A Temporary Vegan

I've been eating vegan for 10 days now. 21 more days to go! It's more difficult than I thought: I find myself sick of soy products already. So I will need to find more bean and quinoa recipes in order to survive the next 20 days.

And I am making a vegan chocolate cake this weekend - recipe courtesy of the Moosewood website. I've had it at Moosewood restaurant, and it tasted non-vegan and wonderfully sinful. I just looked at the ingredient list and all of the ingredients look like what a normal cake would have just without the eggs or milk or butter. The one magic ingredient turns out to be vinegar! Can you imagine? I am totally psyched about this.

This diet is a result of too much meat and cheese in Europe (mostly too much cheese I think). So being vegan is mainly for detoxification. Also as a challenge to myself: I wanted to see if I could do it.

For the past few years I've wanted to be vegetarian for environmental and social justice reasons, but I suffer from the difficulty of liking meat. It tastes good. I love food. And many dishes are just not complete without the flavor of meat and fish. Writing that sentence was surprisingly painful- my favorite daydream activity is planning what to eat or cook for the next meal, and being vegan has made this activity more of a chore.

Nonetheless, being a temporary vegan has it's upsides: 1. It has made deciding what to order at restaurants super easy (there are usually only one or two things I can eat). 2. It's a wonderful excuse to explore the many bean and grain dishes I've been meaning to try cook. And that vegan chocolate cake! 3. I feel self-righteous when reading articles such as this one: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1879192,00.html

So we'll see how the rest of this month goes. It's tough, but it's giving my a whole new perspective and attitude towards foods. And, oh, did I mention that vegan chocolate cake?