My weekday-vegetarian adventures
The clue is in the title... This is a diary of me trying to be a weekday-vegetarian. For my health and for my ecological footprint. As you can see it's proving to be a struggle with succes and failure. Luckily even half a succes means i'm still reding my meat intake significantly, and with this system i will gradually get a my goal :-) Feel free to join me!
Monday, July 18, 2011
Day 57: screw it
i ate it
it was good
Monday, July 11, 2011
Day 56: all you can eat sushi
Day 55: Tulips from amsterdam
bami with chicken and some shrimp springrolls for lunch from the market in Jordaan.
And chinese take-away for dinner, pork and chicken.
so meat with pleasure yet no beef which is the worst offender when it comes to producing greenhouse gasses.
Day 54: a week of succes
so given that monday got switched with sunday, a week of 5 out of 5 without meat!
yay, and i'm still alive and feeling good!
Imagine that!
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Day 53: out for lunch + fruit
Lunch: out with Sven, a croque monsieur without ham
And i also had brought fruit with me from home, a banana and an apple which i ate at 11 and 5.
And when i came home after tai chi class .. some doritos :-) but not too much
Day 52: baguettes
Smos kaas and Brie with honey.
No real dinner i can remember
Day 51: Exki
a vegetarian salad with fried tofu, yummy stuff
and a dark raisinbread - baguette with goat's cheese and sundried tomatoes
all at Exki, a pricy store but nice food.
Everything else was ok too.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Day 50: steak
i ate a smos chicken curry for lunch and a steak in the evening
yumyum
Day 48-49: some meat
I think i ate some chicken on saturday morning, then a smos kaas for lunch and in the evening i went to a wedding that was completely vegetarian! Lots of yummy moroccan foods and quiches.
On sunday no meat at all because i'm switching with monday because my sister will be making steak :-)
Friday, July 1, 2011
Day 47: More succes
Ok 2 out of 5, thats better than 1 out of five :-)
Day 46: Succes
Day 45: a few tiny pieces of ham
She didn't put ham on my quarter but in the end i ended up with a bigger piece than 1/4 and at both edges i found a few pieces of ham ... and ate them.
So no complete succes and actually no meat was "not-consumed" (if you get what i mean) because she hadn't bought less meat than for all of us, she just put the 4/4th of the ham on 3/4 of the pizza.
So no actual reduction.
Day 44: i tried, they failed me
i ordered a vegetarian one, but when we opened the boxes at their house, there were 3 pizza's with meat inside .. so i tried but didn't succeed.
I did enjoy the bbq-pizza very much :-)
Monday, June 27, 2011
Day 43: started good ... then ate chicken and ham
For lunch: smos kaas
And then for dinner my sister made cordon blue .. and i ate it, would have eaten it in the morning anyway
I need to provide her some vegetarian recipes :-) !!
Day 40: And another big meat-fest
No serious veggie options available in that restaurant.
Day 39: again mega-dinner
Lots of pork, chicken, beef, fish, shrimp and duck!
Big chinese feasts are not the time to go vegetarian :-)
Day 38: A day off
could have worked, couldn't, no idea
Day 37: big big dinner at work, mega-fail
But very yummy :-)
I had actually arranged the buffet myself and could have made it so that at least have the food was vegetarian, thought of it too late.
He/she who has the power needs to make the choice to make vegetarian items readily available, so the all the eaters have to do is choose at the table.
Day 36: cleaning and studying en doing an exam
studying, no meat,
before exam got bread, egg salad and fruit, so no meat there either!
succes
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Day 34-35: Uneventful weekend
- free small baguettes with chicken curry and ham at the red cross duty-thing
- chicken in a big spring rol and ham on a pizza
Day 33: Double fail
And then late in the evening after training went for a "mitraillette" with one of the bro's, thus eating chicken, bad bad me!
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Day 32: no probs, and then oops
Then for lunch there was a vegetarian dish available, check!
And then in the evening i went to the graduation ceremony of students from the courses i will be managing in my next job starting next week, and there was a reception ...
Wasn't interested in fishing out the "veggie-or not" bits so i ate a bit of trout-mousse and some chicken curry, the rest was ok i think.
So apart from a few grams of fish and chicken, today was ok.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Day 31: lots of leftovers
For lunch i chose a feta-salad, I wonder if that's an intended timing by the chef so that more days have a vegetarian option?
And for dinner i had made a baguette with the leftovers from the salad, yumyum, but i forgot it at work in the fridge :-(
So for dinner i ended up eating half a meal of not so yummy whole grain rice with some fruit out of a can and not the fishsticks that were made for me. Yep, a talk with the family is needed.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Why again am i doing this?
Take a look at this talk by Jeremy Rifkin, if you don't have time, skip to 17:19 and you'll know why and why it's so important to reduce my beef-intake.
If you have a little more time, please watch the whole thing, its a vitally important message for our future!! Seriously it's a good and inspiring talk!
Day 30: succes
no breakfast so no sinning there :-)
For lunch i ate a vegetarian pasta, thanks to the restaurant at work, good stuff, need to learn how to make that.
For dinner my sister made a bunch of hamburgers, and i succesfully fought the desire to eat one, boy that wasn't easy.
I think i even almost licked one, just for the taste of it, the meat dealers have there claws deeply locked into me :-) but i prevailed!
ps: tomorrow morning i ofcourse will have to eat some of those burgers as leftovers, we can have waste, no sir!
Day 29: i worked hard, gimme meat :-)
So i ate chicken curry on a piece of bread because i wanted to :-p
And since the veggie-day was screwed anyway, i joined the family in eating spaghetti bolognese, containing a small amount of ground meat.
Let me point out here that i'm not eating steaks or whole chickens when i'm breaking the rules :-) my meat intake is still pretty low.
Day 27-28
Friday, June 10, 2011
Day 24-26: ehm think it was ok and then everything failed
Between wednesday and thursday we had a fire in the house (3 o clock at night), oops, got lucky that the fire was noticed by other people who woke us up or we all might have died.
During the time after the fire I ate pastry and "smos kaas", in the evening (we could stay in the house, but no electricity or gas) we ordered home delivery: I dutyfully ordered a vegetarian dish but without realising it at the time, I ate some of the chicken starter :-)
Friday i started with chicken leftovers from yesterday (say NO to waste!), had a vegetarian salad-bar lunch with a "roggeverdommeke" and for diner said "screw it" and bought some hot pita-chicken sandwiches for the family cause they are warm and yummy, and i was driving my bike through the cold and rain.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Day 23: vegetarian canneloni
Monday, June 6, 2011
Day 22: hmmm turkey
And since today is a fail anyway, ate spaghetti bolognese in the evening :-)
Week 3: 4 out of 5 ain't bad
Wednesday: "vol-au-vent" :-p
Thursday: had a great day in Gent and nice vegetarian food
Friday: don't remember but it was "legal"
Saturday: BBQ
Sunday: Vol-au-vent
Day 12: ehm ... don't remember
Friday, May 27, 2011
Day 11: hmmmm bacon, almost
Them soup was good, unfortunately there were lots of bacon-bits in it, afterward i found out there was a vegetarian option, so i could have succeeded but ddn't investigate enough.
The buffet had sufficient opportunities to eat cheese and vegetables, no problem there.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Day 10: Again meaty leftovers
Then for lunch all went well: vegetarian pizza
And for dinner a baguette with cheese and vegetables
10 days and i'm not dead (yet)
maybe eating a lot less meat is possible after all ;-)
Day 9 (part 2)
Vegetarian dish for lunch: stuffed paprika with something yummy, think tofu or quorn, unfortunately the rest of the dish wasn't great, green beans that were actually white, mashed potato and a tomato sauce that was too sour
For dinner i had a great tomato and mozarella sandwich with extra vegetables on top (cucumber, corn and carrots), yumyum!
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Day 9: i will not waste good meat
There were leftovers so i pulled everything togehter, including a few pieces of chicken, and i'm eating that right now for breakfast.
So it won't be a veggie-dag but i won't have thrown away perfectly good pieces of chicken either, so no bad feelings, just no perfect score :-)
By the way, it's 10 o clock in the morning here, not whatever tim is attached to this post
Day 8: succes
Nothing veggie available at the restaurant for lunch so went out and bought a baguette with vegetables and cheese and a vegetarian pizetta, check!
For dinner some mozarella with cheese, mashed potatoes and omelette, check!
Soon i'll have to take a good look if i'm getting in all necessary nutrients, but i actually needed to do that before this quest so nothing new :-)
Day 6 & 7: The biggest meat-eating fest in history?!
Nothing of the kind, over the whole weekend actually nothing un-vegetarian was eaten!
These 2 days were actually the 2 first real vegetarian days!
So it can be done, onwards!
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Day 5: Opportunity creates the criminal
Salad-dish with cheese for lunch, check
Tiny piece of salmon on the cheese dish, fail
One colleague suggested fish doesn't count toward my quest.. i don't agree.
Meat or fish both need to eat something else before they're big and juicy, they're both on a higher trophic level than "plants" and in these times most fish is probably even more unsustainable than most types of meat.
Anyway, my truly vegetarian colleague even gave me her piece of salmon so i had 2 :-)
And another colleague offered to eat my salmon so i would succeed today yet i decided to eat it anyway to prove a point:
Oppurtunity creates the crime, being a weekday-vegetarian would be very easy for me if the choice was available!
First week: 0 / 5
Better luck next week!
Day 4: Between a rock and a hard place
I was torn ... I know from past discoveries in our fridge that this would most likely not be eaten by anyone else and thus would end up in the trash.
Given that i'm partly doing this to reduce my ecological footprint I decided the best choice would be to eat it and not eat some extra food while this would end up being thrown away.
So failed again yet with good reason.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Day 3: Old habits die hard
Since there was no vegetarian meal available, i went out and bought a very nice vegetarian baguette with grilled courgettes, pesto and lots of other yummy stuff.
And in the afternoon i also got a fruit-salad from a colleague that wasn't hungry for it.
And then ...
Completely oblivious of my weekday-vegetarian adventure i ate a big plate of spaghetti bolognese (ground beef) for dinner and later at night in a bar i ordered a croque-monsieur (ham)... only to realise late at night when i got home again that ... OH DAMN i was trying to be a weekday vegetarian!!
So i started up this blog at that point to keep track of it all!
Better luck tomorrow!
Day 2: succes ... almost
Sometimes that meant that the pasta with ham and cheese became pasta with cheese, not bad but not great.
Today it was an nice vegetable sauce with tomato, lots of variety in the sauce, it was yummy.
Unfortunately there were small meatballs in the tomato sauce ... failed again!
On to day 3!
Day 1: May 16, 2011, Monday
At lunch in the restaurant i chose te eat a "Cordon Bleu", you know, a schnitzel with ham and cheese inside.
Let's see what tomorrow brings!
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Something that's worth doing ....
It hasn't been going great yet,
but i'm happy that i've started reducing my meat intake significantly.
Tonight I'll start posting about what happenend this week.
Ready ... set ... GO
http://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian.html
Graham describes my situation pretty good:
- wanting to eat less meat for health and environment
- not wanting to give up meat completely
- not getting around to it because of the abovementioned dilemma and the lack of a plan
But after seeing yet another mind-expanding TED-lecture, i once more have a new perspective on reality from which there is no return :-)
So gogogo! I kinda started 2 days ago on monday and will keep a diary here and add random but relevant stuff.