More noodles: I'm so boring

I was going to have the curry sauce on rice and vegetables, but when I got back to my room and saw all the peanut sauce I already had, I didn't want to open a new container and waste what I had left, so I cooked the veggies, reheated some noodles and served it up. Please don't think that all vegan meals are so boring. It's just that I made scads of peanut sauce and don't want to have to throw it out. It's still tasty.

I'll have to throw everything that won't travel out tomorrow morning, and anything that I don't eat tomorrow will have to go tomorrow night, because I won't be able to take it on WestJet.

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.

Running in the Snow

I ate a leftover piece of a Luna Bar and then went for a run. Mine was Caramel Nut Brownie flavour, but same idea. They're made by a company that is all over the organic environmental thing and earlier I checked out their website where they say "LUNA bars do not contain animal products or ingredients sourced from animal products."  And I had these before I started this vegan trial, so you see I'm not a vicious anti-vegetarian in real life.

But as I was uncrinkling the wrapper to see if I could take a picture of it, I noticed the words "may contain traces of dairy."  I imagine a hierarchy of vegans disdaining one another based on how they react to this ubiquitous phrase. I personally don't think it makes a whit of difference, but then I'd probably eat a products that said "may contain traces of human babies" if I thought health standards had been adhered to. Some people are probably grossed out by it, some get angry, some sigh and eat it anyway?

Ah, here's an explanation later in the FAQ: Clif Bar Inc. specifies to our suppliers and bakers that ingredients going into our LUNA bars do not contain dairy. The food manufacturing process however, is such that we cannot guarantee that trace amounts of dairy will never turn up in our products even for products as natural and wholesome as ours. If you believe that you are allergic to dairy you may want to consider not consuming our products and take the same precautions you do with all other pre-packaged and processed foods.

Dunno. It tasted good. And the run was great, too. There was no ice and all the drivers were really nice and changed lanes when approaching me. I went further than I expected in my 45 minutes and didn't cold or sore.

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.

Sunday Supper

The vegan diet isn't nearly as limiting as the facilities available for me to prepare food at the hotel. I have a microwave, a bar fridge, a swiss army knife, and a plastic knife-fork-spoon set. Here's the preparation of some of tonight's meal. I'm using my swiss army knife to cut up vegetables on the rotating platter from the microwave,and using the plastic container the spring mix came in as a salad bowl.

The first course consists of spring mix (a premade mix of various organic leafy edibles), green onion, yellow pepper, alfalfa sprouts and roasted sunflower seed. I mixed these all together in a bowl and ate them, while watching The Fugitive on the Aboriginal Peoples' Television Network. Apparently Tommy Lee Jones, the one who wants a chocolate doughnut with sprinkles, is of Cherokee descent, so they show his movies on this channel. An ad for some sort of cheese comes on, and the first thing I think about it is, "nope, can't eat that."

I was still hungry after that, so I then I had some walnut pieces and then some blue corn chips and red pepper hummus and a kind of mini-bread loaf. They had a book in the grocery store where I got to check all the ingredients. And maybe Ill have another piece of chocolate.

Sunday Snack

I just got in from work, but I want to go for a run before it gets dark, so I just had a snack. A red delicious apple (which was free in the hotel lobby) and a square of dark chocolate. There's me and the apple. I don't usually look that scary, but I'd just taken off a baseball cap. In the interest of full disclosure, the apple was pretty shiny, so it might have been coated with shellac. And the sweater is wool, so I'm really losing at this vegan thing. The chocolate was yummy.


And then I decided that it was too late to go for a run and still get back before dark so I ran on the treadmill and did some upper body work with free weights, in the hotel gym.

Vegan Eve Shopping Trip

World Go Vegan Week starts tomorrow, so I went on a vegan shopping trip today. I came home with a rainbow of food, but nothing so strange that it would be out of place in a salad at a nice chain restaurant like Earl's or Moxie's.

My rainbow:

Red: tomato
Orange: carrots, roasted pepper hummus, mandarin orange
Yellow: yellow pepper
Green: lettuce, alfalfa sprouts, spring onions
Blue: blue corn tortilla chips
Indigo: pomegranate juice, and maybe the avocado
Violet: some sort of purple lettuce in the spring mix

I also bought several different sort of nuts and some rice. Later in the week I will experimentally answer the question, "Can I cook rice in a coffee maker?"  I forgot to buy a can of chickpeas to go with the rice. I can get that when I go back to get more fresh ingredients in whichever town I'm in next.

I had a few surprises as I scrutinized the ingredients lists for animal products. I was wrong about potato chips being vegan: my favourite brand and flavour contains honey, and all the other kinds I liked contain whey. There may have been a flavour that didn't, but I bought tortilla chips instead. All the yummy-looking packaged olives contained lactic acid. I didn't know whether it was milk-derived or not, so I didn't buy any, but research shows me that lactic acid is produced commercially through fermentation of glucose, so the olives probably were vegan. The best surprise was a vegan 70% Dark Chocolate bar, containing only cocoa mass, cocoa butter, and natural bourbon vanilla beans.

It all came to $39.07.