Gracie's Kitchen

It's been a couple of weeks now.  Part of the adjustment to cutting animal products from my diet is figuring out what to eat instead and making sure those things are in the house.  It's been eye opening to realize how much we relied on cheese, butter, cottage cheese and yogurt as staples.   It's very much like when I found out I was gluten intolerant.  I had to shift my thinking away from what I couldn't eat to what I still can eat.   Part of the challenge for me in eating mostly vegan is that I can't eat gluten (wheat, barley, etc.).   Cutting out dairy products is harder for us than cutting out meat.

We are in the process of figuring it out.  I found a great recipe in the January Sunset magazine.  It's a recipe for Wild Rice, butternut squash and cannellini stew.  Of course I couldn't follow the recipe exactly just because I don't think I've ever done that in my life.  I left out the dried mushrooms because I forgot to buy them, I increased the amount of butternut squash because the one we had from our garden was big.  Our Swiss chard plant is not producing anymore so I used frozen spinach and I used vegetable broth instead of chicken.  Recipes are just guidelines, right?   It was really good.

We still have butter and chicken and cheese in the house.  I imagine we will still be buying cheese because one of my cats adores it.   I wouldn't dream of depriving her!

We ate bacon for breakfast the day after we decided to transition to eating vegan.  It felt strange, but when we opened the fridge we realized we had it full of all the things we decided not to eat.  Vintage white cheddar, bacon, eggs and butter.  We have lots of chicken in our freezer.   So we talked about the whole concept of transitioning.  We have no desire to be wasteful of the food we already have.  The transition will be just that.  A transition.   We aren't even sure at this point if we'll be able to sustain a truly vegan diet.  If we can get 95% of the way there, we will be happy with ourselves.

It will probably take a month to work through everything in the house.  Then what?  Although I'm excited to try this, I'm a bit concerned too.  I have tried to eat vegetarian before.  It failed.  I was training really hard as a competitive master's rower and it got to the point where I couldn't sustain not eating meat.  The day I broke will live in infamy (with Steve anyway).  Steve said I "went feral" and demanded we drive immediately to a local BBQ restaurant where I devoured an order of beef ribs.  I remember the day like it was yesterday.  

So what makes me think we can do this now?  I'm not sure we can but I'm willing to try. I'm willing to try and be smart about it.  I know I didn't do that before.  I did not track protein intake.  I did not pay attention to eating good, whole natural food.  I still ate a lot of junk.  I didn't eat nuts or legumes or soy protein.  We didn't grow our own vegetables.  We just didn't give it much thought beyond not eating meat.

This time, I'll be paying attention.