Not What I Thought

...describes this blog. Less than a month ago I created this blog because I was becoming so excited about learning about food that I thought I might have enough to share to start a new blog based just on food. I was right about that part. What I didn't know was that I would be eating mostly vegan and committed to sticking to that just a few weeks later. So, it looks like this will be a vegetarian blog pretty much from the beginning.

I have not had meat in over a month now. Yay me! I have also mostly been free of dairy and eggs and have cut my processed sugar down by miles (and my processed foods in general). I am just starting out on this journey. Many people I have talked to say that it is ok to ease into it, and that you shouldn't expect yourself to change all eating habits overnight. For any other newbies out there, I thought I would share all the "mishaps" I have had in the last month.

Two days into my "eating experiment", my mom came to visit. At this point, I was not in very deep and so it was easy just to eat all my moms "usuals" and my old "faves". I didn't even keep track in my head of all the things I ate that weekend as it wasn't extremely important to me at that point. I have no idea if I was a fairly good girl or if I went totally wrong.

Within a week of my mom being here, my hubby went to the trouble of picking out something really nice and cooking dinner. I had a piece of fish that night. I didn't want to let him down. He is having a lot of trouble with my new way of eating and I am trying to make it affect him as little as possible.

I LOVE ice cream. Milk and other dairy products were surprising easy to give up for me, but ice cream has always been my thing. In the past month, I have had two McFlurries (one was that weekend my mom was here), I ate a Dairy Queen ice cream sandwich, and I had two licks of my daughter's coconut ice cream from the Marble Slab Creamery. The problem seems to mostly be with ice cream stops outside the home. As long as we are home, I can mostly resist by grabbing one of my fruit popsicles out of our freezer. I really need to try some dairy free ice cream, but it is so darn expensive. I also recently saw a vegan ice cream book, and I am definitely going to be looking into that.

Tonight. Tonight was a big problem, but it actually didn't turn out as bad as I thought. I ate dinner tonight at my in-laws for the first time since I started eating differently. I brought along a Chickpea Salad and a Carrot and Daikon Salad and some Vegan Gluten-Free Gingerbread cookies (my mil has celiac disease). I was really worried about comments that would come up if they didn't see any meat on my plate. I have never eaten much meat, so I have actually regularly been subject to sarcastic, "What, are you vegatarian now or something?" comments. Now that I actually am a vegetarian, it was not unrealistic to think that this might happen again, but I was dreading having to change my reply to them.

Of course, I couldn't ask anyone what was in the side dishes without pointing out my new dietary issues, so I just tried to judge as well as I could. I likely will never ask what is in things when I go there, as I want to not have my choices affect them even more than I want this for my husband. I took a small amount of mashed potatoes, even though I am sure they make them with milk and butter. I took a pasta salad that looked pretty safe, but first bite told me there was a little bit of cheese hiding in there (and I left the rest). I accepted a small tart that must have had some dairy in it. However, even though I was almost scared enough to take a little bit of steak (and then think about trying to slip it to one of the dogs, or hiding it under my corn cob) I managed to keep the meat totally off my plate. If anyone noticed, they didn't comment on it.

I will post the next month's "mishaps" around the middle of July and we can see if I have improved. Most likely, just me promising to post my mishaps will greatly improve my chances of a cleaner slate.