The vegan food pyramid
There were tears. There were tantrums. And that was just on day 2. Overall it was a good week, a touch easier than I thought it would be. Still craving everything I can’t have like there’s no tomorrow but happy to be trying something new and leaving my comfort zone as a result. I’ll tell you, one thing I will miss when this vexperiment ends is the power it gives me to use vegan-related puns. I must be thankful that “soy” is such a good rhyming word. And I have a whopper coming up for the finale in one week’s time.
It’s been said a million times before, so I’m be the 1,000,001st person to say that if literally one word of advice should be given to a newbie vegan it would be: preparation. As the boy scouts say – Always Be Prepared. And I mean always. Finding myself on Thursday with absolutely nothing in the house in a cyclonic storm was not fun. I ended up finding a small stash of water crackers that thankfully passed muster but I don’t like feeling as though I have been left stranded on a desert island and have to fend for myself eating sand and making friends with footballs named Wilson.
Now of course there was the earlier hiccup of the coffee. It was early on in the piece – only the second or third day and I was weak and vulnerable. My mother and I were at the shopping centre doing grocery shopping when she casually said we should have a coffee. What started as a casual invitation soon became a plea to partake in the ritualistic after-shopping coffee that seemed so natural all those trips before. I caved. What I could have done, solving the problem quite nicely, would have been to order it with soy milk (you think with all my soy puns I would have remembered its availability) but my brain wasn’t on and I had a “dash” of milk with it. It really wasn’t that much but still it was cheating.
Something that I think a lot of vegans or vegetarians with very robust meat-eating families may relate to is the kind of novelty this decision seems to be to them. Whether it comes from a place of ignorance and they just don’t understand it, some people (namely, my buffoon 19 year-old brother) see it as a game where they can “win” by breaking you down. I certainly don’t expect him to turn down the steak my mother was offering for dinner that night but to purposely (or in his words, “accidentally”) drop a piece on my vegan schnitzel-occupied plate was just playing dirty. It may also be that it’s only because this is a 2-week challenge and know I will eventually shun the vegan lifestyle, rather than that they have no confidence in my ability to stick by it. There’s no doubt in my mind that if were to become a vegan permanently, my family would become bored of the game and just accept it.
This is not to say they haven’t been supportive (mostly). On Friday my mum was kind enough to bring me home lunch at which point I groaned thinking she had forgotten or this was some trick to get me eating animal products, but was pleasantly surprised to find inside the packaging were two neatly bound tofu sushi rolls. They were absolutely delicious. I had eaten tofu only once before and could not remember what it tasted like, but this was something new. Immediately I vowed to buy tofu the next shopping trip and incorporate it into my burgeoning notebook of vegan recipes.
Day two was also my mini-breakdown. I had a headache which though at the time I blamed on what I was not eating, turned out the be caused by what I was eating. Which was nothing. I had planned the first day well, but not the second. Everything I had bought for the first day were single-meal frozen foods which isn’t exactly stretching myself as was my original attention. So I was slightly starved, irritable and on the brink of making a chicken sandwich when my mum came home with bags in each hand of vegan-friendly ingredients I could use. She had went *back* to the shop after I had roused on her for the coffee incident and read every label to make sure I could use it. That actually really brightened me up and got me re-invigorated in this challenge (well that and the three Aspro Clear paracetamol tablets I popped – I love that stuff).
Here’s a bit of irony for you – vegans are all about not harming/using/abusing animals however my library-borrowed copy of the cult classic Veganomicon cookbook was misplaced on the countertop and left teetering. Teetering until it toppled off and landed on my cat Bubby! Bubby aka Bilbo Baggins aka Bobby St Clair aka a million other nicknames that reveal me as the insane creature that I am was thankfully fine. Just a litter shaken. Get it? Litter? Like a litter of kittens and also a litterbox. Ah I crack myself up. But yes, my brother joked that I was causing more harm to animals since becoming a vegan.
Anyway so my plan for world domination family acceptance of my challenge was to win them over twofold. Firstly, by offering to cook a dessert from the FANTASTIC cookbook My Sweet Vegan by Hannah Kaminsky. Being quite possibly the worst cook in the world, this was always going to be quite a challenge. I chose the cupcakes which seemed simple enough, but left them in too long and they came out a crispy shade of tar black. My mum encouragingly sampled one of the lesser burnt ones and stifled a gag. The “winning them over” thing wasn’t going so well, so I moved to plan 1: phase 2. My younger brother is an ex-chef so I gave him the recipe for the cupcakes and of course they turn out picture-perfect and just as mouth-watering as the book’s cover photo implies. The reception, however, is mixed. My mum, like me, quite likes them however Brother Bear thinks it needs butter, milk and cream. On to plan 2.
Secondly, by taking them out to a proper vegan restaurant (in this case, the very wonderful Squirrels at Newmarket in Brisbane). My vegan lasagna was decidedly edible. Actually I’m being a bit harsh but that’s due to the bitterness I still harbor for not ordering the tofu burger which I pushed my brother to get. He cut me off a piece and it was just finger-licking good. When he wouldn’t give me another bite, I reminded him that a) He supposedly doesn’t like vegan food, and; b) He was very vocal about his disapproval of tofu or as he puts it “the tree-huggers life food”. “But that was beeeefffoooorrreeee,” he whines. I leave it, smiling smugly in the face of an epic win on the vegan forefront. Alex 1 Brother 0.
The Hypewriter 