99 44/100% Vegan

Monday saw torrential downpours and gale force winds that ripped down trees and destroyed electricity and, more importantly, internet connections in our area. After making it through this two-to-three hour ordeal with no internet I'm proud to say we came out the other end unscathed. Electricity only flickered on and off but the internet was out of commission for several hours! This left me asking myself the question: what on Earth good is electricity if you have no internet? Might as well just take it all, cruel fate.



That night I prepared a salad for dinner using my now traditional Sesame Fig Dijon Dressing. At only 25 calories per tablespoon (according to my calculations via Livestrong.com's Daily Plate application.

I combined spinach, mixed greens, garbanzo beans, currants, and tomato and tossed it in the dressing for this salad. I've had variations on this salad for the past week sometimes adding brown rice, almonds, or whatever else we had in the fridge to get rid of. Considering the absurdity in how few calories there are in a cup of spinach (7, according to My Plate) you can pretty much have as much spinach as you have in the fridge then top it with a number of other ingredients. At 25 calories per tablespoon you can be pretty liberal with my Fig/Dijon concoction as well. I made a heaping pile of salad on the largest plate in our cupboard yesterday for lunch then topped it liberally and still had a salad that was less than 300 calories in total.




For dinner on Monday I made black beans and rice which I served on a flour tortilla with a dollop of sour cream. For the black beans I simply chopped up some garlic, onion, red pepper, yellow pepper, and sweated them in a little olive oil with chili powder, cayenne, and cumin. Then I added some frozen corn (the last remaining speck left from the farm share), and green onion. I mixed in some chopped cilantro at the very end and added some sliced avocado.

I served this over brown rice. I tried something a little different with the brown rice that I'd heard recommended recently. I browned it in a pan for about five minutes then cooked it with vegetable stock and a little Bragg's Liquid Aminos.

While I enjoy vegan cooking I just can't get behind vegan or vegetarian dishes that pretend to be something else. For that reason I used real sour cream. There are a few products out there that you can buy that are imitation sour cream made with tofu. You can even make it yourself with silken tofu, soy milk, lime juice, and nutritional yeast. But you really have to ask yourself, "Do I want to eat some concoction pretending to be sour cream, or should I just eat something different all together?"

Another day and just a dollop of sour cream was all that stood between me and a 100% vegan diet. Tomorrow that roadblock will come in the form of half a duck.

Half a delicious duck.