Vegan For a Day

This year, Chip got a few bonus vegetarian surprises at Christmas time.  First, Jeff decided to offer up a meatless week (hey, it's a start) and then my son Alex decided to outdo ALL of us and commit to Meatless Mondays for the entire year.  That's 52 meatless days to my 31!  But I did up the ante a little bit with respect to my own sacrifice by offering Chip the opportunity to give me a bonus challenge of his choice, keeping in mind that my attempt at TWO meatless months a few years ago did not work out so well.  His challenge?  To go vegan for a day.  I don't know about you, but I can do ANYTHING for just one day and it didn't take me long to figure out that only a few small tweaks to my menu would be all it took to meet the challenge.  I often have eggs for breakfast (which aren't vegan) but almost just as often I choose oatmeal with fruit (which is vegan).  Switching out milk for Crystal Light would be easy enough and if I stuck to dishes which are typcially cheeseless, I'd be home free.

I'm glad I set the bar higher for myself than that.  I'm glad I'm not the "what's the LEAST I can do and get away with it" type.  Instead, I decided to do a little research about what vegans actually eat, or in any case what they suggest for newbie vegans to eat. And then I ate it.  Here is my vegan menu for the day, which was conditionally approved by Chip after the fact:

Breakfast
Vegan breakfast burrito made with faux sausage, tofu, and sauteed veggies
Coffee with French Vanilla flavored coconut milk creamer

Lunch
Leftover stirfry made with un-chicken over brown rice
Slice of whole grain bread with vegan un-butter spread (which I only purchased out of curiosity)
Crystal light

Dinner
Vegan lasagna (recipe provided by my vegan friend, Kristine)
Garlic bread (toast with un-butter spread, seasoned with garlic etc)
White wine

For you non-vegans out there, you may be just as dismayed as I was to learn that wine is generally not vegan!  You know what that means?  I wish I was kidding but as it turns out, animal products are often used during the fining process.  There are actually lists of approved "vegan wines."  Fortunately for me, Chip has decided that even he doesn't need to go THAT far when it comes to being vegan so he approved my menu on the condition that I read up a little bit on the whole vegan wine thing.  Which I did, but only what he actually copied and pasted into the body of his email to me.  It's not like he asked me to do a research paper or anything....

What I learned from Vegan Day is that it was actually a whole lot easier than I thought - as long as I can continue to exempt wine from the list of offending foods.  I'm not planning to become a vegan at any point in the future, but I do now have a carton of coconut milk creamer and a tub of un-butter spread to use up.  So, there are a few vegan-ish meals in my future just the same.  And wine.  :)