Vegan Week Day 3

Third day of the vegan experiment went off without a hitch.  Preparation and familiarity is the key, but ending off with the best vegan “burgers” I’ve made yet was perfect.

Sadly, today was another day of having to wake up early with an alarm.  That may sound like whining, and it is.  However once you’ve woken up based on your internal clock only your system gets used to having it’s fully night’s sleep.  Even with waking up early I still, like yesterday, had to get on the road too fast to make a full real breakfast.  So instead I did exactly what I did yesterday, ate the Rip’s Big Bowl dry without the berries.  Tomorrow, I swear, I’m going to get a real breakfast in.

Morning meetings made the day fly by and lunch came upon me pretty fast.  I had started thawing out a vegan butternut squash soup that I made much earlier in the year.  There’s not much to making a butternut squash soup: some vegetable stock (mushroom in my case), some onion and some butternut squash.  Simmer the cubed up butternut squash and diced onion in the stock with some additional seasoning for a couple of hours.  Then you can either get one of those wand blenders and puree it right in the pot or transfer it to a food processor or blender.  I just used the wand blender since it is the easiest to clean up.  Best still is that you can freeze it, like I did, and reheat it.  Once it comes up to temperature and you stir it up it looks just like it did the day it was made, and tastes it too if you stored it right.  While it’s all cold and just out of the freezer is another matter, so just heat it up and trust me.

The afternoon like the morning was chocked full of meetings so it wasn’t until late afternoon that I had time for a snack.  I kinda needed it but kinda didn’t.  “Snack” was two huge carrots and a handful of mixed nuts: almonds, macadamia and raw cashews.  Those nuts were actually left over from my hike two weeks ago, I just happened to have brought the Tupperware into the office.  What I was really doing was deadening my appetite for the burgers that I started making last night.

My first veggie burger experiment was okay but not great.  Those were the Candle Cafe Brown Rice & Lentil Burgers. They tasted okay but it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.  Instead, a friend of mine pointed me to these Beat and Bean “Burgers”. The pictures I took sucked, so go to the hyperlink to see some tasty looking pictures of these guys.  I will be blogging about the cooking process in another article.  All I’ll say is that it has lots of sauteed onions and garlic, beets, black beans and good spices.  The prep calls for letting it sit for at least two hours but preferably over night, so I did most of the work on this yesterday.  I could smell how good the individual constituents were and could only imagine how good they tasted.  These did not disappoint at all.  They were tasty and filling.  If I had to do dinner again, rather than eat two of those I’d probably eat one with a side of something else like a salad.  While I made them into veggie patties, without the eggs they didn’t hold together well enough to be eaten as a sandwich.  That made me wonder if perhaps cooking it as a hash would be a good idea; food for thought anyway.   Ionce again ended the evening with a bowl of frozen mixed berries, my traditional healthy late night dessert snack.

While I didn’t feel hungry much at all today, I have been plagued with a persistent migraine like headache.  I’m less willing to chalk this up to caffeine withdraw like I did about the same phase into the paleo diet.  Yeah, I had a relapse and had up to five Coke Zero’s in one day, but I often was less than 2.  That’s not enough to build a caffeine dependency again.  I’m wondering if it could be something else, some sort of absent consumption that both diets have in common.  I guess it will be a wait and see approach on that.  Just to be on the safe side I intend to have a little caffeinated tea tomorrow to round things out.