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I’ve been meaning to update a bit on the experimentation with “extreme vegetarianism”/eating vegan. I haven’t been running at 100% with it the past couple of weeks, but I’ve been making decent progress towards consistency. I did cook some chicken we had in the freezer on Thursday last week. I remember cooking this particular dish for the first time a while ago and thinking it was just fantastic, it has chicken and white beans and sundried tomatoes and rosemary, but I really couldn’t get into it this time. I didn’t eat a whole lot of it and let DH have all the leftovers. So cooking chicken is losing some charm.
I have had an egg in the morning for the past three mornings, mostly because we ran out of oats and interesting cereal. I was eating the Ezekiel bread with natural PB a couple of mornings but for some reason the two together are just too salty for me. The bread itself, however, when eaten on a sammich or something, is not salty – it’s just the pb/bread combo, so I haven’t eaten that for breakfast since. Need more breakfast options here.
Overall, though, I think I’m doing pretty well with it. I even bought a pint of Rice Dream ice cream as a treat this weekend. Yum. As an added bonus, I think I can actually keep this stuff in the house for more than a day, because DH didn’t seem to like it – usually he snarfs every last bit of ice cream I bring into the house within 48 hours, which gets irritating. As long as I feel I can control myself around it, I like to have it in the freezer for an occasional treat.
So I think I’m running at about 85% animal product-free on average, which I am happy with. I’m not good with dramatic change anyhow, so a nice period of transition is the way to go for me. I have consistently changed all of my snack options to vegan ones, so I think next I will work on making sure all of my breakfasts are vegan – and once I can do that consistently (meaning once I have enough options so I don’t get stuck), I will move on to making sure another meal is consistently cleaned up. Eventually it won’t even be a question for me. That’s where I want to go.
Just want to post a photo of my wonderful new acquisitions: a Sigg 1L water bottle (to replace my 8-year-old BPA-riddled plastic one) and a Camelbak day trip backpack:
The rest of the water bottle says “green” in green, and a couple of the people on the other side have green heads. It’s wonderful. If you’ve never heard of Sigg, they are a company worth checking out – though there has been a run on Sigg bottles recently due to the BPA announcements (Sigg has always been, and will always be, a manufacturer of stainless steel and aluminum water bottles).
The Camelbak is a small backpack with about 16L capacity (just enough to hold a rain jacket and lunch). If you aren’t familiar with Camelbak hydration systems, then you’re probably wondering what that blue tube is running out of the side of it. Well, that’s the mouth piece to the 2L hydration sack nestled in its own pocket behind the bag. These things are super convenient, as you don’t have to take off your pack and root through it to find your water bottle, nor do you have to worry about dumping your water down the front of your shirt as you lean back to drink (this has happened to me on numerous occasions). The bag itself has a wide opening to fill which is approximately the same size as a Nalgene mouth, which means that any water filter adaptable to Nalgene bottles will fit this equally well. The mouthpiece is a bite valve, so it won’t open and drip unless you squeeze it. And when the tube isn’t in use, it has a nice little strap to hold it out of the way against the side of the pack.
Pretty awesome, eh? :D
I had heard good things about the recipe for Snobby Joes from Veganomicon (thankfully copied into the archives of Post Punk Kitchen as I do not yet know the joy of owning Veganomicon). I decided to give it a try this evening, since I otherwise had no idea what to cook.
First mistake: Assuming I had lentils.
Second mistake: Assuming I had tomato paste.
Third mistake: Assuming I had tomato sauce.
Fourth mistake: Assuming I had a bell pepper.
Yes, indeed – the four main ingredients in the snobby joes were entirely absent from my cupboard. I toyed with using red lentils instead of green, but had visions of turning out a tomato-flavored mush instead of a lentil delight. So I opted for the near-forgotten green split peas lurking in the back of my cupboard. Funnily enough, I remember buying them accidentally, thinking they were lentils – and being disappointed when I returned home to find that they were actually peas. A quick google told me that I should be okay with this substitution – the flavor is a bit different, but the consistency would be much the same. So forward I forged.
It wasn’t until I was about done cooking the peas that I realized I was seriously lacking in the tomato department. I tend to keep a pretty stocked cupboard when it comes to tomato products as they are so useful and versatile, but I must have forgotten to restock. Crap. Well, I did have some canned diced tomatoes… and some canned diced tomatoes with jalapeno peppers… I think I can work with this…
So what to do for a side? Well, I have half a head of cabbage left after the delicious bean-stuffed cabbage rolls I made last week, I should use that. Okay, what do I do with cabbage? I have done precious little with cabbage in the past, so I called out for help via Plurk and got some good guidance from Heather on what to do. I took her mother’s recipe, modified it according to what I had on hand (and with an eye towards healthfulness), and turned out a pretty great dish.
Enough with the narrative, here are the recipes:
Snobby Joes (modified, original is in link above)
1c green split peas, uncooked
2 c water
1 yellow onion, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 c tomato sauce
1/4 c barbecue sauce
1 can diced tomatoes with jalapenos, drained and pressed of excess liquid
3 tablespoons chili powder
bread or buns to suit (the above photo is Leo’s plate, I had mine open-faced on Ezekiel bread)
1. Boil water; add split peas and cook for 30 minutes on low.
2. When peas have 10 minutes left to cook, in a pot sautee onions and garlic in non-stick spray (or you can use EVOO, I had enough oil coming in via the cabbage salad that I opted for no oil here) for about 7 minutes.
3. Drain peas and add to pot with onions. Add remaining ingredients, stir, heat through. Serve on a bun. Nom.
This turned out to be fantastic. My husband was impressed, so much so that I had to hide the leftovers before he could eat us out of lunch tomorrow. This easily makes 6 servings, or four if you have a big appetite/are hungry enough. This version of the Snobby Joes was absolutely delicious, and I will be hard pressed to return to the original… There really is no need.
By-the-seat-of-my-pants Cabbage Salad
1/2 head of cabbage, shredded
1 apple, peeled and diced
1 oz almonds, coarsely chopped; or else 1 oz slivered almonds
1 tbsp sesame seeds
1/2 onion, diced small
Dressing:
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp sugar (I used splenda)
3 tbsp red wine vinegar, others may work well too
Mix everything together. Refrigerate until ready to serve. This may not stand up well over night, so it’s best to eat it all the day of (the cabbage may wilt in the dressing). The above probably made 4 normal-sized portions, but that husband of mine, well, since I wouldn’t let him snarf all of the snobby joes, he snarfed the remaining salad instead.
This turned out surprisingly well. I was a little wary – raw cabbage is a hard sell for me, due to traumatic coleslaw-related incidents during childhood. Plus I tasted the dressing before I dumped it in and I was not too impressed. But this is the magic of cooking – the part that I love: put everything together and voila! Super fantastic food! The tart/bitter cabbage flavor balanced out perfectly with the sweet occasional apple, and the almonds added a great crunch and that something earthy that really tied it together. I think the only thing I would change is to omit the sesame seeds, except for maybe as a garnish – they didn’t add considerably to the flavor, perhaps because they were overpowered by the sesame oil (which is a must).
All in all, an incredibly successful experiment – would definitely make this again!
I’m convinced there was something divine about my run this evening, at least from a mathematical standpoint. Check this out:
I left at 8:52 pm, checked my watch again at 9:00 and 9:08 on the dot, and sauntered in the door at exactly 9:16. Yeah, those are all 8 minute intervals.
My first jaunt of jogging lasted 6:06 minutes (officially my longest single stretch of jogging EVAR), which was followed by two 3:03 segments, for a grand total of – you got it – 12:12 running.
And, of course, 12 minutes running = half of the total 24 minute travel time (which is the highest walk:jog ratio I’ve ever managed!).
Something was in the air. Too bad the 1.69 miles I did doesn’t turn into some crazy numerical coincidence as well. Nor does the 14 minute mile I was averaging tonight.
All in all, a short run, but a fantastic one.
A couple of years ago I was on 3FC under a different name (britomart) and entered some kind of drawing. Now, I never win anything, door prizes, lotteries, contest, races, nada. I am just not a terribly lucky kind of person. Well, somehow the 3FCers managed to draw my name out of a hat (I tell myself perhaps I was the only one who entered, this is the only way that would happen) and I won a pretty nifty little pedometer, a signed copy of the 3FC book, and a 6-month subscription to PUSH. The 3FC announcement was also the #1 return if you googled my name for a while (it has since been pushed back to #7 or so). I felt like a celebrity!
Anyhow, I never really kept going with PUSH. I enjoyed it but I get bored with strength training easily – there is so much sitting still involved, I get antsy with all the reps… It feels good, don’t get me wrong, I love feeling stronger, but when faced with the choice between cardio and strength, I’ll take the cardio. Last night I found the stack of DVDs again, many of them unopened. So more out of curiosity than anything else, I popped in the 1st month and went to down.
Yeah, somebody remind me to do the floor exercises on my freakin’ yoga mat next time, okay? Somehow that didn’t occur to me and now I have rug burn on my knees and elbows – yeah, explain THAT to my coworkers. I keep telling them my husband didn’t have anything to do with it… Sigh…
Anyhow, I think it would be a good idea for me to keep up the strength exercises this time. We’ll see how far that resolution goes (I sound excited, don’t I?).
PUSH is kind of an interesting program if you had never heard of it. It’s a subscription service, and $19.95 per month will get you a DVD with two brand new strength routines with a trainer of your choice, set to music of your choice (to a degree), focusing on an area of your choice. You also get a cardio routine to do alongside the strength, and you get to choose what kind of cardio you get. You can also tell them what kind of equipment you have at home and they will choose exercises that allow you to utilize it. For instance, I have some handweights at home, so a few of the strength routines have me holding the handweights. It’s an interesting approach to the fitness DVD market. There are things I like and things I really kind of dislike about the way it is set up… But I’m hesitant to go into that because I don’t know how much they have changed the service since I last received DVDs in the fall of 2006. Anyway, if you’re looking for something new, it might be worth checking out…
Went for a run tonight and ended up with a bit of a conundrum when I arrived back home to check on my progress. We went for what felt like a great long run. We both thought we had run at least 3 miles but, upon checking the route on mapmyrun and gmap-pedometer, we actually ran only 2.38 miles – which is 0.22 miles shorter than last time. Okay, well, time doesn’t always move in a linear fashion when you’re distracted, so we were willing to accept that the run just didn’t get the distance we were hoping for. However, when checking on the time – this is what bothers me – we ran 5 minutes MORE than we have ever run in one run, yet we ended up on a shorter route coming in four minutes slower than we did on the longer route. What the heck does that mean? I don’t think we were going slower. I don’t feel like we were, anyhow. And last time we had that horrendous hill to contend with which by all means should have slowed us down. I don’t understand why running more of the route = taking longer on a shorter distance.
If anyone has some insight aside from “you must be running slower,” I’d love to hear it. Any known time vortexes occurring last night? Alien abductions? Otherworldly possession? Because the (rational) alternative is frustrating…….
EDIT: For anyone who thinks the difference isn’t all that much, keep in mind that once you do the math that means we added a whole 4 MINUTES to our mile time tonight. 4 freakin’ minutes! That’s nearly a lifetime!
WW meeting was this morning, I am up 0.8 lbs. Eh. Not gonna try to make excuses for it, just know that I will be working extra hard to make next week count. Ultimately it may not be hard to get it off since I was seeing 193’s all week until just this morning, so maybe it’s a daily whatever. This would be the problem with going by one day’s weight out of the week – but it sure keeps me saner to do it this way than to agonize over every decimal each morning.
I have updated my measurements (off to the left) which hadn’t been done in a while. I think it’s been a month and a half since I last measured, made some decent progress but nothing spectacular.
Today’s food has consisted of mostly peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I’m gonna get in the kitchen and whip up that fantastically orgasmic quinoa and green vegetables dish I posted a recipe to the other day, if anything can get me back into eating whole grains and vegetables it is that dish. Then tonight, off to see Wall-E (we were going to see it at 7:30 but wanted to get in a run beforehand – ran out of time, so we’re going at 10) in celebration of Leo getting his green card approval :)
I have been maintaining a page in this blog for running progress, but I think I will concurrently post about it as well so I can keep some narrative about it. Otherwise the Running page tends to just be stats.
Anyway.
Just back from my run (literally just got in the door, still covered in sweat, working down some water while I wait for my body to find equilibrium again). This is the first time I have ever done two runs in a row – usually I have only given myself enough credit to perform once every other day. Granted, yesterday’s run felt so half-assed, only out for 1.2 miles, only out for 19 minutes… My heart just wasn’t in it, and I was mentally exhausted from our recent trials with the government.
Today was 2.7 miles, at least according to gmap-pedometer.com. I have to add, however, that about a quarter of a mile was spent at an approximately 65 degree angle – the steepest, most daunting hill in our neighborhood, and it completely wore me out. I would love to find out what the distance actually is – I have a feeling online pedometers are somewhat inaccurate as they probably only measure flat distance. When you’re working with as many hills as I am, it becomes an issue. Of course, wearable pedometers become slightly less effective on hills as well, so I guess that’s not a winning situation. Perhaps best I could do would be to drive it and mark my odometer. Or get a bike computer and bike it. Or get a better pedometer.
Peak HR 186
Avg HR 163
Time 42 m
Running 7:57 m
Distance 2.7 mi
Temp 90.2 F, 47% humidity
6:22 – 7:04 pm
Route: Oxford loop, up Bruce, down to lights and down Rugby to Greenway, Amherst, and Rose Hill, to Rugby again and back up Wellford
I am having too much fun with the vegan experiment to stop now. 7 days was not long enough to really explore the possibilities of this lifestyle! I am going to do my best to keep this up, and not assign an end date to it. Just see where it naturally goes. I do know that my next weight-related reward (191, no longer obese by BMI, 3.8 pounds from here) will be the Veganomicon, because I keep hearing about it and yum! vegan cooking!
I was reading Joe’s blog (the aptly titled Vegan Experiment) earlier this afternoon, and one of his entries mentioned being contacted by a rather militant vegan who berated him about his calling himself vegan while he follows the spirit of a vegan diet, while not necessarily eschewing all other animal products in his life. I don’t understand that. I mean, he is making an effort, just as I am, to remove animal products from his diet and thereby his life on a gradual basis. I am throwing this out there because I don’t want to be in that situation – I don’t want people to have misconceptions about exactly what it is I am doing. I may get to a point where I am strong enough/ready enough to remove all animal products from all facets of my life, but I think for now, the food part is hard enough for me to tackle. So militant vegans, back off, there is no room for you here. Thankfully I have not yet met any of these sorts of people – but I know they exist. I am still going to call this a vegan experiment, even if my shoes still have leather uppers.
This recipe took me about an hour from start to finish. That’s a little longer than I typically spend on a weeknight meal, you may want to save this one for a weekend if time is an issue. I wasn’t terribly hungry this evening so didn’t mind investing the time in it. This recipe originates from Cooking Light.
Baked Eggplant Stacks with Roasted Tomato Sauce
8 plum tomatoes (about 1 pound)
Cooking spray
1 1/2 cups diced onion, divided
1/2 cup dry red wine
1 teaspoon chopped fresh oregano
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup sliced onion
1/2 cup dry white wine
20 garlic cloves, peeled (about 2 large heads)
1 cup canned vegetable broth
1/4 teaspoon salt
18 (1/2-inch-thick) slices eggplant (about 2 medium)
2 (10-ounce) packages frozen chopped spinach, thawed, drained, squeezed dry
Oregano sprigs (optional)
Preheat oven to 425°. Place tomatoes in a shallow baking dish coated with cooking spray. Bake at 425° for 30 minutes. Set aside.
Heat a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Add 1 cup diced onion; sauté 3 minutes. Stir in tomatoes, red wine, oregano, pepper, and 1/4 teaspoon salt; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer 20 minutes. Place tomato mixture in a blender; process until smooth. Set aside; keep warm.
Place a saucepan coated with cooking spray over high heat. Add sliced onion; sauté 5 minutes. Add wine and garlic. Bring to a boil; cook 5 minutes. Stir in broth; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer 20 minutes. Place garlic mixture in a blender; process until smooth. Set aside; keep warm.
Sprinkle 1/4 teaspoon salt over eggplant. Place half of eggplant in a single layer on a baking sheet coated with cooking spray; broil 5 minutes on each side or until lightly browned. Repeat procedure with remaining eggplant; set aside.
Place a large nonstick skillet coated with cooking spray over medium-high heat. Add 1/2 cup diced onion; sauté 3 minutes. Add spinach; cook 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Remove from heat. Preheat oven to 425°.
Arrange 6 eggplant slices, 2 to 3 inches apart, on a baking sheet. Spread 2 1/2 tablespoons spinach mixture over each slice. Stack each with another eggplant slice, an additional 2 1/2 tablespoons spinach mixture, and remaining slices. Bake at 425° for 15 minutes. Arrange 1 eggplant stack on each of 6 plates; spoon 1/3 cup tomato sauce and 2 tablespoons garlic sauce on each plate. Garnish with oregano, if desired.
NOTES:
A lot of the prep work can be done ahead of time in order to cut down on day-of prep. Both sauces, actually, can be made beforehand. Blend them and toss them in tupperwares, reheat when you make the dish. Also, I’m not sure why they tell you to bake the eggplant in two separate phases; all 18 slices of eggplant can in fact go in at once, saving you 10 minutes.
One thing that doesn’t make sense to me about this recipe is that ultimately you need 12 tablespoons of the garlic sauce (equal to 3/4 cup), but with the onion, garlic, wine, and broth, you end up with nearly double that. Perhaps I didn’t let mine reduce far enough, but seeing as how the tomato sauce came out in the perfect amount and I simmered them for the same time, I think it might just be a problem with the recipe. I would cut the garlic sauce items in half (so 1/2c broth, 1/4c wine, 1 head of garlic, 1/2 onion), that would be plenty.
The tomato sauce for this was fantastic. It was a rich, purple-red color, very fragrant. I would be tempted to keep the recipe for the tomato sauce and use it in other dishes, it was so good. Too bad I don’t have any of that left over!
Also, forgive the fact that I am not a food photographer of any quality :) I do my best with my little Canon point-and-shoot.
