Thursday: Noodles and Peanut Sauce

The new hotel room has a kitchen!  Stove!  Oven! Full refrigerator!  Pots and pans and plates and even a dishwasher. I went shopping and bought way way to much food, just because I could cook it.

As I arrived back at the hotel, I discovered it was free pizza night. Right there in the lobby: free food and I had to walk by. So far that's been the only conscious deprivation of pretending to be a vegan. It would have been harder had I not recently discovered that pizza is better without cheese. Next time I'm involved in a pizza night, I'll convince them to order one with double sauce no cheese. That will work for dieters and the lactose intolerant too. It's all about recruiting others who want the same thing, even if not for the same reasons. When I was a vegetarian there were no other vegetarians in my club but we always ordered one vegetarian pizza to accommodate me and the guy who was following Jewish dietary law.

Here is a picture of my first serving of whole wheat pasta noodles with veggies and peanut sauce. The peanut sauce consists of a 500 g jar of crunchy organic peanut butter stirred together with a can of coconut milk, and then mixed with a lot of pepper flakes.  I got the idea from here, but used much more coconut milk and I like it. I meant also to throw some spinach in for the last few minutes with the pasta, but the pot was pretty full already.

I could have spent more time artfully arranging the serving or tossing the noodles or something, but I was like, "Hey, this peanut sauce it good! And it goes with everything!" so just dumping it on.  There's lots more left, so if I don't post for a bit, it's because I'm busy eating the leftovers.  I just had some for breakfast. And this time I remembered the spinach.

Wednesday Supper: Using up the leftovers

I'm halfway through my week of veganism. A week is actually a pretty poor test because honestly I probably could go a week without food of any sort without dying, and can go a week of eating at Boston Pizza without ill effect, so a week without animal products is in no way a proof of it being a healthy lifestyle. Next week I will be off work and able to use my kitchen, so maybe I'll extend the experiment another week so I can try actual vegan cooking as opposed to vegan ingredient eating.

My work group is moving on tomorrow, to another province, but they haven't told us which one yet. I have to use up all my perishables, so that pretty much determines what I eat: everything. First course for supper is a salad of lettuce, alfalfa sprouts, avocado, yellow bell pepper, tomato and sunflower seeds. (I remembered to add the sunflower seeds after I took the photo). Meanwhile I sliced the beets and carrots and put them in the microwave, same as on Monday, except this time I added the water to the plate after I had fit it on the spinner in the microwave, so I didn't spill beet-coloured water all over the place. And this time I knew it was going to take about twelve minutes in the microwave to get the veggies right. So I put them in for eight minutes, flipped them all over and then put them back in for five more minutes.

Except that when I finished my salad, I realized the microwave was still running. I had accidentally set it for 50 minutes, and it had consumed eleven of them, and evaporated all the water. Dehydrated beet chips, anyone? They were inedible.

So I ate a pomegranate. That's a process a lot longer than that sentence. Pomegranates do not give up their seeds without a gore-streaked fight. Between the beets and the pomegranate, the hotel staff are going to think I slaughtered a pig in here. Okay, done.

I told my coworkers that I had food to finish up in my room, but that I'd come out for desert with them. I hope there's a vegan-friendly dessert available. If not, I can just hang out.

Monday Supper

I found out we're staying here a few more days so I went grocery shopping again, so I have some new ingredients for supper. I sliced up a beet and some carrots and put them on the microwave rotating plate. I meant to buy a small bottle of olive oil for this, but I forgot, so I just put some water on the plate -- it has a shallow lip, and I microwaved them until they were almost done, adding some mushrooms for the last two minutes. As you can see from the picture, I served it with alfalfa sprouts, olives and a kind of multigrain bread thing.

I ate all that and was still hungry. This is where I need to eat more to get the same number of calories, because I'm no longer using a cow to pre-concentrate my vegetable energy. I also ate an orange. I was still kind of hungry, but my stomach was full. I think the lack of fat is bothering me. I should have bought that olive oil.