New Years Revolutions, or 'Pour Some Turbinado Sugar on Me'

So, I'm sitting here at work breaking about half of my New Years resolutions. It's 10:30 am on January 2. Some of the resolutions are really worth keeping, however. This year, my second year of veganism, I resolve to become a BETTER VEGAN.

I eat refined sugar.




I lazily cut and pasted from Vegan Outreach's website. After they explain to you how disgusting bone-char sugar they suggest that you go ahead and eat it to make veganism look easy to other people. This philosophy sounded good to me last year, but as the days pass I become so much more concerned with how I live my life. And quite honestly, it's not going to be hard to abstain from sugar, and I think it makes vegans appear healthier and cooler. :)

Refined sugars do not contain any animal products, and so by an ingredients-based definition of vegan, refined sugar is vegan. However, some refined sugar is processed with animal bone char. The charcoal is used to remove color, impurities, and minerals from sugar. The charcoal is not 'in' the sugar, but is used in the process as as a filter. Thus by a process-based definition of vegan, refined sugar may not be considered vegan. For those who would prefer not to use refined sugar, there are several alternatives: raw, turbinado, beet sugar, succanat, date sugar, fructose, barley malt, rice syrup, corn syrup, molasses, and maple syrup.

So, it's not going to be hard to keep that resolution. I'm not even sure why I'm writing about it - other than it's a little step closer to becoming a Level 5 Vegan.

:)

Tiger Business

I'm sure you've heard the news about Tatiana, a tiger imprisoned in San Fransico zoo who escaped and killed a man and injured two others. She was killed.

Hopefully, this incident will cause people to pause and think about how strange is it to take (or breed) a wild animal to make money. Not only is it a really strange and horribly unethical thing to do - it's FUCKING DANGEROUS!

Easy.

A fine holiday! I'm sitting here by fire, munching on vanilla almonds and Barefoot
brand merlot. Last night we had my parents and uncle over for dinner. Now, keep in mind that both my dad and my uncle are real "meat" people. We served onion rings for an appetizer along with tortilla chips, salsa and bean dip. For dinner we had spaghetti with Tofurkey sausage, corn fritters and garlic sourdough bread. All in all it was an EASY dinner. My mom tends to hover in the kitchen so I wanted something I could do quickly!! An easy menu, but I'm still impressed by how well everything turned out.

As for today, Christmas Day, my entire family went to my in-laws house where I was greeted with vegan stuffing, yummy baked carrots and pasta with mushroom sauce. My mother-in-law gave me Veganomicon AND The Joy of Vegan Baking. I was thrilled!!

I can't believe how much easier it's getting to be vegan! My worst issue was with mine and my husband's parents, I used to always feel like I was getting in the way of all their holiday traditions. So, I'm a very happy and full vegan this Christmas evening.

P.S. Of course I watched 'A Christmas Story' too. Of course.

THE vegan.

It's recently come to my attention that I am the ONLY vegan some people know. While this puts a huge weight on my shoulder, the vegan community should be assured that I am quite polite and generally a lovely person to know.

The shock of picking up what I thought was my veggie sandwich and seeing what appeared to be a fleshy pile smothered in bright white mayo physically startled me. My lunch date laughed her ass off and said I looked like there were fingers or something in my sandwich. There may as well have been. But I smiled, and informed the waiter of his mistake. See, fucking lovely.

Ten Minute Dinner

organic mixed greens. organic packaged beets. organic salad dressing.

organic soy tempeh. seasoned with salt, pepper and braggs

organic lentils. some boxed kind. (to be fair, these took a bit longer to simmer...)

and as always! Yellow Tail Merlot

(if you look closely you can see Darby!)

Damn! This Shit is Easy!

I was explaining to my mom that I wasn't going to buy a new Christmas tree this year because I already have a nice little silver one and a new one was probably made in China anyway. As I braced myself for her rebuttal, she said, "Oh, I can see that." I know you would need to know my mom for this to make sense, but trust me.... it's substantial.

OMG.

It's going to be so much easier to be a conscientious consumer than it is to be vegan. And it's REALLY easy to be vegan.

12-09-2007

this is what happened today! oh, add some banana pancakes to this - i couldn't find a good picture but it was a MAJOR component to today. :)