Meats Be Gone

Chris O and I are going on a lifestyle change. I ate a million things over Christmas but now I have joined my work “Fat Off” and I had to pay $20. Whoever loses the greatest percentage by February 12th wins all the $20s. My starting weight on Monday was 141.9. That includes all my shoes! But the winner in the last round only lost 4.7%, so I only have to lose 7 lbs! I wish to lose 10. On The Biggest Loser they lose that in five minutes!

Chris O is going on a diet because his Mii is so fat:

Ha haaaaa!

Anyway I think we are going to do the 6-week regimen of Eat to Live. The Eat to Live guy seems like a sell-out based on his recipes which include Butter Buds and how he sells soup on his website for $4.80/can but the diet is supposed to be based on The China Study which sounds to me like it might be a real thing. Basically it is vegan, with limited grains and starchy vegetables (1 cup per day) and fats (1 oz nuts or 2 oz avocado) and unlimited fruits and vegetables. The challenge is going to be cooking things without starting with a giant glug of olive oil like I always do and giving up tofurkey sausages and pancakes. We have ordered the book but it is not here yet so in the mean time we have to eat up all our bad things including our stash of Sweet & Sara S’mores.

Tonight we ate the Tempeh Bolognese from the January Vegetarian Times (only $5 for a year!) (coconut creamer instead of evaporated milk and way less oil) on cauliflower puree.

The point of cauliflower puree is that it is better for you than potatoes, but if you look at the vast majority of recipes on the internets people are all adding butter, heavy cream, and cream cheese. I can’t believe you dummies don’t know why you are so fat! Anyway I just added some Smart Balance. We will wait until official Eat to Live time to see how it is without…

Thanksgiving at my parents’ house was vegan other than the turkey. I removed it from the picture to protect your delicate sensibilities. Generally a certain member of the family acts like an ass by dangling a piece right in my face but on the other hand Lenny was extremely pleased to have it there. Otherwise there are brussels sprouts, Bryanna’s soy and seitan turkey, stuffing, squash AND sweet potatoes tho they are the same, salad, and not-pictured cranberry sauce.

Pies! Apple, pumpkin from Joy of Vegan Baking, and 3000-calorie chocolate pie from the November Vegetarian Times. The cookies are not vegan. Also not naturally colored.

After dinner I discovered something fun, which is that if you rub a fake-fur pillow vigorously on someone’s head it makes their hair crazy staticky and they end up looking like Helen Keller before Anne Sullivan showed up. This is relevant to Thanksgiving because we got this fake fur pillowcase in our gift bag at the Woodstock Farm Sanctuary Thanksgiving last year.

Stay tuned to hear about Christmas promptly on January 20th.

I bought the new issue of Vegetarian Times and it seems to me that it is getting better and is much less cheese-centric than it used to be. There is a whole article about vegan donuts and I am obsessed with making the apple cider ones except that I can’t find a donut pan anywhere and in the meantime I drank all the cider.

So, last weekend I made two of the recipes from the Zen Kitchen article based solely on how the pictures in the magazine are so beautiful. Incidentally it is impossible to find thai basil in northern Virginia unless you go to Grand Mart. At Grand Mart they have at least 15 kinds of leafs that I have never seen or heard of before. So the first recipe was “Dragon’s Head Tofu” which are these fried tofu balls and let me save you some time by telling you that no you cannot substitute egg replacer for the egg even if you also add panko and the balls instantly disperse into a million bits as soon as they hit the oil. The Zen Kitchen article is all about being in touch with the sensory details of cooking so that does give you the opportunity to be fully present in your body as you experience the urge to whip the pot of oil across the room as though it were an eppendorf tube rack after a bad night of western blots.

So I fried them in a pan and it ended up being like a little falafel made of greasy tofu and it was not that great. I don’t know what all those picturesque tentacles coming off of the magazine picture’s balls are either. Then I was so busy being mad at the stupid tofu that I overcooked the goddamn red curry. Which I bet is pretty good if you don’t overcook all the vegetables. For example I don’t think you need to pre-blanch the green beans. Anyways, this was a terrible meal and it took a thousand years to make plus the thousand years I spent going to every store on the planet in search of thai basil.

The next day I made the tempeh sloppy joes from The Vegan Table and it was a million times easier and better and made enough leftovers for three more meals.

The End.