My Indulgent Weekend

What do you do when you feel tired all the time? How do you keep your spirits up day after day?

I get tired of feeling tired and I don't want to give in to feelings of uselessness or self-pity. That was actually one of the reasons I started this blog last Spring; to help me remember the simple pleasures of life. The big pleasures are more elusive these days and so it helps to focus on small things of joy and to remember that there really is joy in such moments.

This weekend with all the rain and my seeming inability to get out to do an important errand, I ended up staying close to home. An internet friend in a far off land told me I should get out to the movies but the rain hindered that. Instead, I rented two movies from a video place a block away and stayed cuddled up with a soft blanket and pillows to eat popcorn, drink soda and watch:

He's Just Not Into You with Jennifer Aniston & Ben Affleck; and Revolutionary Road with Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio.

I watched the Jennifer Aniston, chick flick first and found it quite engaging. I have not read the book by the same name but I did watch an interview on Oprah Winfrey with the author and found him to be very enlightening. The movie was fictional however and it captured my attention more so than I expected.

Perhaps I was tired by the time the second movie played (the first movie was rather long). But I did not enjoy this "blah-ish" movie nearly as much as I expected since I love both Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio. Anyway, the two movies more than took up my Saturday evening.

Today, I finished a book I've taken a long while to start (it's been sitting in my collection for a long while) Mme. Proust and the Kosher Kitchen by Kate Taylor. This was a satisfying book overall but it was weakened in the telling of the story through the eyes of three protagonists. I think it was one too many, but that is my humble opinion. I won't give the story line away but I did very much enjoy the diary entries of Mme. Proust who spent much of her life (at least in this novel) attending to the needs of her asthmatic writer son, Marcel Proust. If anyone reads the book's description on Amazon.com and would like to read it, I would be interested in a book exchange.

Still feeling indulgent, we had chicken with ginger ale sauce for Sunday dinner from Lynda in Tanzania; one of the bloggers I love to read. She has a lot of wonderful recipes. Some of you might be wondering what I am doing eating chicken when I said I was going vegan. Sadly, I have not been able to continue with my vegan diet. It simply takes much more energy and planning than I can muster at this time. Whenever I am a little more "up", I hope to incorporate vegan eating as often as I can.
The chicken dish was delicious accompanied by brown rice and a mixture of steamed gai lan (chinese broccoli), crimini mushrooms and green beans.

In my first making of this dish, I learned that next time I need to somehow get the more fast out of the chicken first. Perhaps this means boiling it or partially cooking it and straining off the fast. I also need to measure the ginger ale more carefully or use more chicken to have a thicker sauce than what I ended up with. Nonetheless, it was a delicious dish which I will try again some time. My roommate pronounced the sauce "really, really good" and asked what was in it.

Break in Vegan Blogs

Hey everyone,

It's my fourth day of eating vegan today.

This is the point at which my vegan eating "coach" and encourager evaluates how I am doing so far and makes suggestions to help me. After showing her my menu for the last several days she said I am not eating enough. I can easily increase portion sizes and eat more in general of veggies and good snacks.

She also made an excellent point that I should not worry about the dairy slip I had the other day. Her point is that I've been doing without a lot more dairy over the past few days than I would normally eat and that is so true! In I week, I would generally have milk, yogurt or cottage cheese, maybe some ice cream products or cheese. Now I have none of that so indeed, I have cut waaaaaaaaay back. It took Naomi Rose to point that out for me and I thank her for it as I was feeling pretty bad about it all.

So today will be my last day of journelling what I have been eating on this vegan diet now that my new lifestyle is underway. I was only going to give this new way of eating a one week trial but I have noticed an increase in my energy levels and for the most part, I am feeling less hunger than in my regular way of eating. So I have decided to stick with the vegan eating for at least several weeks. By that time, my body will likely be so used to it that it might be hard to return to dairy and meat but we will see. My main purpose in going vegan is to improve my health. It isn't because I am against meat eating.

Even though I am not opposed to meat and dairy eating, the sad reality is that in most of the western world, the conditions for raising animals to supply meat, poultry and eggs is so disgusting that as time goes by I really have a harder and harder time to think about eating animals products. Most of the animals and chickens have been under distress before succumbing to slaughter for our food needs. I don't think that is good way to treat our animals before we eat them. I also don't think that that kind of animal distress can be good for our bodies once we consume the meat, poultry or eggs.

If I lived on a farm and could ensure everything was hormone free and stress free for the animals, I could eat in good conscience. There is also the issue of the rapidly disappearing rain forest to be able to support livestock needs. Another distressing issue for me is all the hormones and junk that animals are fed. Have you heard what they feed to pigs? I have always like pork but I have a hard time to eat when I think of what they might have eaten themselves.

Well, I'll stop there as I am certainly no expert on the rationale for going vegan. But all these things trouble me when I permit myself to think of them and also they all contribute to a poor diet devoid of the necessary nutrients I need to function properly. Now here is my menu for the day.

Breakfast
Porridge with cashews, figs, brown sugar and soy milk.
Half a banana
Lunch
Large portion of Butternut Squash Lasagna
Snacks: 1 square of chocolate and a few small mandarin oranges.

Dinner (pictured above)
Corn, Red Potato & Onion Chowder with pureed garbanzo beans as a thickening agent. Perhaps I should have added flour to properly bind the soup but I omitted it on purpose. I added salt for seasoning and a few crumbs of falafel mix left over from the other day. I found the falafel gave it a bit of a spicy flavour which was good.
Pitta bread was the accompaniement as I have no bread/buns.
Snacks....I will likely have some cantaloupe and other fruit later. Perhaps a choco square.

This weekend I hope to make some muffins, cookies and/or banana bread Vegan style of course so that I have some snacks on hand for next week. I will also start cooking more veggies as side dishes. That way I will ensure I get a broader spectrum of greens, and nutrients etc. I may let you all know in a few weeks how things are going with me and the "vegan way".

Very soon I hope to be blogging here about some exciting projects I am hoping to move forward to aid widows and orphans in Kericho, Kenya. I hope you will come back again soon and let me know what you think when I write about them. I would dearly love to hear from you all and I hope to see you again real soon.

God bless.

Eating Can Be a Challenge

I needed some fibre today so I started off with porridge sprinkled with ground flax, a few raw cashews, dried figs, brown sugar and soy milk. It did the trick.

Lunch was a package of store bought falafel. I'm not a huge fan of falafel. I found this mixture to be somewhat salty though actually better than what I've eaten in restaurants. Due to the saltiness, I only had 3 round balls in a small bit of pita bread with alfalfa sprouts. It was quite good that way and "cut" the salty taste but I've been hungry all day.

This is the package.

This is what it looks like after mixing with water.

This is the mixture after setting for 10 minutes.

Here it is browning in a cast iron skillet with some olive oil.


Dinner ~ I have been wanting to make this Eggplant Dip for awhile. The main ingredients are eggplant, garlic and tofu.

It started off fine. This is the eggplant inserted with garlic cloves and brushed with chili peppers and olive oil.
It looks great after roasting for 40 minutes.
To get it looking like it does below was a bit of a challenge. It required scooping out the eggplant meat from the shells, adding it to a blender along with some mint leaves, some tofu and some soy milk. It kept getting stuck in my blender so that was no fun. After I finally got it looking more edible, I added some more chili flakes and lemon as suggested. I'm afraid I didn't like the taste as much as I had hoped. I found I did not like the addition of the fresh mint so next time I will leave it out.

This ended up tasting quite good however as a base in which to put chopped red onion, parsley and tomato...all wrapped up in pita bread like a donair but without meat and with out the yogurt, lol. It was rather yummy.My hunger was not satisfied today. I need to get something more filling tomorrow. I found I didn't ride the vegan wagon too well today as I had some more pomegranate sherbet purchased yesterday..the one that has milk ingredients in it. Today it wasn't as good...too sweet...so all of a sudden everything seems too salty (the falafel) or too sweet. Other snacks included a cored and quartered apple, about 12 nacho chips, a Starbucks grande soy latte, 1 small half inch square of chocolate (50%) and 1/2 diced fresh cantaloupe sprinkled with fresh juice of lemon. I'm still very hungry. I think I'll have a few more nacho chips, some soy milk. I know that's probably not a good thing but I don't want to have some pasta or beans at this hour. It is really bed time.

At least I started back on my vitamins today at last and my energy level has been up. I got some real work done tonight around the house, hunger pangs and all. Whatever hunger pangs I might be feeling are time limited compared to what my friends in Kenya experience on a weekly basis.

Talk soon.

Vegan Experiment On Track

Today was the second day of my experimentation with vegan eating. I think it went okay for the most part. Breakfast was the final (and small) wedge of Apple Pie which I wrote about earlier this week. Lunch was a half circle of pitta bread and a small bowl of yesterday's Beany Stew. I made Butternut Squash Lasagna for dinner.

This what the filling looked like.

A close up of the autumn coloured lasagna filling.

Here is the beginning of the layering process before the noodles are added.

And a close up after the noodles are added.

I made enough lasagna for two pans. That way I would have left overs since this dish was more labour intensive than what I normally cook. Perhaps after I make it a few times it will seem less so.

This is what the lasagna looks like after it is topped with the vegan "cheesy" sauce which is really a roux or a bechemel sauce.

I topped one of the pans of lasagna with soya "Mozzarella" cheese.

The cooked lasagna with the "cheese" topping. Ready for eating.

It was good! My taste taster however, said that while it tasted good, I should have made "real" lasagna with meat. I reminded him that I could not because that wouldn't be vegan eating. He had a two large pieces at dinner and another one later for a snack.

Looks like I ended the day on an error as I had some refreshing pomegranate sherbet. Later, upon reading ingredients I learned that this sherbet contains milk! I usually read labels first, but I really thought I was fine on this one.

An earlier snack included about 8 nacho chips and 4 squares of dark chocolate (50%) at different sittings as well as a half pitta circle filled with alfalfa sprouts, a few slices of avocado and tomatoes. I didn't feel like eating more pasta when I felt a hunger pang.

My First Day Vegan

The new eating regime started Monday. It was a little hectic chopping up all the veggies for luncheon and preparing the dried beans (soaked on Sunday night) and getting it all together for a late lunch. I had risen late otherwise I would have had an early start. In between making lunch, I was replying to emails, making and receiving phone calls, doing laundry, etc.

Breakfast will usually be porridge or hot oatmeal with some cashews & dates/raisins/figs. One can eat the porridge with or without almond milk or your alternative milk of preference. But today, I had left overs of the Apple Cake I made Saturday night. If you recall, I had made a vegan version of it and though it is a dessert, it actually has very little sugar in it, probably less than I would get from the dates/raisins/figs I would put into porridge.

Lunch today consists of Beany Stew with Roasted Garlic.


Ingredients in my version:

~ reconstituted garbonzo beans, two cups
~ reconstituted fava beans, about 1.5 or two cups
~ 8 green beans chopped
~ 1 large carrot, peeled and slided
~ 8 reconstituted mushrooms chopped
~ half a red onion cleaned and diced
~ 1 can of tomato paste
~ 2/3 cups of water
~ stir in baked cloves of garlic 1 or 2 baked garlic heads as in Naomi Roses recipe
~ water as needed. Less water for stew-like consistency. I did not use canned beans so you will have to add more water than the 2/3 cup that Naomi's recipe recommends.
~ salt and pepper to taste when done.

This was absolutely delicious and filling! Actually I had a half filled blue bowl (less than in the photo) and I feel too full now that it is digesting. I also had enough for my roommate who has a huge appetite and saved some for another meal & snack.

Right now I have a wonderful aroma permeating the house as Braised Red Cabbage is cooking in the oven. Here is a sneak peak. I will cook it for several more hours to get it reduced to an almost like sauerkraut consistency. It is piping hot from the oven to be stirred and you can see the steam rising from it. I'm not actually sure what is for dinner but it will likely include this cabbage dish. I think I will have the tempeh burger and the cabbage. Tonight I will try to make some vegan lasagna to have on hand for tomorrow night and figure out how to make falafel for another day (both suggestions of the wonderful Naomi Rose.
Please drop by my other blog post for the day called Window Shopping.