Liz's Tomato Soup Recipe

... can be found here on her blog. It sounds really good.

Protein: Shopping in your kitchen

Before I decided to become a vegetarian, getting enough protein was a major concern. I've done Weight Watchers' Points plan before and since I didn't eat enough lean meat, and couldn't eat half the foods I normally did, the new diet would give me headaches. It felt like a pair of big ice tongs were squeezing the sides of my head. Sure, I lost some weight, but I was miserable. Which is better, skinny or happy?

Only after I found out how much protein I actually needed, and that I could get enough without eating meat, did I decide going veggie was a possibility for me. Those links on the sidebar about protein - they're all mine. I wanted them close by for future reference.

Since I'm between the ages of nineteen and forty-nine, I need 45 grams of protein a day. The challenge now is eating enough protein-rich foods to meet that requirement. I decided to look around my kitchen and see how much protein I had hanging around.

First the cereals: I have five kinds. Here's the amount of protein for each.

Kellogg's Corn Flakes = 2 grams per 1 cup serving
Total Whole Grain = 2 grams per 3/4 cup serving
Rice Chex = 2 grams per 1 cup serving
Kellogg's Raisin Bran = 5 grams per 1 cup serving
Post Grape-Nuts = 6 grams per 1/2 cup serving

I was happy to see that Grape-Nuts, a.k.a. Colon Blow or "Avoid the middle man and just pour it in the toilet," did so well for protein and fiber (7 grams). I do put sugar on it, but I figure it's better to eat it with some sugar than not eat it at all.

In the freezer I found, along with all the frozen meat I'll have to figure out what to do with, a bag of shelled walnuts and some single-serving bags of sweet peas. Here's the breakdown for those:

Diamond Shelled Walnuts = 5 grams per 1/4 cup serving
Birds Eye Steamfresh Singles - Sweet Peas: 5 grams per bag

That's pretty good. Buy more peas. Nuts are a little fatty (20 grams), but it's good fat, right? We're supposed to have more good fat than bad fat, aren't we?

I also found some Umpqua vanilla ice cream in there but sadly, the package had been manhandled to the point that the protein gram statistics were no longer visible. It's probably just as well.

Moving on to the refrigerator:

Small curd lowfat cottage cheese (2% milkfat): 14 grams per 1/2 cup. YOW!
Whole dill pickles: NO protein. But at least they're also fat, sugar, carb and calorie free. What are they good for? Putting on your peanut butter sandwiches. You heard it here, girls.
Applesauce: No protein.
Gold-n-Soft spread: No protein there either.
1% lowfat milk: 11 grams per 1 cup
Large eggs: 6 grams per egg, but they provide 71% of your daily cholesterol limit, so I'll probably eat one a day, if that.

Looks like we're sticking with dairy. Now that I've gone veggie, I find myself craving lots of milk.

This post is long enough (some might say "too long") so we'll save my cupboards for another time.

Thanks for humoring me during my protein search. Happy Eating!

Hummus = Yummus

However, I was disappointed to find that while chickpeas = protein, the commercially-prepared hummus I bought at WinCo today had only one freaking gram of it. To the Protein Queen, this was quite distressing. I might as well have bought a Snickers bar to snack on.

Maybe it's all the other stuff in the hummus - high fructose corn syrup is always high on my list of "yeah, gimme some more of that" ingredients - but I was really hoping that the hummus would have more protein in it than the pita chips I bought to eat it with. Heck, I've got cereal made with refined white flour here that has more protein than this hummus, which I think was made with actual chickpeas.

Hopefully, we're checking labels and making sure we know what we're buying before we bring it home. I'm sure this is obvious to everyone else, and personally I've checked more labels just in the last week than I probably have my entire adult life, but I trusted this hummus. As a new vegetarian, I put my heart in its little hands, and look what happened.

My dear friend Elasticwaistband Lady tried her hand at making homemade hummus not too long ago. Her experience is linked-to in our "Recipes" portion of the sidebar.

Vegetable Stock

You can buy vegetable broth to replace chicken or beef broth in your recipes, but since I'm cheap, I will probably make my own. Allrecipes.com has an excellent vegetable stock tutorial.

If it looks too complicated, you're basically throwing chopped veggies in a pot and boiling them in water, then straining the broth and freezing it for future use. This can be used as a base for soups or main dishes. The nice thing about making it yourself is you can flavor it the way you like it.

I love Honeybaked Ham's split pea soup, so one day when I was feeling all food-storagey, I bought a package of split peas without having the slightest idea of how to make the soup. They've been in my cupboard for a while, waiting for me to go buy ham hocks - what are ham hocks? - or a bone-in ham (my recipe called for ham hocks or a meaty ham bone). Now that I'm going meatless, I'm going to try it without the ham. Since the recipe also calls for chicken broth, I'm going to try the veggie broth instead and let you know how it goes.

Has anyone else done this?

The Lone Veggie

"Meat, and the world meats with you. Veg, and you veg alone."

More than one bloggy sister has mentioned that she's thought about becoming a vegetarian, or cutting out most meat, but hasn't because her husband or family won't. What to do?

Try it by yourself first.

To some people, going veggie seems to be a black-or-white, all-or-nothing, cut-all-ties-with-normal-life proposition. The new vegetarian must throw out beloved family recipes and buy cookbooks with weird ingredients and shop at gross-smelling health food stores and learn to cook new foods (or learn to cook, period) and force-feed her children and start obsessing over tofu and TVP and EVOO, and buy robes and oils and get new veggie friends. I'm here to tell you that I am way too lazy and cheap to take on anything like this.

The trick, as with anything else in life, is to stop worrying and start doing.

The other trick, as with genealogy (you like how I snuck that in there?), is to start with yourself.

For me, it started at the drive-through. It was a busy Wednesday night - Cub Scouts, soccer, Mutual - and we ran to KFC for a quick dinner. From my son Brennan's example, I knew that if I really looked at the drive-through menu, I could find plenty of veggie-friendly food: cole slaw, baked beans, mac & cheese, corn on the cob, biscuits, and my personal favorite, mashed potatoes and gravy. Lots of choices there, all of which would make me happy and full without involving meat (is it actually possible?). I had the potatoes and the cole slaw and enjoyed them. It was weird and new, but I loved how I felt afterward.

The rest of my family had chicken meals, and while I did ogle those lovely golden nuggets of chickeny joy once or twice, my lack-of-chicken status didn't make me feel deprived. Avoiding meat from this day forward was my choice, and I knew why I made it. It's important to know the "whys" of your decision. Otherwise, sticking to your plan will seem silly when faced with tempation. "Now, WHY am I not eating bacon again?"

If you've decided that going veggie is your course, take it one small step at a time. Buy a new veggie cookbook, research vegetarianism and nutrition online, read that nasty but very effective article Elizabeth-W posted about mad cow disease, stock your kitchen with more fruit and vegetables, check food labels for protein grams (you'll need to know how much you're getting from non-meat foods), hard-boil some eggs... many, many ways to start. Cut out the meat a little at a time, or jump in and go for it all at once - but give yourself room for messing up.

A word of caution: If you're going to go veggie alone, it's best to do it sweetly and peacefully. The goal is to keep your husband happy enough that maybe someday, he'll want to try your new lifestyle with you. Believe that as much crap as you give your husband about his meat-eating, it will come back to you in dump truck loads. When you're on a date with your sweet darling spouse and he orders a wonderful meaty entree, make no snide remarks. Give no raunchy statistics about "what's probably in that burger." Accept his freedom to choose, and be sweet about it.