I tried out a quinoa vegetable "paella" from Fat Free Vegan for dinner. I think the recipe was a good one, but once again my tendency to try experimenting with things landed me in bland-land. I do like quinoa though - I can see myself enjoying that fairly regularly. Just need to learn how to cook with it properly. As with anything new, it is a bit much to expect brilliance right out of the gate.
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| It was supposed to look like this. Maybe next time... |
So, apart from cooking related disasters, anything else worth sharing? Well I am surprised how little I find myself missing meat. I fully expected some sort of craving for chicken to overcome me, but so far I've had nothing of the sort. I've also not wanted any chocolates and other sweets, which is a gigantic plus for going vegan in my books.
One thing I've noticed a couple of times now is people's different reaction to my rather radical change in diet. Some people actually get really defensive when I mention going vegan, immediately explaining how much they love meat. I've then had people explain to me that being vegan is really unhealthy and I'm going to drop dead of protein deficiency any minute now. Where does this need to defend meat eating and attack plant based diets come from? I think that I have given a similar response to vegetarians before. Why do we do this sort of irrational justification? Not sure - but it is quite an interesting response. Of course not everyone is like that, some are much more like "that's cool!" and are interested in how I'm doing. I like these people the most :)
One solution is to take the emotive "vegan" word out of the conversation and instead go with that I'm on a "cleanse" (oh cool, short term hippy stint, I can accept that) or more simply that I'm adopting a Plant Powered diet (taken from Rich Roll's book). That sounds a lot easier, but leads to far less fun conversations!
