Hibernation

That's my excuse for why I haven't posted in over a month! It was much harder than I thought to finish up posting food from the CSA...even there are only two meals left! Sometimes, when I get closer to the end of completing a task, I get a little lazy finishing it up. Does that ever happen to you? It's like now that I can actually see the end of a project in the near future, I can relax a little...to the point where I stop working. Oops. Don't worry, though, the last 2 meals will be posted very shortly!

Will an adorable picture of Winnie make you forget about how long it's been since the last blog post?

For the past few years, February has been "Vegetarian Month" in our home. This all started while I was in graduate school. I was taking a class about drug addiction, and one of our assignments was to give something up for a month and journal about it. While some of my peers gave up sugar, alcohol, and caffeine, I decided to give up meat. And because I have such a wonderful husband, he agreed to do it with me! Talk about a supportive spouse! It was much harder than I anticipated it to be - we had to be more creative when planning our weekly menus by trying new meals and foods. It was also a challenge attending social functions, like going out to dinner with friends or going to a Super Bowl party, where everyone else was eating meat. Somehow, we survived and we enjoyed it so much that we decided to continue the tradition every year!

This year, however, we decided to challenge ourselves a bit more and go vegan...before 6. A while ago I posted about Mark Bittman's idea of going vegan before 6 pm, where you eat vegan meals for breakfast and lunch and then whatever you want for dinner. It's more of a lifestyle than it is a diet, and it takes a lot of preparation and awareness of what you are eating for you to do it properly. We decided to incorporate this idea of going vegan before 6 into vegetarian month - we're going vegan before 6 and then vegetarian after 6 (so we can eat dairy at dinner). One day in and it's not so bad so far!

Breakfast: coffee with almond milk; cinnamon raisin bread with peanut butter; avocado toast
Lunch: smashed chickpea and avocado sandwich
Dinner: roasted vegetable sandwiches and salad

Stay tuned for more vegan and vegetarian meals this month!