Vegan kickstart Day #2

I had lunch today with my mom at a place called Roots, at which she's eaten at several times, and I never have. I had their vegan chili empanadas which were really, really delicious, and the little bit of cheese sprinkled on the side salad was the one slip-up in my daily attempt at veganism. Roots happens to be right next to a Trader Joe's, so there was some shopping for veganish things done there, and I've also eaten today- a shingo pear/singo pear/apple pear/Korean pear/Asian pear (there are too many names for it, but it's absolutely my favorite fruit, they're so good!), a few almonds, my weight in blueberries, and for dinner- a Morningstar Farms chik patty & Uncle Ben's 90-second Basmati rice with some leftover grilled veggies my dad made yesterday-- corn, 3 different kinds of squash, and asparagus, with some grapes for dessert.

Anyway, it's not like I actually cooked anything myself, but it all tasted so good I felt like sharing! (And, seriously, I can't stop eating these blueberries, they're so amazing.)

Vegan kickstart!

I've been a vegetarian for exactly six months now, so this seems like an appropriate day to start this attempt into veganism! I burst into vegetarianism really abruptly - I read Eating Animals, by Jonathan Foer, and thought "Well, gee, I can't eat meat anymore" and just stopped. I didn't call myself a vegetarian for a while, because I didn't want people being like "oh yeah? for one week? suuuure", but after about a month, I tentatively began using the label (because I had to, at a camp during spring break, where the vegetarian food options only went to self-identifying vegetarians!) I'd tried to go vegetarian in the past for various reasons, and it never lasted more than a few days, but this time, for whatever reason, it just worked, and except for one night in May where I accidentally ate a piece of pepperoni on otherwise perfectly fine cheese pizza and got sick to my stomach, I haven't eaten any meat since the end of February.

Over the summer I've been toying with the idea of veganism, but I just haven't quite been able to make the plunge, largely because I'm a) a cheap, miserly college student, and b) the world's worst cook. But you know... it doesn't hurt to try.

So, on this, the 6 month anniversary of my decision to stop eating meat, I'm sort of tentatively trying to feel my way into veganism, for the same reasons I went vegetarian - health & moral issues (the general inhumanity and incredible cruelty associated with the meat industry is present also in production of things like eggs, milk, basically any time you get industrialized animal husbandry like this, and while I wouldn't probably mind consuming milk or eggs from animals on my own farm or something, if I was actually living like that, I don't have enough access to those friendlier products in my actual life). So  I have been eyeing 21 Day Kickstart-- a veganism "kickstart" diet, just like it says on the tin, from the PCRM. I forgot I'd planned to start today, but at the end of the day my mother asked me how  I did and... as it turns out, I'd eaten entirely vegan today without even trying!

Breakfast: Multigrain Cheerios with almond milk (Blue Diamond) & fresh blueberries
Lunch: Morningstar Farm chik patties, more blueberries, some raw almonds & Trader Joe's Veggie Stix
Dinner: an Oklahoma Bacon Cheeseburger (seriously, it's vegan, I swear) from the glorious Native Foods, my favorite restaurant
Midnight snack: Silk chocolate soy milk and more blueberries, I have a huuuge bowl of them and I've been wolfing them down all day, there's almost nothing I love more than fresh blueberries.

So, see? None of that did I have to go out of my way for, none of it was hard to make - I didn't even cook anything, I had one meal out and the rest was microwave (for the chik patties) or no cookery at all. It was what I would have eaten today even if I hadn't been trying to eat vegan.

20 more days...!


Reading: Shadowheart, by Tad Williams (#4 of the Shadowmarch "trilogy") -- still!
Listening: "Speak Now", Taylor Swift, whom I unabashedly adore
Watching: Project Runway, season 4 on DVD!

Grand First Post Hurrah

First post!

This blog will be divided into three sections (for now...). My adventures in food, my adventures in books/movies/television, & my adventures in my life in general (including college, unschooling, sorority life, and...everything). I'd make multiple blogs but that really seems a bit ambitious at this point, so I'll just tag everything accordingly and maybe in the future, if I keep at it, actually divide the blogs up.

Backstory-- I'm a 23-year-old Californian native who has been unschooled most of her life (I was a 1st grade dropout). I still consider myself an unschooler at this point, although you could call me a homeschooling alum as well. I go to a college near home where I'm double majoring in Drama and History (about to start my senior -- well, supersenior -- year), I'm in a sorority which is a very important part of my life (living in the chapter house for the 2nd year, multiple officer positions in the chapter, and I'm on the campus Panhellenic executive board). I have an older sister and a younger sister, a mother and father who are remarkably awesome, four finches that are actually my mother's, and an unabashedly extreme amount of pretentiousness.

Some of my favorite books include The Little Prince, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Great Gatsby, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Lolita, Captains Courageous, and Pride & Prejudice. Some of my favorite authors, generally, include Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, Diana Wynne Jones, and Patrick O'Brian.

Some of my favorite music that doesn't come from theatre or opera includes: Adele, Taylor Swift (and I'm not ashamed to admit it), the Beatles, The Boy Least Likely To, Camera Obscura, Rufus Wainwright, Leonard Cohen, Madeleine Peyroux, Au Revoir Simone, and Dar Williams.

Some of my favorite musicals include: Pacific Overtures, A Little Night Music, Assassins, Fiddler on the Roof, The Spitfire Grill, The Secret Garden, Passing Strange, South Pacific, West Side Story, The Light in the Piazza, and Man of La Mancha. Some favorite plays include Proof, How I Learned to Drive, Wit, Cyrano de Bergerac, Macbeth, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and Arcadia. Favorite operas include La Traviata, Turandot, and Madama Butterfly.

I'm vegetarian (5 months & 2 weeks, so I think I get to actually use the label now), but I can't really cook at all. I'm terrified of all things kitcheny. I can assemble -- I can make salads, sandwiches, anything in the microwave -- but for some reason I'm paranoid about actually...cooking. So I'm going to try to change that, because these recipes I keep finding on vegan blogs sound a lot better than non-stop empty burgers at In N Out, and I want to spend less money and lose more weight and generally stop being so faily, come fall quarter - which starts in 1 month. So I'm going to try to teach myself how to cook some easy recipes, and take photos and put them on here with links to the recipes, basically. That's the adventures in food part.

The adventures in books etc part is because I used to have another blog on another provider, called Stored Thought, which was solely book reviews & thoughts on literature. It's long past dead, though I might repost here some reviews I had there, but I still have opinions on books (inevitably), as well as on movies, theatre, tv, and other reviewable kinds of artforms like that. And they'll go here. Informal as well as more officially reviewy things.

The adventures in life is just exactly what it sounds like. It might not be very exciting, but it's my life and really, I think it's pretty different from a lot of people's.

Listening: Dar Williams, "Southern California Wants to Be Western New York"

Reading: Shadowheart, by Tad Williams (#4 of the Shadowmarch "trilogy")