When I first went vegan, I swear I thought I was going to starve to death. I’d thought I was all set to start, thanks to a vegan cookbook and a handful of recipes to try. I’d bought cashews and peanuts to have on hand for the munchies, a fridge full of veggies and tofu, and went for it.

Most of the recipes were terrible. I’d say a number of things on the list of ingredients in some of the recipes I’d never heard of. A lot of recipes asked for weird things like seitian and tofu - which is completely bland and tasteless until you learn how to freeze it, squeeze it, and marinate it.

Seriously, I lost lots of weight in the first few weeks - but mostly because I was STARVING.

If anyone wants to try switching to vegan, I thought I’d make their life easier. For the next 30 days I’ll post what I cooked/ate for each meal, and the recipes for them. It will also hold me accountable to eating 3 meals a day - many times I tend to skip breakfast or lunch, which isn’t exactly good for you.

Monday Jan 5:

Breakfast - bowl of oatmeal

Lunch - simple spinach salad - baby spinach, raisins and a little shredded carrot

Dinner - roasted veggies and pasta with roasted garlic and eggplant

Oven roasted veggies are super easy, and super yummy. I make a large pan of them because I’ll eat them for days. Basically, chop up potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, tomatoes, onions and carrots - and any other veggie you might have on hand that would be good this way - put them in a glass baking dish, toss them all with a little olive oil and maybe some herbs of your choice (I used basil this time, rosemary is a favorite) and bake at 400 for an hour.

I loved the roasted garlic and the diced tomatoes over the pasta, that was absolutely great. The eggplant recipe was a bit of an experiment. Personally, I’d keep the recipe on the eggplant side but cut back on the balsamic vinegar, maybe water it down, and serve it with some sauteed spinach or some other yummy green. Recipe for that is here:

http://southernfood.about.com/od/eggplantrecipes/r/bl00810k.htm

You can substitute rice cheese (or soy cheese, though i have found the rice stuff melts better) for the parmesan, and veggie boullion works well to replace beef or chicken broth/boullion. If using boullion instead of veggie broth: don’t add salt until you’ve tasted the dish! Many times I’ve found the salt in the boullion is plenty fo the dish.

Enjoy!

I was browsing around the internet today - procrastinating, more like - and read an older post by No Impact Man, suggesting we carry napkins and re-usable cloths with us when we are out and about.

We use cloth napkins at home… why not when we go out to eat too?

This may seem a little unconventional. But then, so is carrying a Mason jar for water. Most mornings we fill two quart-sized jars with iced tea for my husband to take to work with him. Why not? It’s free, and it saves me having to clean up the mess left by some hideous leaking waxed paper Big Gulp cup when it held the melted ice for too long and fell apart and left a water stain on my husband’s desk…  The mason jars don’t leak, and I don’t have to carry the trash out so often. My motives are purely selfish.

By now, we should be getting used to a few funny looks. You know - the one for politely stopping the overzealous kid from putting groceries in a plastic bag (one item per bag!) and pointing out the cloth bags you brought with you.

So now that we are accustomed to bringing grocery bags with us before heading to the store - is it that much more to remember napkins and a container for leftovers before going out to eat? I really don’t mind the own-container part especially. It often takes a while to get the styrofoam (ew!) container from the host/ess anyway, and then you have the guilt of bringing home something that doesn’t decompose in 100 years.

I’m putting a couple of napkins and a container for leftovers in my car now.

I know what I did wrong. I had three cups of coffee in one afternoon, and I rarely ever drink coffee anymore, and I topped off the torture with half a bag of chocolate chips. Sometimes sitting at your computer is boing, ok? I had the muchies after I drank the coffee, and I didn’t have anything healthy (like cashews or dried apples or something) to nibble on.

The end result was, I tore my stomach up. I haven’t eaten anything in 24 hours now, and on my way back from one of my side jobs I swung by the grocery store to get some ginger root. I’ve had nothing but fresh mint tea to drink all day, and I figured, if it still isn’t right, then some more mint, some dandelion tincture and some grated ginger root should surely help put things to rights.

Joke was on me. No ginger root at the grocery store! *quietly screams in horror*

OK, you say, why not just get some ginger ale from the soda aisle?

Because there is no ginger in it anymore. It’s all high fructose corn syrup and flavors, which means MSG too. Let’s really *not* try to make things worse!

So I’m stuck sipping mint tea flavored oh-so-dully with dandelion tincture. Please cross your fingers that this works, because I’d really like to eat something soon. Like cashews.

My husband is one handy guy. Not only did he rebuild (I do mean rebuild) our 1930s home himself - with new footers, re-framing the attic and rearranging rooms based on my plans, but he remodels homes now for other people for a living.

And a few weeks ago, he added on a sunroom for someone - and the company he ordered the 4×12′ corrugated quality plastic sun panels from had one slightly damaged panel - ours to keep. Woohoo!

A friend of ours has a stack - literally - of greenhouse and solar home books he loaned us so we can start planning how we will put this panel to its best use. These books have been a wealth of information and have further helped me mentally plan our “someday” house that will be off the grid. Southern exposure is the key for these things.

Our current home, unfortunately, does not face a nice, neat, north/south/east/west alignment, else adding on say, a greenhouse room would be much easier. Instead, our front door faces northeast, and there are therefore only two sections of the house that even get a decent south exposure - and still far from perfect.

On the southeast side of the house, we get some wonderful morning sun and the exposure lasts until about 2pm - so not a full day of full sun but it is definitely the warmest end of the house in winter, as the north winds don’t whip around the house there at all - they are further blocked by our 8′ slat fence, which is why that area is already the site of my extended garden.

On the southwest side of the house, there is no morning sun, the section of house that the green addition could attach to is much smaller, and in summer, there are tall trees that block the sun starting around 3pm - though it actually gets sun from 10am until then, and in winter it gets that sun for another hour or so until the sun is blocked by our guest house.

Really though, the thought that the green space could be a full 12′ long and maybe be 6-7′ wide is all the two of us need, and so the southeast section of the house has my vote. It further has my vote because that is the “low” end of the house, where once we install a simple rainwater collection system off some gutters, is where it would make the most sense to store the water. Water could be stored under the tables in the greenhouse, being warmed by the sun’s rays and stabilizing the temperature of the house at night. It would also be easy to add a spigot to the tanks there, and water the garden area that surrounds the greenhouse site.

It’s also out of sight from the road, something to consider within town limits.

The hard parts for us to overcome are: A)we don’t want to spend much money on it, but we still want it to look halfway decent and B)I want it to be removable from the side of the house, so it can go with us to the next home AND not hurt our resale values when it does come time to sell.

At any rate, I am having fun learning about checking the sun’s angles, calculating the BTUs the space might collect based on that angle, our latitude, etc, and researching how we might construct water collection tanks and arrange their location so they also get the sun’s heat even when I have the plants sitting on tables just over top of them.