It's now week five of our plight to become 95% vegan. Our cheese-aholic house officially has no cheese! The cow's milk has been replaced with almond milk and the mister finally finished the last spoonfuls of ice cream he's been hoarding since we made the plunge.
We've settled into a nice routine with our meals and everyone seems to be happy with what's on the table at each meal. Breakfast is usually homemade muesli with almond milk (sometimes hot sometimes cold) and whole wheat toast with Earth Balance (btw the mister who is majorly into butter approved of this vegan substitute without complaint!) Lunch is usually leftovers from dinner the night before. For snacks, dried fruit, nuts, avocados and our favorite green smoothies still prevail.
For dinner I've been preparing a lot of grains (barley, bulgar wheat, wild rice, and of course quinoa) as well as beans and legumes (adzuki, garbanzo, black-eyed peas, French lentils). I must say I get a bit giddy at whole foods when unleashed in the bulk and produce sections. It's used to be that those isles were simply stops on the way. Now they make up my whole grocery list and so I feel something like a kid in a candy store knowing that I can and should get every grain, bean and vegetable known to man! I've also been using a lot of Asian, Mexican and Indian recipes and spices to keep it fresh. Would you beleive Max now asks for sesame oil and soy sauce to add to his plate the minute we sit down at the table? This week we also had our first salmon night which we plan to make a once a week tradition in order to get the B3 and B12 that's so hard to come by on a plant-based diet.
I'm still working on getting my vegan (and gluten free-- the little miss has thrown me for a loop in deciding to be gluten intolerant!) baking down pat. I will make a mean vegan banana bread but then follow it up with a crumbly-beyond-belief batch of cookies.
I must say we have so much more variety in our diet than we ever have. On a given day we eat well over a dozen different fruits, veggies, grains and legumes. Max is happy, the mister is happy, and little miss is happy as long as I avoid wheat, dairy, cayenne pepper, and chocolate. But that's all a post for another day! Coming up I will share how to make almond milk...
But first the creamy yummy goodness pictured above is an adaptation of this recipe. I used dates instead of raisins and opted to make a blueberry sauce by blending an 8oz package of blueberries with about 1/3 cup of water and 4 dates.
