Have Gone Vegan

the easiest laziest vegan chili ever

This may also be one of the laziest posts ever as I've already added these pics to Flickr, snort, but I thought it was worthwhile reposting as this really is a quick and tasty meal when you're in a hurry and all you feel like doing is opening up a bunch of cans. I know, canned goods may not be your idea of home cooking, but they're handy! 

Anyway, all you have to do is open up and combine the ingredients below. One can of tomato soup (but don't add water as the chili will be soupy enough), one can of red kidney beans, one can of chili seasoned diced tomato (yay, you don't even have to add chili powder if you don't want!) and half a package of Yves Original Ground Round. Put everything in a medium-sized pot, heat, let simmer for a while, and eat! Okay, you could always add additional items, and unlike me, you'll probably want to add more spices, but basically, this is it. Because don't you have better things to do than to spend all of your time in the kitchen? ;)   

vegan culinary confessions

Ready? Well, in a nutshell, I don't really like cooking.

Now that probably won't come as a huge surprise given that I've already confessed to a certain lack of enthusiasm for baking. But I was thinking more about it the other day when I was trying to pinpoint exactly what it is that I don't like about baking in particular, and realized to my shame that it all came down to it being too much work. In other words, I'm probably the laziest vegan in the world! Specifically what I find most annoying about baking is all the precise measuring you have to do. And that is precisely what I like about soup (the one dish I do enjoy making): you just throw everything into a pot in whatever amount you like or happen to have on hand. No recipe to follow, no persnickety measurements, and not even a required order of ingredients. Nope, you just do what you want, and then let it do what it wants for a while. Which maybe makes me more of a culinary rebel than the laziest vegan ever? Oh, and I don't ever put soup in a blender either. If I want it all smushy, I just let it simmer longer. ;)

So given my distaste for dishes that require more than five ingredients (including spices), and more than fifteen minutes of prep time, why do I torture myself and even look at the gluttony of vegan food blogs available? Blog after blog showing me just how lazy, undisciplined and pathetic I am for not creating my own culinary concoctions day after day. And that's the problem of course, because just as I admire flowers and gardens maintained by someone else, I like looking at food when prepared by someone other than myself. But all this blog ogling makes me wonder how anyone has time to do all of this delicious cooking, not to mention cleanup and shopping. Am I a bad vegan for sometimes wishing that I could just pop a pill to get all of my nutrients? Snort.

the language of veganism

Every movement or cause needs and develops its own language over time, so I've decided to explore this vegan vernacular if you will. But before I see what's in Google-land, I'm going to list V words that come to mind (ones that I've seen or am making up, snort):

• vegalicious
• veganomics
• veganology
• vegaphobic
• veganacity
• veganize

I really like veganomics and veganology (can you tell I used to be a sociology major?) and I think that as veganism continues to become more mainstream, it would be both useful and interesting to study the social and economic impact of this movement.

I came across and liked the words veganosity, veganniversary and vegangelical, and check out the vegan words on pages 14-15 of this 2003 Spring edition of Vegan Views! I particularly like veganimous and of course, veganoid, LOL.

How about you? Any good V words you'd like to add?

am I the only vegan who DOESN'T like cupcakes? ;)

I know; I almost feel like a traitor just for saying it! Snort. And it's not as if I hate them per se, but they just don't do anything for me. They don't make me squeal with delight, don't make me go ooh and aah, and they don't (unlike a certain cookbook would like) take over my world in any way. Now before you go thinking I'm the grumpiest vegan ever, I've never really liked regular-sized cakes either. The icing, especially, is usually too sweet for my taste.

And that, at the risk of you viewing me as ultra grumpy, brings me to the commonly held assumption that a vegan diet is healthier. Well it can be, but not always. All those cupcakes and other admittedly yummy vegan desserts can be high in both sugar and fat. I myself gained weight after turning vegan in part because I felt I deserved more treats. Using a generous amount of olive oil when sautéing onion and garlic didn't help either. In some ways, I find eating healthy even more of a challenge these days because I've never liked vegetables much, am not keen on most faux products, and find that beans will only take you so far!

Now another perfectly reasonable explanation for my cupcake aversion could be that I'm not only grumpy but also lazy, and not having easy access to vegan sweets in a small town means that I would have to bake them myself. And baking is NOT something I'm good at, or enjoy. Or maybe my appetite is so large that those little cakes are too darn small for me?

So, do you like cupcakes? Is it unveganly not to? Should there be a support group for cupcake-challenged vegans like me? ;)

a REAL Happy Meal

Oven roasted carrots, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, apple, pear, onion, garlic, and brown beans in tomato sauce. Served on a bright, cheerful plate. Healthy, filling, and unlike at a certain restaurant chain we all know, no sentient beings were sacrificed. :)

I'm vegan

Two simple yet powerful words.

Twice last week I ended up using them (with a telemarketer trying to sell me delivery of beef, and a clerk wanting to give me a food sample) and it struck me how effective those words really are. Right away the other person understood what I was saying, and there was no attempt to continue their campaign. And it made me realize that this declaration of who you are and what you stand for is probably better than any type of slogan we could come up with. Although fun, maybe slogans aren't even necessary because as the number of people who utter these two words continues to grow, the more exposure our cause gets. Our message is getting out there people! Before long everyone will know at least one person who is vegan (kind of like how everyone knows at least one person who is gay), which means that the whole movement will become more mainstream. And that, I like to think, will translate into more people becoming vegan. So maybe I'm vegan is actually the best un-slogan of all!