Celebrating Vegetarian Awareness Month

Today is World Vegetarian Day and I'll be posting here daily for October to participate in Vegetarian Awareness Month. What a gift to be vegan now, eating for my health, for animal welfare and for our environment. So many good things are coming from this lifestyle: I've lowered my total cholesterol by 22 points; I've learned to be satisfied with healthy vegan food choices; my cooking repertoire has grown to include wonderful new recipes such as Vegan Chicken Fried Steak made with homemade seitan, Vegan Alfredo Sauce (both soy and non-soy versions) and so many other tasty things; I feel better as a human being that I no longer contribute to the misery and death of animals in my pursuit of sustenance; and I have even lost weight since switching from a lacto-ovo vegetarian way of eating to my vegan lifestyle!

When I'm in New York, I have the abundant selections at Whole Foods and great produce and other treats from the Union Square Greenmarket just a short walk away from the office and a very good health food store and decent neighborhood grocery store near home. I can take a reasonable hike over to Stogo in the East Village for amazing vegan ice cream and sometimes combine this "road trip" with a walking meeting with a like-minded client. When I'm in the country I can try out recipes in my spacious kitchen (comparatively to New York) and enjoy my bright red KitchenAid stand mixer preparing vegan baked goods and protein-rich seitan. The local produce stand offers fresh-picked corn in the summer and pumpkins and squash in the fall and lots of other good things.

Eating out in restaurants has become possible as I've learned more about the ingredients in the foods I order. For example, I love Olive Garden because I can have whole wheat linguine with a tasty marinara there plus abundant salad and bread sticks. Eventually I found out that unless I order the breadsticks "plain" they come buttered. I get the bowl of salad minus dressing, cheese or croutons, ask for the cruets of oil and vinegar and do fine. Most other restaurants have trouble making me what I ask for. They put cheese on the veggie burger, or the veggie burger isn't really vegan as I later learn. I ask for a bruschetta minus cheese and it comes minus mozzarella but loaded with Parmesan. Or I ask for pasta with oil and garlic and fresh vegetables and they come buttered. New York has some wonderful vegan restaurants and most servers don't look at you as if you had two heads when you explain your needs, but in the country, not so much.

Mother's Day Dinner

Happy Mother's Day. It was a good one for me. My husband gave me a great card from him and Daisy and then suggested we take an exercise walk to the lake near the house. We did that and saw a mother goose and her four goslings swimming behind her. We also decided on that walk to get a paddle boat for ourselves. Apparently a lot of people in our community have them but we haven't seen them in use much. The one we saw yesterday in a store had a canopy and we thought it would be just the thing. Better for us than a canoe or kayak where we might end up in a disaster, getting in, getting out, getting around.

We decided to go to Olive Garden but when we got there the wait we were told was 2 hours and 40 minutes. That's ridiculous. So we went to LongHorn Steakhouse, and I was able to have a nice vegan dinner with a large salad with pecans and mandarin orange slices over mixed greens, minus the chicken it came with which my husband will enjoy tomorrow, rice pilaf, and lovely unadorned asparagus. Okay, the pilaf may have had some butter in it, and the cornbread croutons on the salad while good probably weren't vegan, so I tasted them and gave them away to my husband. It was nice to be able to eat there and not just have a bunch of sides and call it dinner.

When we got home my son called for Mother's Day, and that capped off the day. I feel very lucky tonight.

I joined Spark People this weekend and have been learning my way around the site and learning how I can use it to help me with my vegan weight loss regimen. I'll write more here as I find out how it works for me.

Summer Already??

A gorgeous little violet in the still-wintry brown lawn near our country house. And moments later as I photographed its neighbor:

And yep, that's a real live honeybee, on April 26, and it was 88-degrees up here on the Plateau today in Eastern Pennsylvania, and even higher down the mountain where we were doing a little shopping and the asphalt was sizzling, maybe 95-degrees.

So it's time for shorts and tanks and oh, the distress of the post-Atkins body I now inhabit, with added weight from eating vegetarian for the past 10 months, and being vegan since March. I'm trying to get the right nutrition without overdoing fat and carbs. The worst seems to be eating in restaurants where the only thing I can get that seems like a real entree is pasta, often with garlic and oil and some veggies if I'm lucky or marinara. By the way, Olive Garden has whole wheat pasta with a tasty marinara, and the salad and bread sticks are good. Maybe too good!

I made an awesome vegan Alfredo sauce, thanks to Don't Get Mad Get Vegan's great recipe site. Check it out! I made it with Dreamfield's low-carb macaroni and added a drained can of sliced mushrooms and some baby peas. Yummy, but still pretty rich. I shared some with a vegan friend who agreed it was great, but it didn't help me lose any weight. So the adventure continues.