No More Meat!

Today, Vincent and I finally finished off the last little bit of meat (turkey bacon) that was in our house. You can now consider our house as "meat free". What this means is if you are coming by for dinner don't expect to eat anything that comes from a pig, cow, chicken/turkey, or fish. What you can expect is a meal made with one of the following: tofu, seitan, TVP, tempeh or some kind of bean or pasta dish. I have some links here, so if you are unaware of what vegetarian/ vegan food is like you can take a look, along with a great recipe site.

When you first hear the that someone is a vegetarian, what is the first thing that comes to mind? For me, it was "California hippies who have no idea how good meat is and they're insane for living on veggies and tofu." I also just assumed they were the super skinny and undernourished, but I quickly found out that isn't true. It's never a good idea to pass judgment on someone or a lifestyle/belief without actually knowing anything about it, because when you really find out the truth you might look kinda dumb. Yes, there are still the undernourished vegans and vegetarians, not because of the food they are eating, but rather poor diet choices and not getting enough vitamins, etc.

Just because someone is a vegetarian / vegan doesn't mean they just eat veggies or bland crap. There are a wide variety of meat substitutes as I mentioned before. These things can be flavored or even made to taste like a lot of your "meats". Right now in the oven I have a tofu & seitan turkey cooking, yes I know it's not really a turkey. Let me tell you this much, it wasn't that difficult to make and it smells awesome. Here is the link for the turkey if you want to take a go at it... Later tonight for dessert I am gonna be making some peanut butter and applesauce chocolate chip cookies, it's a vegan sub for using eggs, etc. The first time I made them I was a little worried about how they would taste, but they passed the taste test with flying colors.

Now, had you asked me a few months ago what I thought about going vegetarian leaning vegan I would have laughed at you, and said, "yeah right!". Even though we had mostly cut out all the meat we still didn't go full vegetarian, mostly because I put up quite a fight. I have always been a meat and potatoes kinda girl, and to me giving up something I had lived with for 20+ years was gonna be hard. Actually, it hasn't been as hard as I thought it would be with all the meat-like proteins out there, it's no biggie.

I think what actually changed my mind was when Vincent made me country fried steak out of seitan, and it was really good. I was really concerned because a vegan / vegetarian lifestyle can be rather costly, really eating healthy in general is costly. However, most of the meat substitutes that you see in the store you can make yourself or if you don't want to deal with the hassle look for bargains and the prices have been lower than what I expected. Yesterday at the store we were able to get 5 things of tofu and spent only $4.86 because of a buy one get one free and then one is getting ready to expire. Tofu on average costs about anywhere form $1.80 - $3.00 for a 12-14 oz block. The nice thing about tofu is it can be frozen and you don't have to worry about it turning green in the freezer if it's there too long. We also got a 1/2 gallon of "fresh off the truck" almond milk for $1.50 because the package was damaged! Now we are taking on the challenge of making all of this at home. Yes, you read right. We are going to be making our own soy milk, tofu, tempeh (we already make seitan) at home. Soy milk, tofu and tempeh are all made from one thing...soy beans! And we can get a 50 lb bag of soy beans for about $33. That may seem like a lot of money, but that makes 150 lbs of protein and in the long run it saves us a lot more.

I am looking forward to our new "lifestyle", because honestly that is what it is. I don't expect it to always be easy, but it will be a fun and hopefully tasty learning experience.