Become a vegetarian

This makes me very happy. It’s been about two months now.
I can’t promise I’ll never slip and eat some fish if I don’t have better options (at a wedding or party or trip or something). I don’t care for red meat or chicken, anyway, and only ate them as some kind of “protein obligation”. Beans and grains are my new obligation ;) But it has been very interesting, and my family is eating a lot of different foods with new (to us) spices, many fruits and nice recipes for pulses (which I always found boring).
For instance, yesterday I made a spicy lentil soup with some bread to go with it. Today I made crepes with two different fillings (spinach and ricotta, and corn) and tomato sauce with basil. These were wonderful (I’ll post pictures).
We’ll have black beans and rice for dinner, and I’ll save some rice to make stuffed tomatoes tomorrow.
We are healthy and we are eating very good food.

So it’s been a month with only one failure. I’m not sure I’ll never fail again (especially in the same kind of circumstances), or that I’ll be able to completely give up seafood, but it’s been easy so far. It doesn’t feel like that much of a change or that I even accomplished that much, probably because I already only ate meat as an “obligation”. I just had to concentrate on nutritious substitutes, so as to not live on pasta :).
I’ll give it till the end of this month to mark it as done.
(now Christmas with the in-laws, that will be something :P )

...I see it’s been almost a month. I failed once: two Saturdays ago we had to stop somewhere for lunch, and my husband ordered some pasta that had some meat, and it was a huge dish. I could have avoided it, but thinking it would go to waste seemed even worse for me than just eating it. Throwing it away feels like “desecrating” the animal even more, so I decided to help him (my husband) finish it. He suppports my goal and never even asks for anything different than what I cook. He’s also feeling healthier. But when we don’t eat at home (not often) he asks for something with meat.
And yet… a funny thing happened this last Saturday: we had to shop for some things and decided to eat something fast on the go. This time we looked for individual portions and I managed to get a vegetarian chinese meal. He asked for chicken at the same place… and then he complained the taste was too strong, that it tasted too much like chicken :) My veggie recipes are working wonders!

I’ve been improving my homemade yakisoba. It’s not the real thing, but I used what I had: an onion, carrots, broccoli, mushrooms and a sauce made with thickened (with cornstarch) veggie broth, sesame oil and soy sauce.
A family favorite.

which day of the week, but I know we recently had a leftovers day, which consisted of coleslaw (made with the cabbage I didn’t use for the minestrone), miso soup and veggie nuggets.

Dinner was spaghetti with a simple tomato sauce with olives.

All my new recipes this week are vegetarian:
The chickpea dal ( or cholay?) was wonderful, very well received. And not nearly as difficult as I expected.
The Lentils Provençale were an interesting twist on lentils. I served them with rice, and we had strawberries and meringues for dessert.

Well, at least indirectly. Even though he is four years old, he has already grasped that mommy likes to experiment in the kitchen on weekends, if possible with “international” food. So he asked me to make an Italian meal. We talked about pizza, pasta,... but as we had recently eaten that, I made a salad with fresh and sun-dried tomatoes, olives, mozzarella and lots of veggies. Oh, and garlic bread. Maybe not real Italian food, but close enough…

Yesterday: some vegetable wonton and sushi for lunch; my homemade veggie minestrone for dinner and lemon cupcakes for dessert.

of most my veggie meals. Maybe that’ll help me to write a menu.
Sunday: baked falafel for lunch; my black bean soup for dinner.
Monday: An omelette with green peppers, onions and mushrooms and bread for luch; three different homemade pizzas with shiitake, sundried tomatoes and green olives.
Today: a fast cheese sandwich and orange juice for lunch and a big salad with corn, red and yellow peppers, green olives and capers for dinner ( and bread).

I’m trying to work on the vegetarian front and the try a new recipe each week goal together, meaning, I’ll try hard to test only vegetarian recipes. Makes sense, doesn’t it?