Reclaiming Control

For many people, going vegan is often accompanied by weight loss and healthier eating. After all, many of the fattening foods are now off limits, and you find yourself filling your plate with more veggies, beans and whole grains than ever before.  After a while of being vegan, however, you get better at it, and your options expand.  It's no secret that I love making cupcakes, but cupcakes are nothing but fat and sugar (delicious and adorable fat and sugar).  After a while you learn more about what you can eat: no butter vegan beaver tails!  Oh wait, more fat and sugar.  The fact is, there's plenty of junk food out there that is vegan that you really have no business eating (oreos, potato chips, french fries, passion flakies - readily available vegan junk!).  Here's the truth - just being a vegan isn't good enough if your goal is to be healthy and fit.

Or maybe, you start to lose your resolve, get a bit more flexitarian from time to time.  A bit of cake at a wedding here, a sweet treat at a coffee shop there.... sooner or later, that vegan line you drew in the sand gets washed away and you're nibbling from the pastry case on a daily basis!  Ok.  So I have a confession.  I've been a bad vegan.  I started working at Starbucks.  When I started out I restricted myself to only the vegan snack options (blueberry bar, sweet potato chips, packaged nuts), but I gradually started sampling more and more of the pastries, pastries I knew weren't vegan, but I wanted them anyway.  "To hell with it", I would think, "I'm not allergic, it's not going to hurt me."  Eventually I was eating non-vegan pastries every time I went in to work.  Even when I didn't want to eat them - I wanted to resist - I craved them, and the cravings won, day after day.  

It's not like I was craving the animal products, which are quite minimal in a lemon poppyseed loaf, peppermint brownie cake pop, or the new cinnamon swirl coffee cake that I fell in love with.  What I was craving was fat and sugar.  I used to be able to resist these treats.  In fact, I never used to crave sweets at all!  I used to be a salty snack craver (potato chips being my ultimate undoing).  This was desperate, I needed to break free of this craving cycle, I needed to regain control of my diet!  Enter Dr. Neal Barnard.  I've been a big fan of his for a long time, and when I became a vegan I read his book Food for Life: How the New Four Food Groups Can Save Your Life.  It's a really excellent book that discusses the health repercussions of the "standard american diet".  It is well referenced, thorough, and in my opinion, a must read for everyone who wants to be healthy.  One day, guilt ridden after not having the will power to resist sugary temptation, I remembered another of Dr. Barnard's books.  Breaking the Food Seduction: The Hidden Reasons Behind Food Cravings and 7 Steps to End Them Naturally.  I promptly got myself to amazon and ordered it.  It was high time I took charge, and I did that the only way I knew how - by learning as much as I could. 

If any of you find yourself at the mercy of your cravings, if you find yourself addicted to chocolate, sugar, cheese, or other unhealthy snack foods, I highly recommend this book.  It explains, on a scientific level (without being filled with complicated jargon), what is happening in your body and your brain when you crave and eat these foods.  Knowing is half the battle.  The rest of the tools are pretty simple, and the ones I'm going to talk most about on this blog are:

1. Eat a healthy breakfast

2. Choose foods that hold your blood sugar steady

3. Boost Appetite-Taming Leptin

One of the other steps is "Call in Reinforcements", and that's why I'm blogging about this.  It's like my version of AA.  I'm hoping to come on here and post about the foods that I'm eating that are helping me be successful, how many days I've gone without eating pastries (my current nemesis), and tell you about my failures a means to come clean and get back on track.  Stay tuned!

Double Whammy

I'm blogging to you now from

Brockville, Ontario, my new home base for the next 6 months. In case you were wondering why I dropped the ball again and missed yet another week of my salad challenge, I will use the excuses of moving to a new city, and starting a new job (which means adjusting to a new sleep schedule). So this post will be a 2 for 1 deal of salad fabulousness.

Earlier this week I decided to try my hand at veganizing the Caesar salad. Perhaps one of the most popular salads around, and decidedly not vegan, this dressing traditionally contains egg, anchovies, and parmesan cheese. Needless to say, making this salad animal-product free is no easy task. I started by searching what else was out there on the internet. I came across several variations, but the one I decided to go with was found on Recipezaar. I chose this recipe since conveniently the recipes on this site are rated by those who have tried them, and this one was given a nearly perfect score.

Vegan Caesar I: Julius

Greenery of choice (romaine is traditional, but all I had was spinach)

croutons

Veggie Bacon - fried and crumbled

Vegan Ceaser dressing

This salad was definitely tasty, and the dressing had some zing (and Caesar style garlic breath) but I'm going to have to classify this as a food fail because it really tasted nothing like a real Caesar salad. It didn't even look like Caesar dressing on account of the soy sauce. On the up side, it tasted really good on roasted potatoes!

Tonight's salad was anything but traditional. I'm not sure why, but I started thinking of how I could incorporate chocolate into a salad. I remembered that Susan over at FatFree Vegan Kitchen has made balsamic chocolate cookies before. She explained that balsamic vinegar actually enhances chocolate flavour, and so I figured that a chocolate balsamic vinaigrette would have to be delicious. When I was in the grocery store I spotted raspberry flavoured balsamic vinegar, and I was sold. I'm sure that you could make this recipe with regular balsamic vinegar, but I highly recommend this raspberry flavoured vinegar if you can find it.

Strawberry Salad with Chocolate Vinaigrette

Serves 1

4 or 5 strawberries, sliced

2 tbsp sliced almonds

greenery (I recommend baby spinach)

Dressing

1 tsp cocoa

1 tsp raspberry balsamic vinegar

1 tsp olive oil

1 tsp honey/agave nectar

This salad was seriously decadent. Seriously. Go out and make it.

Salad Challenge Countdown

Salads made: 15 Salads left: 37

You can't stop the Beet... or can you?

You thought I forgot about Beet Week didn't you? Not so! I had one last beet recipe in store, but I only just got around to making it today.

I found this recipe for Crispy Beet Chips and thought it sounded like a good idea. I love sweet & salty food, and I love chips, how could I go wrong. Armed with a newly purchased mandolin and an apron, I excitedly sliced my beet potato chip thin, lovingly arranged them on my cookie sheet, oiled and salted them and popped them into a toasty oven.

Remember how I said "How could I go wrong"? Well, I don't know what I did, but it went wrong. They curled up causing them to cook unevenly - some bits were singed while other bits were still soft. As you can see, not that appetizing.

Ok, so a few turned out well, and they were quite tasty. Since half burnt beets don't taste very good the batch as a whole gets a fail. Maybe my oven was too hot, I'm not sure, but this wasn't one of my shining moments in the kitchen.

So why am I sharing it with you? In the scientific community, negative results are almost never reported, and I suspect that food blogs follow this same pattern. The Journal of Negative Results was created to counteract this deceiving practice, so I am trying to do the same for food blogs by sharing with you my culinary failures as well as my triumphs. Also, they photographed well, so maybe not a total loss eh?