Veggie roadkill

This road trip to my wife's alma mater has driven home the point of having to really mean it to be vegetarian. I didn't really want to carry a cooler around during the trip to keep food in so I was gonna be going wild and crazy from a dietary standpoint.

I do eat fish so if pressed I can always roll through a fast food drive-thru and pretend I'm eating a decent meal. Yes, I know they have salads. Most of them are...well, just not too good. I'm sure they're better than the processed fish thing on a bun but some times you just have to damage your body for the sake of keeping the damn car moving down the highway. Luckily, my wife is pretty understanding about my strange eating habits so we compromise on Subway whenever possible. At least when I order a veggie sandwich they know what to put on it.

Pit stop on the road. Twizzlers are a vegetable, right?

 The most interesting part of this weekend should be the various get togethers, especially the Chili dinner at one of the coaches houses. I don't expect folks to go out of their way to accommodate my veggieness, especially folks I don't know who I'll probably never see again. There was no box to check on the are you coming form for, “my spouse is a veghead”. I've already lost the ability to process animal proteins so I'm not just gonna plunge in hoping for the best (that was not a pleasant experience when I discovered that little tidbit of knowledge). Anyone who's been vegetarian for a while knows what I'm talking about. You find yourself wishing you had more reading material in the bathroom.

The first time I was vegetarian I went to a family gathering at my Grandmother's house. Now, my Grandmother was an old school central Ohio granny who didn't do vegetarian. Salad was what your dinner ate. PETA stood for People Eating Tasty Animals. After a long discussion, actually more of a negotiation, about what exactly I could eat during the visit without having to live in that little bathroom by the backdoor of her house for a day or two, we settled on spaghetti. Now that should be fairly harmless, right? Grandma was known for her delicious meat sauce so that was her go to option. I had to explain to her that no matter how little meat she put in it (“Grandpa will raise a stink if I don't put enough in,” she said)I would still get sick. I finally, convinced her to just make a small pot of plain sauce for me.

I'll never forget coming into the kitchen through the back door and smelling that awesome aroma that only your Grandmother's cooking can generate. I can still flashback to that moment in my mind the smell was so incredible. My aunt gave me a big hug and showed me to the stove when the sauce was bubbling away like some magic pot of goodness. She pointed out my small pot of veggie sauce and the massive cauldron of the “real sauce”. The cauldron had an inch or so of fat from the pork and beef that was simmering away in the depths of the sauce. As I turned away my aunt tasted my pot and said it needed, “something to pep it up”.

The next few seconds were something like the slow motion beginning of an action movie where the hero is helpless to stop his best friend/wife/child/parent from being killed by the bad guy who gets it in the final scenes. As I turned to greet the rest of my extended family I saw my aunt grab a coffee mug and scoop just the fat from the cauldron and pour it into the pot of veggie sauce. “There,” she said, “that should pep it up.” When my anguished cry stopped she asked as innocence as a babe, “What's the matter? I didn't add any of the meat.” So, instead of awesome sauce sans meat it was plain spaghetti with butter and garlic for me.

Let's hope things go a little better for me the next couple of days. At least there's always a Subway nearby in big cities.

Do you have strange eating habits that make travel more interesting?

Are Twizzlers a vegetable? 

I think I can, I think I can

While driving home I was starving since I'd missed a couple of meals during the course of my day at work. Since rejoining the world of vegetarians I get to eat like a hobbit. You know, first breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, first lunch, second lunch, etc. Anyway, I was on my way to the grocery store to pick up food for dinner that night and was trying to decide if I should pick up a quick snack or just wait until I got home.

As I was working all this out in my head I passed no less than 9 fast food restaurants in about a 1.5 mile stretch of the fourlane I was driving on. Around here we only have one highway so we call it the fourlane. It sounds cool and confuses the hell out of the tourists. Each one of those fast food establishments tried to worm its way into my consciousness and get me to turn my steering wheel and pull in for a quick pass through the drive-thru. It stuck me that this is one of the big problems with our culture. Since we've become an instant gratification, gotta have it now, hell no I can't wait kind of society no one debates whether or not to have a snack right this instant even if it's a non-nutritious, unhealthy, grease bomb of a heart attack waiting to happen. Being a vegetarian is a big enough challenge by itself without having to survive a gauntlet of “eat me” every time I drive down the fourlane.

This little episode of mind games with myself has prompted me to really focus on how I plan my daily plethora of meals. I'm still fairly new to returning to this whole vegetarian thing so I'm relearning a large amount of lost lore from the last time I did this in the 80's. Having leftovers never seems to be a problem since my family is still a carnivorous band of cavemen and women (my kids look at my meticulously crafted vegetarian meals with an expression akin to seeing a train wreck on their faces). My daily work musette contains assorted veggies, fruits, energy bars, and great quickie meals like hummus on tortillas with kalamata olives. That kind of selection lets me grab a quick snack or meal on the run. At my job I rarely get to sit down and eat, I usually eat while on the run. I still freak out my co-workers when I eat tomatoes and peppers like apples while on the job.

If you're vegetarian, how do you plan your meals?

Do you eat like a hobbit?

What veggies do you eat like an apple?

Return of the Vegi

If you read my last post and are wondering about the book I mentioned, you'll just have to wait a while cause I'm gonna go all bibliophile on you in the very near future. Good things come to those who wait.

So it started with cycling, then progressed to running, and finally the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. About six weeks again I started eating vegetarian again. Ahhhh, I hear some of you out there yelling. I know, I know. I used to think salad was what my dinner ate. I thought PETA stood for People Eating Tasty Animals. I thought if God didn't want us to eat meat, she wouldn't have made it so tasty. Well, all you carnivores out there just look at it this way, there's now more meat for you.

I was a vegetarian back in the 80's for several years. I had no grand social agenda behind my thinking, I just thought that it was a better way to go. I was pretty well into it when I went on a kayak expedition in Mexico and we ate MRE's. No veggie options there so back to the paleoman diet I went.

I didn't make this. It looks like a prison food tray.

I had been gradually eating a more healthy diet as I started getting back into shape so the veggie change wasn't too traumatic. It hasn't been without some bumps on the road to slaying more defenseless plants to put on my plate. The first time I made tacos for dinner I swear the taco burger was talking to me by the end of the meal. Just a word to the wise here, lentil burger crushed up and covered in taco seasoning does not a fair substitute make.

Being a veghead is much easier nowadays with the vast selection of veggies at the local market, specialty grocers in most decent sized towns, and a wealth of vegetarian recipe websites. All that combined with a wealth of information on proper nutrition that is available just a click away helps to keep you on track.

The most important question though is how has it helped me? Given that I have a physical job on top of running and or cycling everyday proper nutrition is obviously of huge importance to me. There are several big pluses to my new diet. I now get to eat like a hobbit. You know breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, first lunch, second lunch, etc. I now seem to graze like some giant beast constantly on the prowl for a tasty morsel of vegetable matter. I've also found out that eating peppers and tomatoes like apples tends to freak out my coworkers so that's a bonus.

Again, there were a couple of important books in the whole transformation. I promise that I'll get all that bibliophile information together in a post for the near future. Really I will, I swear.

Has taco meat ever spoken to you?

Are you a grazer or a more organized eater?