunch – and sliced up – OK, there’s dinner, and of course adding to the mix various sauces and stacking them in different orders and numbers on a bun between a pickle and leaf of lettuce gives you the complete menu of the Big Mac Factory. End result, pretty boring.

    Now that I think of it, pizza might be the only non-boring food group!

    Of course, here in Kansas City, there are 57 varieties of BBQed meat, even without venturing across the state line, “all the way out of state” from whichever state you’re in… Regardless, how many times can you have BBQ in a week without being boring?

    Now, adding to the mix eggs and cheese: you can fry an egg, scramble an egg, poach an egg, and even make an omelet with an egg and cheese. But an egg is an egg. Boring.

    It occurs to me that what makes the meal interesting is the spice and variation in preparation, largely with those ingredients other than meat, cheese, and eggs. Especially when you don’t use a recipe (!), those meals are different every time. The recipe variation we’ve seen on these pages during these six days has limited immediate evidence of innovation. But the spirit has been energetic and the meals very tasty! We wish you were here to join us!

  • Day Six

    Breakfast: Mixed Nuts

    Lunch: Had lunch with Mark Z today at Hen House. Had hummus on WW bread, and a side of vegetables with vinegar and oil; they were mostly tomato, peppers, broccoli, some cauliflower, and onion. Satisfying.

    Dinner: Red Beans and Rice. Sauteed onions, garlic, peppers, then added the cooked brown rice and a can of beans. Also a slice or two of WW bread.

    Chatted with Casey this afternoon. He provided customary words of encouragement. It is good to have a coach for this experiment though it isn’t all that difficult. Having him on board reduces the level of effort substantially as he is there for reference. I’ve had a lot of questions and he typically knows the answer off the top of his head. Attaboy, Case!

  • Day Five

    Breakfast: Nuts again. Not a bad way to start the day, but it doesn’t blend well with coffee.

    Lunch: PB&J – at home… and an apple.

    Dinner: Left-overs of the tomato dish we had last night, and freshly cooked green beans. Very good. We had the Haute Medoc wine, a nice change.

  • Catching Up with The Blog!

    Geeze… the disadvantage to creating a Blog is that you find people are actually reading it. So, you have to keep making new entries!

    OK… for dinner on day three, Mary put together some left-overs, that all else being equal were pretty normal. But, things aren’t equal, and I’d have to say that this assortment of vegatables for dinner was very tasty indeed! And we felt good at the finish.

    DAY FOUR: I was off to work and didn’t take time to have breakfast. So, I had some mixed nuts at my desk around 9:30, maybe 10. I had lunch with the gang and helped myself to a heaping pile of salad bar including some legumes and greens. Really nothing out of the ordinary. Dinner: We had a tomato based pasta dish with yellow squash and the usual variety of veggies. On the side we had a heaping pile of fresh cooked spinach. We are managing to go through the spinach at a pretty good clip.

  • Introduction and First Day

    January first began a thrity day experiment of eating exclusively non animal products (therefore excluding milk, cheese, butter, fish, eggs, beef, pork, chicken, snails, and rattlesnake, among others.) This also includes all manner of venues… such as when eating out, at parties with friends, and other social and non social eating arrangements. The dietary experiment doesn’t exclude coffee – a good thing. And even though the experiment officially kicked off on January 1, 2006, I’ve already headed a fair piece down this road by trying various tofu recipes, and have managed to become moderately successful in preparing a number of palatable recipes. Tomato salsas and other products have been wonderful in seasoning otherwise fairly bland tofu dishes. Tofu doesn’t seem to have much of a taste. When you think about it, neither does turkey or chicken – especially when served as cold slices on a sandwich.

    Breakfast: Tofu Scrambler with onions, green peppers, Farm Fresh Whole Wheat Bread and vegan spread.

    Lunch: Farm Fresh Ciabatta bread with Red Pepper Hummas, mixed fruit chunks, carrots, celery, cherry tomatoes.

    Dinner: Vegan Lasagna – Morinu Extra Firm Silken Tofu slices sauteed in very little olive oil and then cooked in large cast iron frying pan with tomato sauce with onion, garlic, green pepper, then with WW lasagna noodles and a full bag of freshly sauteed spinach added and vegan pepper jack cheese spread on top and baked in oven for 30 minutes. Salt, pepper. Very good.