when your stint as a vegan is over ...

you go all out.  right?

i can't say it was planned.  i think i was in fact going to hold out for a blt with the bacon i just scored from cedarbrook farm  (h street farmers market, i love you).  but when i stopped by our most awesome corner food shop for a boule or baguette (either or as they are equally delicious) and happened upon this ham and cheese croissant i could not help myself.  i had just spent an hour or so in the sun, had a very light breakfast and had been walking to and fro imagining the meals i'd make with my veggies later on.  i was starving.  and it was absolutely worth it.

though so was the week of no animal products.  in fact, that week of no animal products was quite educational.

WHAT I LEARNED :

1.  being a vegan isn't *that* hard.

2.  being a vegan isn't that hard in a time where whole foods, a plethora of independent food shops, and the interwebs exist.

3.  i still love to eat pig and cow and sometimes other animals and i don't really want that to change.

4.  going vegan means i get to force mas to eat asian food.  don't get me wrong, the boy likes everything from thai to chinese to korean to sushi but we NEVER make it at home.  partly because it's been a miserable failure every time we've tried and partly because mas pretends to hate asian flavors when i suggest we make them.

5.  it would not be hard to be a fat/unhealthy vegan, which goes against everything i have ever believed.

6.  we can in fact use all of the produce in our green grocer box before it goes bad.

7.  almond milk makes everything better (though i kind of knew this already).

8. van's frozen waffles are the shit esp. with coconut oil and maple syrup.  we will always have these in the freezer from here on out.

9.  some people kind of judge you for being not really a vegan.  lame.
10.  i can go a week without bread and cheese.  this was really the main reason i went vegan and not vegetarian.  you see we go vegetarian all the time.  it's not a big deal.  and when we do that i mostly find myself snacking endlessly on variations of bread and cheese.  i will, actually, only eat bread and cheese for days straight at times.  but now, now i have veggies as a fall back.  i just didn't realize.
11.  the black pepper tofu from plenty is just as delicious as all of the other recipes in that book, and just as hard to source ingredients for.  i didn't have the three varieties of soy sauce that were called for and our dish kind of suffered.  next time i'll make the trip out to the eden center and buy them all.
12.  the thing i missed the most, hands down, was butter ... and the baked goods that result from butter. oreos are not as good as they used to be, or they are, but i just don't like them as much as i used to? we've been hard core on our version of milk bar cookies recently and i dare say they've spoiled us for anything of less quality (cornflake-chocolate-chip-marshmallow coming your way soon!).  this surprised me ...  i thought cheeseburgers or cheese would be the most missed.