Life's Little Updates and Kale and Banana Experiments

Ok, so it's clearly been a long time since I've posted on this blog. BUT I didn't forget about it. Life happened! So, let me tell you what's been going on.

In the past, I've written about my relationship with Tony and the kind of cooking that we did together. The biggest thing that's been going on since my last post is that WE HAD A BABY! Yay!

To be fair, this picture is somewhat misleading. She's about three days from 10 months old today. This is more current.

My pregnancy was somewhat difficult. I was considered high risk, so we saw a specialist frequently. Josephine was a c-section baby, so there was quite a recovery time too. And then there's all the new mama drama!

The good news is that I'm ready to jump back into the blog. The bad news (maybe?) is that Tony and I have decided to make some pretty serious changes with our lives. In my last post, I talked about how we've made more of an effort to choose responsibly when it comes to food. That said, we've decided that we're going to go vegan.

Now, I know what you're thinking. There's a lot of criticism about the vegan lifestyle. There's the ever-present question of where the protein comes from, and there's also the fact that it seems like a really big sacrifice. So here's some background. The main reason that Tony decided to give vegan a try is that he wants to feel better. He's got some digestive issues and these issues are definitely exacerbated when he eats processed foods and high-fat foods. For him, it's really all about feeling better. For me, there are actually a lot of reasons. I feel like a vegan lifestyle is more healthful. There's also a large part of me that wants to do this for ethical reasons.

Let me be a little more specific about what I mean by ethical reasons. For one, I don't want you to think that I'm a card-carrying member of PETA or that I'm all about animal liberation. I don't think the meat industry is an "animal holocaust." I don't want anyone else to feel bad about eating meat. However, I do think that factory farming animals is having an incredibly negative impact on our world and our environment. I also think that, while there are companies out there that treat animals with respect and use Temple Grandin designed systems for compassionate slaughter, not all meat companies operate ethically. All you have to do is a quick Google search to find hundreds of videos of people gleefully abusing animals that are being bred for meat. I'm not naive enough to think that my abstinence from meat will change an entire industry, but I do feel that it will clear my conscience.

The point of all of this is that we wanted a platform to catalog our journey to the vegan lifestyle. We're not just jumping in with both feet. We're trying to sort of transition into the vegan lifestyle. Right now, we're in the process of using up the meat and dairy products that we still have. As it gets used up, we'll just be replacing those animal products with plant-based products.

Obviously, then, our goal is to get more creative with food in order to keep the positive momentum going. So we've been doing some great experimentation lately with trying new things. Sunday, I made kale chips for the first time, which really were just as easy as the internet said that they would be.

If you've never done it, it's super simple. You wash the kale and let it completely dry. Then, you toss it with a small amount of oil, lightly sprinkle it with salt, and bake it at 350 degrees for 10-15 minutes. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a snack that's easier to produce than kale chips. My entire family loved them, so we'll definitely be repeating this recipe. In the future, though, I think I'll experiment with different flavors and seasonings for them.

Tonight, we actually enjoyed a vegan dinner. We had some veggie burgers, roasted broccoli, and salads. Tony had never had a veggie burger before, but veggie burgers and I are old friends. We found some veggie burgers at Aldi that were cheap and also contained only vegetables and no funky ingredients, which I was pretty impressed by. Tony found them somewhat bland, but he did like them enough to have them again. The real star of my dinner was actually the broccoli. I oven roasted it after tossing it with some minced garlic and salt and pepper. To be honest, I really put an obscene amount of garlic on the broccoli--which is why it was so good!

Those little brown bits are the garlic.

For dessert, I decided to try making ice cream out of frozen bananas--another little thing that I've read about countless times on the internet. I'll be honest, I was skeptical about how this would work, which was only exacerbated by the way it initially looked before it came together. At first, the bananas were crumbly and strange until they started to get creamy. It was just a food processor full of frozen banana shards. I should have taken a picture because none of the things that I'd read had prepared me for the weirdness of those bananas before they got creamy. The finished product, however, was delicious. It does still taste like banana. Everything I'd read about it before said that it would taste more ice cream-like, but it really just tasted like cold, chocolately banana (because I put cocoa powder in it, which was a fantastic choice).

I don't want to underplay how enjoyable this was despite my criticisms. I really love bananas. Cold, processed bananas with cocoa powder and raw, shredded coconut on top is no exception to this rule. It also paired really well with the cashew milk that I'm having tonight. Tony didn't like it, but he thought that might have had more to do with the cocoa powder than the banana flavor.

Tonight was probably a bit more vegan than we've been for a while. We've been eating much more plant-based meals in general just because beans are a really good dinner solution when money is tight, and a great deal of our budget now is dedicated to formula and diapers. Lately, we've just been trying to get rid of the rest of our meat. So tomorrow, we'll be eating chicken wings for dinner because I have to use them up. We don't really have the money to be wasteful and just throw out food, and even if we did, the frugal little psycho portion of my brain would be launched into a twitching, drooling spazz attack. (If you did't know this about me, I hate spending money. The only thing I hate as much as spending money is wasting money or things I've spent money on. If I'm willing to spend money on something, it's because I think it's a viable and useful item that I actually believe in.)

I'm looking forward to sharing the ups and downs of this new chapter in our lives. Be prepared, guys, because it's going to get real honest!