recipes – FIT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE

Image description: Veganuary logo, which is the word “VEGANUARY” in block letters of a variety of fonts, and a little “v” up in the top right corner that looks like a heart.

I’ve blogged about Veganuary before, and in the six years since then the Veganuary web resources have just gotten better and better. If you want to take the January challenge, it’s certainly not too late to sign up. But you don’t have to sign up to gain access to all that the Veganuary website has to offer. It’s not just for vegans or even just for people who want to try it for the month of January. It’s really a wealth of resources for anyone with some curiosity.

Maybe you just want access to some recipes. The website has that, broken down into categories (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and sweet treats). It gives you some tips for getting started. And it has a really great blog with more recipes, articles recommending great vegan books to read, how to survive Christmas or Diwali (bookmark for next year) as a vegan, and even a whole post about vegan bacon alternatives (for the UK — here in Canada I can vouch for Lightlife Smart Bacon).

If you sign up, which you can do for free, you will get a daily e-mail through Veganuary, a free cookbook, a nutritional checklist, and three meal plans — low calorie, medium calorie, and high calorie).

Veganuary is a non-profit, and they’re doing good work worth supporting. So there is of course an opportunity to donate to them. They make it easy to do, but it’s not a requirement.

Whether you want to try it or not, I recommend taking a look at the website and picking at least one recipe that looks good to you. There are lots of delicious-looking recipes and I would be shocked if even the most fervent omnivore didn’t find at least one thing that looks worth making.

As someone who struggles the most with missing eggs, I’m going to try the Tofu Benedict. What do you want to try?

Bon appetit!

I’ve written before about my aspirational cook book problem.

I love the idea of cooking healthy food but I find it all a bit overwhelming.

And now Yoni Freedhoff comes along and validates my feelings. He suggests that maybe we should separate out “cooking” from “healthy.” Certainly for me I tend to bundle cooking in there as part of the complete life change we all dream about. I know, details differ, person to person. In mine my room is always clean, I’m vegan, I only have dessert on special occasions, I’m never behind on writing projects, and I cook a lot of high quality, healthy, delicious food. (Nat’s cooking posts on Facebook make me jealous.)

Here’s Freedhof’s piece, For Beginners, Maybe Cooking Shouldn’t Be “Healthy”

I can also tell you that many of the folks who don’t cook regularly believe that if they were to start doing so, they’d need to be cooking “healthy” foods.

Why sure, cooking especially healthy meals is a nice aspiration, but if you’re a beginner in the kitchen, why not instead focus on cooking meals that while perhaps not incredibly healthy, are meals that you’re confident that you or your family will enjoy?

The goal really is to gain comfort in the kitchen and/or to gain the trust of your family members that you can cook yummy things.

So if you’re a beginner in the kitchen, maybe cutting your cooking teeth on less healthy meals will encourage you to gain the skills and comfort you’ll need to slowly improve your repertoire, and in so doing make the kitchen a room in which you actually enjoy spending time.

Okay. Okay. Maybe I’ll back off from the healthy bit of my cooking aspirations. Scale back a bit and focus on food that I enjoy.

The last new recipe I followed was this: RAS EL HANOUT ROASTED WHOLE CAULIFLOWER. Yummy!