While staying at the hostel in San Jose in my first week, I bought groceries to save some money and made food in the hostel kitchen. It was nice also to be able to cook while on vacation. There's definitely something to being in charge of your own food.As it was a communal kitchen, I didn't end up taking photos of the process, but got a couple good ones of the final product. It was a very simple meal, starting with yellow saffron rice, topped with sauteed onions, tomatoes, and avocado. It was almost perfectly vegan on corn tortillas when I ruined it with cheese! But it was a delightful dinner and the onions were fantastic. I found some seasoning here that is a nice complete blend. I'm taking it back home with me to experiment with some more.
While cooking, another hostel resident struck up a conversation with me. He was a Canadian who was cooking some Ramen noodles beside me. When I was telling him how great my tacos were going to be and described the different parts, he said all I needed was some chicken or steak to make them complete. I shook my head and said, "Nah, I don't need meat." I realized that I totally and completely meant this statement. Maybe there will be a day that comes when I don't need cheese or eggs or yogurt, too. Who knows. But I think my life as a vegetarian is going to start very soon. I feel ready to live the lack of need on an everyday basis.
2 comments:
I love this so much.
The thing that was great for me when I "gave up" meat (and again when I stopped eating eggs & dairy), was that I felt a sudden awareness of the abundance of other foods, especially vegetables. I'm so surprised when people ask me what I eat if I don't eat all that other stuff, like it must be really hard, because it's not really hard once you start looking at things in terms of what's possible instead of what's not possible.
PS. There's an article in the most recent issue of Vegetarian Times about giving up cheese. That was really hard. One thing that helps me now is adding avocado to pretty much everything. It's so creamy and delicious that I forget about cheese almost entirely.
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