I love gravy made from the fat of delicious dead animals. I love the moistness of lamb, the tenderness of a slow-cooked pot roast. I love a gritty, spicy burger. Tacos stuffed to the brim with ground beef. Chili with beef and Italian sausage. Ham and pineapple pizza. You name it, I love it.
I am now shocking myself by contemplating vegetarianism. I have announced my intentions on Facebook and Twitter and I think people will hold me to it, for a while at least.
I have several reasons that I will discuss on later blogs. Long story short, ethics accounts for about 75% of the reasoning and health for the other quarter.
Over the course of the next few days I will not be going completely vegetarian, but the only meat I plan on consuming is turkey. This is because my wife has several recipes she had intended on making with the leftover Thanksgiving bird so I will be obliging. In the meantime, I am getting myself acclimated to different foods. I will be keeping track of a few of these on here as a record of things I am doing different and my initial thoughts.
This morning for breakfast I decided to make an open-faced egg sandwich with fresh onion and herb bread, Morningstar soy bacon, and an egg smothered in smoked gouda cheese and country herbs.
The experience was a bit strange, to say the least. To begin with, the Morningstar bacon looked like large strips of chewing gum with a unique dry, almost putrid smell.
I dropped a couple strips into some bubbling olive oil and waited for it to crisp - but it did not! I guess I learned a lesson today: soy does not firm up when cooked in oil. I had to remove strips and cook them in a non-oiled pot to make it work.
The sandwich turned out ok...ish. This kind of bacon will take some getting used to. It did make my stomach feel queasy for a couple hours. It is too early to determine if it was the soy bacon that did this; I don't want to use anecdotes so I will try cooking with it again in the near future in a different kind of dish.
I must note that it did fulfill my short-term craving for meat. Now that it is lunchtime, I am not going to make my usual lunchmeat sandwich, but instead a bowl of couscous and olives.
I'm not vegetarian yet -- since July 2014 I have been moving in that direction. Count me as 95% plant-based, 5% meat. No dairy, no eggs (I really do miss them!), no refined flours or sugars, no processed foods in packages or containers, no unfermented soy products (Monsanto, I have learned, has around 96% of all soy patents, especially for the seeds and plants), no commercially-made sweets, desserts, breads or juices, and no soft drinks, including the ones sweetened with stevia. I never knew how much I can enjoy fruits and vegetables every day! Adding to my enjoyment are unprocessed brown and black rices, carob powder, stevia for sweetening, non-GMO oils (grapeseed and unrefined olive), and peanuts in the shell! I do notice the differences between how I feel after eating a plant-based meal and one with a mix of plants and meat. The body responses are phenomenal! Not to mention that I hardly experience constipation or difficulty going to the men's room. Sometimes I go more than...well, you get the picture! I sleep better, think sharper, and have much more energy than when I was an omnivore. Maybe Prophet Daniel was right: It's smart to avoid the king's delicacies, stick with the plants. Another reason why I made the switch has to do with the increasing dominance of corporations and commercial interests around the world. As more companies buy out smaller family-owned farms and independent operations, the need for us to produce our own and avoid meat becomes more necessary. But we have to make sure that our food is free from genetic tampering and dirty production. A new apple made from GMO's? No way! Beef cows from clones? Oh-oh. Banana skins sprayed with seashell ingredients (Jews and many Christians and Muslims do not eat shellfish)? Mercy, me! Chicken nuggets made from ground live chicks and carcasses? Who says! And the day will come when we will no longer know exactly how our food products have been made. That is definitely a very scary thought....
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ReplyDeleteAnd I also enjoy dried beans (especially chickpeas/garbanzos) and quinoa (a fantastic rice substitute).
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