More With Less Part 3: Why I Don't Eat Meat

Thinking about writing this post has been giving me the cold sweats all week, so let's just go with the blunt opener, shall we? Rip off the bandaid and get to it.

My decision to keep a meat-free diet (both times I have made it) has been, in my opinion, the most significant lifestyle change I have made to live closer to my spiritual convictions.

There. I said it.

Can we still be friends? I've intentionally avoided talking much about vegetarianism on the blog because I know this is a touchy subject. How do I know? Because I've been rehearsing my "Please don't think I'm a self-righteous far-left Neo Pagan. Please know that I am not judging you for savoring your burger. Please believe me that this is a personal decision and I am not going to hand you a PETA pamphlet when you ask me to have lunch" answer to the oft-asked question of "So, why don't you eat meat?" It feels, at least to me, like there is often an assumption that vegetarians judge omnivores, and/or feel sorry for them and their slowly-clogging arteries. I eat a lot of cheese. My arteries are clogging if anyone's are (Oh, I'm not even going to tiptoe towards my vegan daydreams in this post). And I don't judge you for eating meat. If it looks like I am turning my nose up at your plate, it's because I'm trying to get a good whiff of your steak.

As my wise co-conspirator Jackie reminded me a few month ago (about a totally different subject, but her comment rings true in this discussion), we are not all convicted about the same things, and that's OK. Not everyone is going to feel compelled to give up meat. But I have been, and the thing about convictions is that once they settle in and grab hold of you, your heart makes it really uncomfortable for you if you continue to pull against them.

The simplest answer I can give to the "Why don't you eat meat?" question is this:

I am convinced that the meat industry is bad for people and terrible for the environment and I don't want to support it. It exploits animals and exploits people and causes intense suffering. I believe that God cares about  all of His creation, and that the inhumane treatment and death of millions of animals each year grieves Him, and it certainly grieves me. I am fortunate enough to live in a time and place where there are plenty of healthy ways to eat a balanced meat-free diet, and I'm thankful that I can opt out of an industry that I do not want to support. Plus, my mom died of cancer, and I'd just as soon hedge my bets against a diet that puts me at higher-risk for serious illness. Doctors know that high meat consumption (aka: the typical American diet) increases your risk of cancer and heart disease, and I'd really rather do what I can to avoid those.

But that's not how I put it if someone asks me face to face. Especially here in the South, the land of pig-pickin's and intensely devoted adherents to tradition, southern food, and family recipes. Even in Chicago, though, I hedged a bit. Diet and food are deeply personal, intimate topics of conversation, and people (including me) tend to be very protective of their food choices. I get it. I respect your choices! My diet is not exactly a pillar of virtue. I eat lots of sweets and other things I know to be bad for me and bad for the environment. But giving up meat, for me, was a simple and obvious step towards living in a More With Less attitude towards my food.

Yum! Totally tasty, filling, and meatless.

The More With Less cookbook (at least the older version that I got from the library) only had a half page devoted to considering the role meat should play in a simple diet, and while it used that space to encourage readers that a balanced meat-free diet is healthy and provides adequate nutrition, it acknowledged that most North Americans were probably not going to give up meat entirely. It pointed out that meat production requires a lot of resources (water, grain, land) and produces a lot of pollution, and encouraged readers to limit their meat consumption to 1/4 pound per person per day, and flatly calls anything more that that "waste".

I haven't always been convicted about meat. In fact, after eating meat-free for 5 years, I gave up on it and starting eating chicken and fish. Eating vegetarian is an omnivorous world can be a lot of work. Especially if you don't know a lot of other veg people. Chicken noodle soup and sushi and grilled salmon are their own sort of comfort-food, and I was in a place in my life where I was strongly inclined to turn to food for comfort. But then, I met Les. Les had been eating a vegan diet for 5 years, and also happens to be an excellent cook (I'm a lucky girl!). So, when we got married, one of our first major joint decisions was to meet in the middle and keep a vegetarian diet together. He added eggs and some cheese back in, and I said good bye to meat. Being a team about it is incredibly helpful, but even when I was single, eating veg was doable. I've learned a lot since that first foray into meatless menus, and I can honestly say that my diet is a lot more varied and interesting now than it ever was. Beans, lentils, quinoa (a complete protein!), some soy/tofu, (though I'm not a huge fan), and lovely armloads of vegetables that I never thought I could learn to love are now the mainstay of our diet. I still eat eggs and cheese, and Les has them once in a while. When we get up the motivation to go to the big Farmer's Market here in Raleigh, we can even get small-farm raised eggs and Animal Welfare Certified goat's cheese, which is awesome, but honestly, we don't drive out there as often as I'd like. We acknowledge the inconsistencies, and do the best we can.

My "conversion" from omnivore to herbivore, like many major life changes, is a plodding and circuitous story. The short version is that I was 23, living in Chicago, and starting to swim a bit deeper into the sea of social justice issues and realizing that following Jesus meant more than church and prayer and "trying to be good". I was reading about the growing movement of believers and "Creation Care" advocates who believe that the Bible teaches us to care for the Earth and to speak out about wastefulness and disposable culture. I read an excerpt from the classic "Diet for A Small Planet", and I can still picture the inverted pyramid diagram that showed the staggering amount of water and land it took to produce a pound of edible meat. And, I learned that the Tyson meat-packing plant in the Chicago suburbs is staffed almost entirely by low-wage, no-benefit workers, most of  whom are recent immigrants or refugees who can find no other work. Human suffering and environmental damage were the first pieces to fall into place for me. Even for me, the animal lover. I had grown up in farmland and watched cows roam lazily through the fields. They didn't look unhappy. My relatives were hog farmers on an mid-sized farm. The pigs looked more-or-less chill. I knew that meat was made from animals, but the brutality of Big Agriculture and factory farming hadn't really sunk in yet. But then I started reading. And, heaven help me, watching videos online. And that nearly pushed me over the edge to give up meat altogether. But not quite. It wasn't until I killed a couple of tree frogs that I decided "enough is enough".

My pet goldfish had died, and I went in search of an apartment-friendly pet. I brought home two adorable, zen-faced tree frogs and a little terrarium. I loved those little guys for the 4 days they survived in my care. I was eating a turkey sandwich at work when my roommate called me and told me that my tree frogs were dead. Really dead. "WHY?!?" I begged her. And she, a vet tech and zoo keeper, convincingly informed me that they had starved to death. I hadn't gotten them the right food, and they hadn't eaten in 4 days. A dry sob chugged in my bread-and-lunchmeat-choked throat, and I decided right then that if I could cry for those frogs then I should cry for the turkey in my hand. And for five years I didn't eat meat again.

And now, it has been over 2 years on this second go-round. I will confess that I have had a nibble here or there. Sometimes accidentally, sometimes not. When I did my grain-free elimination diet this winter, I ate some chicken. I was so hungry and anxious and I thought I was going to go bonkers. And I may or may not have taken a sample of grilled shrimp at Whole Foods one day and devoured it with slightly guilty glee. But 99% of the time, I'm veg and happy. And if I ever feel myself waffling in the direction of a fish taco, I look at AugDog and remember that I do not want to be part of any animal's death. I also think of a line from the poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that one of my friends posted on Facebook several months ago:

"I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death."

I wish I could soften it a bit, because meat = death sounds harsh, even to me. But it's true, and I'm goin' with true over nice on this one. The Bible paints a beautiful picture of a New Heaven and a New Earth, when the world will be renewed, and not even the animals will eat one another. Of lions and lambs lying down together, and the end of all death. Woot! I'm all for that. Death sucks. I prefer to have no part in it.

There are a lot of great resources out there if you'd like to give Meatless Mondays a try, or do want to learn more about the meat industry in America. Even cutting back on meat will help your health and the planet. Check out any of these from your local library:

The Kind Diet - yep, its by Alicia Silverstone of "Clueless" fame. But it's a readable, engaging book about transitioning to a meatless (or vegan) diet. I've linked to her Kind Life website.

Becoming Vegetarian - slim book that I read many years ago when first trying out veg.

1,001 Low-Fat Vegetarian Recipes - simple, cheap, and tasty. Helpful when trying to avoid the pitfalls of gaining weight from all the fries and bagels you may or may not lunge towards when first leaning into a veg diet.

Whole Foods Vegetarian Eating page of their website. Yeah, they're a big company. Yeah, they can be really spendy. But it's a helpful resource.

Eating Animals - I haven't read this because I don't need to be convinced, but I've read enough commentary on the book to know that if you are looking for an in-your-face 360-degree look at the meat industry, this is the book for you. I've included 2 articles about the book below, if you prefer the "light" version.

10 Good Things Vegetarianism Can Do For You (And the World) from Sojourners
Eating Animals: 10 Reasons to Avoid Factory Farmed Flesh, also from Sojourners (somewhat graphic!)

There are not a lot of faith-based vegetarian books/websites out there - If you know of some, please let me know! Most that I've found are pretty low-tech and home-made and, well, dorky.

And, not for the faint of heart (be advised that there are graphic animal photos on the main page): www.chooseveg.com

Last but not least, a delightful YouTube video called Vegan Myths Debunked. LOVE. IT. Enjoy.

Delicious Grain Free Baking Failure

Let's be honest: Grain is delicious. I love grain. Fried Rice, Corn chips, Bread, Pasta, Biscuits, everything inside and around every Burrito I've ever loved. Grains are everywhere and in everything. Everything pre-made. Just about everything you can "whip up" on the cheap. Try finding a grain-free, vegetarian microwavable entree. Not just gluten-free - GRAIN free. Paleo adherents have their meat. Vegans have pasta, polenta, and rice. Grain-free vegetarians have most of the produce aisle and the dairy case. Thank heavens for pastured eggs and the total lack of convicting conscience about cheese, or I seriously think I would have chewed my arm off a long time ago.

Anyhoooo, when people ask me how the grain-free thing is going, I usually say something like "It's hard, and I cheat a lot". Which is true. I do. I have polenta one night, veggie gyoza the next, just a "handful" of chips with the guac. Just "half a spoon" of rice in my Chipotle burrito bowl. I've turned down cookies, bagels, bread, pasta, and cake almost every time I've been tempted by it. I've tried to scoot by with nibbles and cheats.

But you know what?

I FEEL CRAPPY EVERY SINGLE TIME. Tired, achy, broken-out, creaky-jointed, bloated and overall gross. Every time. I keep telling myself that this bite will be the last one, but it hasn't held yet.

Until maybe today.

It just so happens that my dear Hubs has gotten on a baking kick. And out of the blue, he decided to start baking bread and to try to perfect Challah. What? Only my favorite kind of bread in the history of bread thankyouverymuch. Not only that, but his first loaf (of bread, ever) turned out like this:

Perfect. Golden brown on top, beautiful butter yellow on the inside, and that marvelous doughy goodness that lets you tear hunks off with your hands and eat them all carnivorously.

And I ate some. And I felt crappy.

Undeterred, I ate another steaming slab of the second loaf he baked last night, complete with butter dripping warm from the crusty fringe. And then I ate another. And then I felt, SURPRISE!, really disgusting for the rest of the night and most of today.

But it doesn't have to be this way. There is hope.

Thanks to a review in my dear Whole Living magazine, I made an Amazon impulse buy a few weeks ago and brought this little beauty into my life:

La Tartine Gourmande - Recipes for an Inspired Life by Beatrice Peltre. Friends, this is a beautifully photographed, delightfully written cookbook that just might change my life. Not only are most of the dozens of recipes vegetarian, they are ALSO mostly grain-free. A vegetarian, grain-free French cookbook. Be still my heart.

I have taken this book into bed with me to read while I fall asleep. I read the recipes with a glimmer of wonder and excitement. I mapped out a plan to bake something. Something savory and biscuit-like. I choose these delightful Cumin and Parsley-Flavored Cheese Gougeres:

Oh. Yum.

They are made with Quinoa flour, which turns out to be hella spendy. So I turn to my mega-bag of plain old quinoa from CostCo (We pretty much live in the suburbs now, so we shop at Mega Marts. I choose not to feel bad about this).

A few pulses in the coffee/spice grinder....

And viola! Quinoa flour:

Ok, so technically the recipe does have a little corn starch in it. But Geez Oh Pete! Try finding anything that even slightly resembles a biscuit that does not have any grain of any kind. I dare you.

After a pretty simple set of mixing, pouring, and piping steps and a mere 20 minutes in the oven, I pulled out these little babies:

Notice their distinct lack of "Puff". Hmm. Well, they smelled pretty awesome, and tasted like a digestible dream. And do you know the best part about mynewbestfriend French cookbook? It recommends you eat your Gougeres warm out of the oven with a glass of Champagne:

In fact, I'm noshing some un-puffs and sipping some sparkling white wine from good ole' Trader Jacques' right now.

There may be hope for this food deal yet.

10 Good Things About Today

1. I finally made the grain-free Coconut Chocolate cookies, and they were incredible. Good breakfast.

 2. We spotted "Not So Wee" Snapping Turtle at the lake on our walk. "Wee" and "Frickin' Huge" must have been somewhere in the deep end.

 3. Every single log in the grimy, slimy little lake looks like this on a warm day.

 4. The lake path itself is pretty if you don't look directly into the water.

 5. Ducklings!!

 6. It was a beautiful, sunny, warm and breezy day for a long walk. And this is what "our neighborhood" looks like.

 7. I made this omelet salad thing from my new French cookbook for lunch, and it was crazygood.

 8. The beans have finally sprouted!

 9. Some timid signs of life finally poking through in my Peony pots.

 10. It's still light enough in the evenings to take a late nap in the sunshine after a long day of cooking and outdoorsyness.

Vegan Pumpkin (chocolate) Oatmeal Cookies

I'm only a couple of days into this Vegan Mofo, and I I have to come clean.

1. I have eaten not one, but 2 completely NON VEGAN meals already
2. I have spent much of my mental food energy bemoaning all the delicious things I "cannot" eat this month, and eyeing people's brownies and mac and cheese with pathetic desperation

But obviously Vegan Mofo is about all the amazing things you CAN eat while sticking to a 100% plant-based diet, so I'm going to share my (so far) all-time favorite vegan baking recipe, including my gratuitous chocolate addition improvements.

Pumpkin Oatmeal Cookies from Vegan With a Vengeance
2 cups all purpose flour (I use whole-wheat flour, still delish)
1 1/3 cups rolled oats
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 2/3 cups sugar
2/3 cups canola oil
2 TBS molasses
1 cup canned pumpkin, or cooked pureed pumpkin
1 tsp vanilla
1 TBS ground flaxseed (optional)
1 cup walnuts, finely chopped
1/2 cup raisins

I leave out the raisins b/c I never have any, and add 1 chopped up 100% Dark chocolate bar. 100% Dark chocolate is vegan, and so are some 70+ % bars, but check the labels. Some are made with milk fat. Also note that 100% Dark chocolate is suuuuuuper bitter on its own. Don't even try a nibble - you'll want to spit it out, and then feel bad for wasting even a crumb of chocolate. But mixed in with other sweet ingredients, it is quite an adequate smack of chocolateyness, complete with all those lovely anti-oxidants. Some very strict vegans do not use refined white sugar because the refining process of cane-based sugar may involve charcoal made from animal bones. I had some "raw" sugar, so I used that.

Preheat the oven to 350 and lightly grease 2 baking sheets
Mix together the flour, oats, baking soda, salt, and spices.

In a separate bowl, mix together the sugar, oil, molasses, pumpkin and vanilla (and flaxseed, if using) until very well combined.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet in 3 batches, folding to combine. Fold in the walnuts and raisins (and chocolate, if using.)

chopping up the suuuuperdark chocolate bar

Drop by tablespoons onto the prepared cookie sheets. They don't spread very much so they can be placed only an inch apart. Flatten the tops of the cookies with a fork or your fingers to form a cookie shape. Bake for 16 minutes at 350 degrees. If you are using 2 sheets of cookies on 2 levels of your oven, rotate the sheets half way through for even baking.

Remove from the oven, cool on the cookie sheets for 2 minutes, then transfer to a cooling rack. Let them cool! They taste better when they've had some time to set up.

Enjoy your vegan treat! Yay for yummy baked goods.

The Basil Tree

I thought I should include some snaps of our newly adopted Basil Tree before its inevitable demise:

We got this towering beauty from the Evanston Farmer's Market last weekend. Her billowy stalks of perky, delicious leaves wooed us, and her $8 price tag sold us. Spend $3 per 15-leaf pack at the grocery store a few times, and you'll easily be charmed by what looks like a perpetual Pizza, Pesto, and Fresh Sauce tree.

We've had her almost a week, and the heat is causing me to wring my hands in worry. I told the farmer that I had killed my little organic basil plant from Whole Foods. "What happened to it?" he asked. "It looked droopy and thirsty all the time, so I watered it, but it's leaves turned yellow and eventually fell off." He informed me that I had over watered it. Boo. He assured me that the Basil Tree should be pretty hearty, and that it needed sunlight and adequate, but not too much water. My herb-growing friend Liz suspects this particular Basil Tree may be root bound, and recommends that I think about getting a bigger pot. But then it wouldn't fit on the window sill, so would it get enough sunlight? Hmm. We'll have to rig something up. Maybe we re-pot the beautiful behemoth into two separate pots, and put them on a side table. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, Liz and I whipped up an almost-vegan dinner of random stuff inspired by the Basil Tree herself:

Polenta with marinara and fresh basil, three-bean salad (from Trader Joe's), and lemon butter green beans. A little butter and fresh lemon juice turn green beans into my Favorite Vegetable. And other than that pat of butter, this plate is animal-product free. And Crazy Delish.

Frugal Food

We've had some successful food experiments over at the G3 apartment this week. Which I think only happened because I also didn't have any after-work plans. Seriously - working moms, or any moms, HOW DO YOU DO IT?

I wasn't sure we could really scrape together a week's work of dinners and lunches without going back to the store, but we did it. Regretably, our kitchen is too revolting for me to have taken any photos of our successes. No, really. I was assembling our dinner plates on straightened-out stacks of dirty dishes last night. You know - you put the dirty plate on top of the dirty cooking pot to make it level and hide the dirty utensils inside the pot and then put your clean dinner plate on top of the teetering pile and scoop on your delicious creation. TMI? That's how we roll in the Shoebox With Scant Countertops.

Last night was my favorite Kitchen Win: Bootleg Bean Chilaquiles. I've never actually eaten chilaquiles, but they always smell delish when other people order them, and decided that I had everything we needed to do a version. Everything except fresh cilantro, which I am avoiding until I can find organic.

I cut up some corn tortillas with kitchen shears and toasted them in some butter in the skillet, making quite delectable little frito-like semi-crunchy corn shreds. Removed them from the pan and set aside. Then I used the hot pan and a tiny bit more butter to cook up the chopped remains of an onion that has been in our fridge for almost too long. Added the leftover black beans, heated them up, then took our two remaining cage-free farmers market eggs and scrambled them in with the beans and onions. Then you just put some of the fried tortilla shreds on a plate, top with the egg/bean/onion mixture, and then top that tasty pile with salsa and avocado. And cheese of course.

Cleaned out the fridge and enjoyed a delish mish-mash of stuff for about, um, $1 per person. SCORE. 

Paved with Good Intentions

This blog should really end up being a confessional.

Because despite my good intentions, I still end up getting lattes in disposable cups, I only made it one day so far on natural deodorant, and it is already June 17 and I have cooked from scratch exactly 2 times.

One of those two cooking extravaganzas was on Wednesday, and it reminded me of why I so very rarely cook completely from scratch. It is a huge pain in the butt. It took me over two hours, not including the overnight soaking of the black beans, and I dirtied 3 pots + 3 lids, one baking dish, one big storage container for the beans, 2 colanders, a cutting board and 2 knives. To make one dish.

I tried to choose my recipe wisely. I consulted these cookbooks:

I settled on a recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance called Black bean, Mushroom, and Quinoa Stuffed Green Peppers. The ingredient list had only about a dozen items, several of which we already had, and the actual instructions were just two short paragraphs. I'm a big fan of recipes that fit onto just one cookbook page. So I thought I was safe.
First, since I was trying to avoid canned stuff as much as possible, I soaked a bag of black beans overnight. This wasn't so hard, it just took a little forethought. I had planned to make this dish on Tuesday night but had forgotten to soak the beans.  Anyway, while the beans started cooking (for an hour and a half!), I chopped up the veggies.

Lots of mushrooms

Lots of garlic

This recipe also calls for a chopped onion, but I didn't want to take any more pictures of chopped white things. I prepped these beautiful big organic green peppers (Bell peppers are on the Dirty Dozen list, so always try to buy organic!) for their stuffing while all the veggies cooked.

After about an hour and a half, the veggies, beans, and quinoa were ready to get stuffed into the peppers. When it was all said and done, they looked like this:

A little organic tomato sauce on top

Overall results were quite tasty. Les and I agreed that next time I would add more quinoa and more chili powder.  They are also supposed to have fresh cilantro on top, but I couldn't find any organic cilantro, and after reading the article last week about the average bunch of conventional cilantro having over 34 pesticides on it I decided to skip it.

It was a good recipe, and one pepper was very filling, healthy, and delish. BUT, I would recommend doing this recipe when you've got some left over soaked/cooked beans and some pre-chopped veggies looking for a dish. The extra dish washing alone is enough to make me prefer to skip a repeat.

Cooking for less food waste

I really do like to cook, but I get frustrated by all the ingredients I often end up wasting. So lately we've been trying to come up with loose menus that let us make at least two dishes from the ingredients we buy. It's kind of a fun challenge.

Last night I went to the grocery store to get the ingredients I would need to make one of our all-time favorite dishes - Polenta Lasagna.  We love this recipe so much, we even gave it to the caterer and had it made for our wedding. It got rave reviews. I was psyched to have it for dinner last night.

I came home from the local little divey market and started unloading my canvas bags; sorting the dinner ingredients onto the messy counter. Green and red peppers, baby portabellas, yellow onion, garlic, fresh mozzarella, tomato sauce and..... no polenta.  Blast! I had forgotten the POLENTA for the polenta lasagna. Genius.

Oh well. I just made the lasagna without the polenta and layered it on top of some whole wheat gnocchi instead.

Veggies in the pan

To reduce my food waste without the hassle of composting, I'm saving up all my veggie cutting scraps in a bag in the freezer to make veggie stock eventually. I'm getting excited because the veggie stock bag is almost full! Soon soon soon I will be cooking my garbage into a tasty veggie soup base!


These went into the freezer with the other scraps.

While the "gnocchi lasagna" was simmering, I decided to go ahead and chop up all the rest of the veggies I had brought home. I'm definitely on the lazy side, and wanted to set myself up to have no excuses not to cook again this week. And tonight when I came home hungry and cranky, I put together a version of another of our favorite accidental recipes: pizza with purple potatoes, onions, and dried dates. We usually put goat cheese on top, but I used the rest of the fresh mozzarella from the lasagna attempt instead:

delish!

The potatoes and dates add a fun sweetness and "meatiness" to the pizza, and our typical goat cheese balances it out with some bite. The mozzarella version was good too, just milder.

Most of the "buy for one meal and make 4 more with leftovers" ideas are meat based. It's tougher to do with veggies, I think, because the "main ingredient" often doesn't keep quite as well as, say, a roast chicken. But I'm trying to gather more ideas.

My friend Jenn just shared these two great sustainable food blogs with me, and they have been really fun to read:
http://realfoodrehab.blogspot.com/
http://littlelocavores.blogspot.com/

Nerds Go Shopping

Les has been a great sport about all of my greening initiatives. Not only has he been a great sport, but he has, in fact, been encouraging and creative about how we can make changes to our routine and start some new positive habits.

For example, he went grocery shopping last night and came home with bags of whole grains and lentils to replenish our cabinets which had been reduced to microwave popcorn and Craisins over the past couple of weeks. When he got home, we decided to put them into the empty jars I had been diverting from the recycling bin for just such a purpose:

We undertook this task on the floor, since we had misplaced the funnel. You could have made a multi-bean and lentil soup from all the stuff we swept into the trash. But it was fun, and we felt very nerdy and granola. Especially when Les suggested that he save all the plastic bags and their twist-ties and reuse them next time he went to the store. This wouldn't be a big deal, since we're taking fabric bags to the store now anyway. We can just stash them in our canvas bags. Yay for zero packaging progress!

I still need to master Jackie's jar-cleaning technique to get my re-purposed pasta sauce and salsa jars sparkling clean and label-free. But I'm OK with stuck-on bits of label glue for now. It's on the outside, so who cares?

Healthy Lunch FAIL

It only looks tasty.

Les came home with a 1LB package of soba noodles (Japanese buckwheat noodles) last week, and their addition to our pantry inspired me to dig through my ideas-torn-out-of-magazines binder for the soba noodle salad recipe I had saved from Women's Health a few months ago.

It has all kinds of good things in it, including orange juice, edamame, carrots, and sesame seed oil. I picked up an orange and some scallions at the grocery store last week, and looked forward to what I thought would be a quick toss-together healthy meal. Plus, it made 4 servings! Plenty to eat for dinner, save for work lunch, and give some to Jackie and/or save for Les.

I started prepping around 7 last night, snacking on string cheese with Auggie and nibbling carrot nubs as I shredded 5 carrots into wispy strips. By the time I was done shredding veggies, whisking dressing, cooking noodles and edamame, grating orange zest and then juicing the orange, I was famished. And it was 8:30. And then I read these dreaded words, which I apparently missed when I scanned the instructions the first time: Allow to chill at least 30 minutes before eating for the flavors to mingle.

Grrrrrr.... I toasted an English Muffin and shoved the covered bowl into the fridge. Cheese and muffin for dinner it is!

So I was really REALLY looking forward to tucking into my hard-earned superhealthy lunch today now that it had had 16 hours to mix and mingle.

I dove in, started chewing, and waited and waited to taste something.  Here's what I tasted: Wheaty, chewy noodles with orange juice and soy sauce.

Gross.

I picked out a few dainty edamame, stirred it around again, and gave it a few more bites. But it was a no-go. And now I am lunch-less and hungry, so I will have to go out in search of edible food. AND I have a big bowl of leftovers in the fridge that will sadly end up in the garbage.

The soy-milk/whole wheat/oatmeal/blueberry muffins I made this weekend fared much better. They look pretty stumpy and weird in photos, though, so they didn't get their own post. Win some/Lose some.