my vegan february: a health confession

If you know me, you know that I’ve been a[n ovo-lacto] vegetarian for a few years now. First more “pescatarian,” and more recently, full vegetarian.

Today I started the YumUniverse Plant-Powerful 30-DayChallenge. Why? Because I wanted to kick it up a notch. Because it's February and I'm 31 and what else is there to do? 

I have been a fan of YumUniverse for a couple of months now, so dinners have been leaning toward the vegan side more often than not. (And they are freaking delicious.) As a self-diagnosed lactose intolerant person, consuming less dairy has made a difference. (A delicious difference.)

People sometimes ask me why I’ve chosen a plant-based lifestyle. My answer has evolved over time, but the heart remains the same: It’s for my health.

The truth is, I have a digestive health condition I can’t do anything about. (Don't worry, that link contains zero pictures, unlike the Wikipedia article.) I don’t talk about it very often, because most of the time it doesn’t affect me. And who likes talking about their colon? But I’m coming up on my annual screening, and a combination of age and a meeting with a genetic counselor has driven a few things home. This condition—and my future with it—are very real. There is only one way to prevent FAP from transforming into colon cancer. You can’t get cancer in something that isn’t in your body, right? It’s a scary future, and as much as I can hope that medicine will make great advances before I have to face this, it’s in my future.

No amount of eating the right things or taking pills or alternative therapies can change the mutation in my genes. I can’t prevent this future. Maybe I won’t be able to eat the way I like (oh, leafy greens!) because I won’t be able to digest them. Some people might take this future as a cue to enjoy eating all the foods they like while they can. In my own way, I am. I have never felt as good as I have on a plant-based diet. FAP isn’t something you suffer from. You don’t feel it. You wouldn’t know it was there unless you were screened for it. There are warning signs, and perhaps your digestion works a little bit differently than everyone else’s.

I know mine does. And I know I have never felt as good as I do on a plant-based diet. Over the past few years I’ve started listening more closely to my body. Our bodies talk a lot more than I ever realized. My body has told me that it likes a plant-based diet. Maybe my condition makes it harder to break down animal-based protein. Maybe I think it does. Whatever the case may be, I feel better eating plants.

I have done a bunch of scary online reading about the operation I will need down the line, and the way it affects your diet. Sadly, it may affect how much I can eat the things I truly love.  So I’ll spend the next 10-15 years eating all the kale, beans, and seeds I can just in case I won't be able to enjoy them down the line. Those things are my Big Macs, people.

It’s a little terrifying to put this out there into the world, but at the same time, I know I’m not the only person with this condition.  Three quarters of my nuclear family is struggling with different stages of this thing. Thanks this delightful condition being a dominant gene mutation, the chances our future children have a 50% chance of inheriting this from me. (And I was worried about my bad vision and bunions being passed down.) So maybe if I learn how to deal with it in my way, I can help others. Maybe my plant-based diet isn’t therapeutic at all. Maybe I just think it is. Is there really a difference? I know I can’t change this condition, and I certainly can’t change genetics, but I can change the way I feel.

So that’s the real reason I’m kicking my plant-based diet into high gear. Since cutting out fish entirely, the only hanger-on has been dairy (and eggs, but they are easier to leave behind since vegan baking is easy, moist, and delicious). And I don’t feel the best when I eat dairy. I feel amazing when I don’t have it, perhaps owing to the fact that I’ve been incorporating more healthful and interesting grains and vegetables into my diet. Husband always thought it was a matter of time until I went vegan, but I didn’t want to be that strict, even though diary has never wholly agreed with me. He thought I had a secret plan to make us vegan. It's not my fault he has an adorable obsession with non-dairy milks! I do agree with the hypothesis that cheese is addictive. It’s hard to quit something that actually does make you feel happy. But if my mind is happy but my stomach isn’t, how long can my mind stay happy?

Not indefinitely.

So there you have it. I can’t actually change my health by going fully plant-based, but I can change how I feel. Perhaps I’ll prevent other health problems from manifesting. That in itself would be a great byproduct. I have enough on my plate as it is.

Note: Yes, Husband is participating in the challenge as well. He is committing to 30 days of ovo-lacto vegetarian eating, which he's been doing for the most part anyway. I'm so thankful for his support!

kitchen organization

So last week was approximately the worst week ever. Starting on Saturday (the same day we enjoyed some raw vegan food and gawking at Ben Folds at Pure Food and Wine and the dramatic stylings of the gorgeous and talented Paul Rudd in Grace), I came down with the worst sinus infection in history. Perhaps not human history, but my history, at the very least. Three days out of work (at a very bad time to be out of work, natch), and severe boredom set in. I couldn't do a darn thing. Except watch movies starring Hugh Grant. That I did with aplomb.

But this week I'm back. Not quite "better than ever," but back to my normal activities. On Saturday I came up with a whole apartment to do list that would give anyone chills. Calling the apartment disorganized is a bit of an understatement. It's a giant, world-consuming mess. I did not expect to get through the entire list in one weekend. I'm not Superman, nor am I my mother, who could totally get through it all because she may be Superman. I just wanted to get through one room. And for the most part, I did! It was the kitchen. And here's where my thought process went.

So our kitchen is sort of disorganized. We don't have a ton of cabinets, but we do have two microwave carts and one buffet-hutch-type-thing. Unfortunately, those are not quick doing the trick, and we just kind of jam things in places and hope for the best. No one ever knows where anything is. It's amazing.

In comes the shelving sale at the Container Store. I bought a few things for the bathroom last week, and they sent me a catalog with my order. And the catalog had these.

Ironically, months, even years ago, when the kitchen was on the top of my redecorating/reorganizing list, these shelves were the solution to all my problems. Ikea has something similar, much cheaper, which appeared alluring once upon a time. Husband was not really feeling it, so we focused on things we could agree on, like the living room.  Now that's just about done (if Ikea decides to continue producing the great bookshelf I would like to buy a duplicate of, we'll be finito shortly), my focus returns to the kitchen. With hints of bedroom, but that's another place, another time.

Here's the thing about Ikea. I'm swinging to the hate side of my love/hate pendulum for the Swedish masters. Our last trip there was the usual nightmare, rife with stress, arguments, and not having measured the length of a wall and buying a desk that might turn out to be longer than the wall we intended to put it on. It wasn't, by the way. The Ikea gods were obviously looking down on us.

And the Container Store shelving, while more pricy, promised to hold up to 500 pounds. Per shelf. I have no intentions of putting 500-pound items on my shelves, but Ikea makes no such promises. And I think my Kitchenaid standing mixer is about 400 pounds. And it has all these fun components! Accessories for shelves?  Now we're talking. Drawers, hooks, wine racks? I'm in heaven.

So, a bunch of money on the credit card later, our fancy shelves will be delivered on Sunday, and we will have a lot of Amtrak miles. I'm excited for the open, airy look, and hoping the open shelves (rather than cabinets) will force us to be more organized. We really put a lot of thought into what we would put on the shelves, how we would use them, and what accessories we wanted, so I hope we've made a good investment. And we can always buy more shelves and accessories, which is kind of fantastic, should our needs change.  They look relatively simple to put together--no enormous piles of screws!--and if we ever move and don't have room for them/have more actual cabinets, they'll break down easily to be stored.

Yeah, I'm sold.  I need to invest in a few more baskets or bins to put loose items in, and perhaps make my dream of shelves of mason jars full of beans a reality. Because my bean collection should be on display.

Of note: Husband did not make homemade seitan yet. I was too sick for seitan, and then this weekend I was so excited not to be deathly ill that I insisted on making other things. But I put nutritional yeast on my cereal this morning and it was amazing.

operation vegetarian

It is a truth universally acknowledged...that I haven't posted in long enough to gestate a human baby. And I haven't even gestated a human baby about it.

Let's not linger there. Or on whether or not I'll do this regularly. I have plenty to catch you up on, but my willingness to do so is limited. It interferes with my naps.

I was inspired to post today because of the mini-transformation I've gone through in the past month. You see, I think I lied to you. If I ever said I was a vegetarian, I was lying. From late 2009 to early August, 2012, I was a "pescatarian." And that was a stupid thing.

I spontaneously decided to go vegetarian (or whatever-a-tarian I actually went) back in 2009 because I was living alone and wasn't cooking meat anyway. I thought I'd see if I could do it. And I did it quite easily. Meat hasn't been cooked in my house since late 2009. Not even fish.

And I felt good about it. I felt green and healthy and like I was doing my little part to make the earth last maybe two months longer.

But I wasn't doing it right. I ate fish in restaurants and at our parents' houses and at weddings because it was too much work to find things on menus and inconvenience people. Guess what? I'mma inconvenience y'all now.

We went to Hawaii for our two-year anniversary, and something about all the fish I ate there broke me. I bought this t-shirt:

and I wanted to live it.

And the thing that has happened since I started this adventure has happened again. I'm having a ton of fun crafting meals, working to get all my food groups in and making healthy, delicious things. We touched down from Hawaii and I got two new recipe apps. Seriously, if the iPhone is good for anything, it is good for recipe apps. I don't have to plan meals ahead of time and make grocery lists. I can do it on the subway. And the day after we got home from Hawaii, I made "raw vegan cleanse soup" and it was amazing. We had to buy a new blender to turn kale into soup, but we learned a ton about blenders, how not to spend $400 on blenders, and Husband even turned a person away from the leaky Kitchenaid blender while buying our Ninja at BBB. 

I've conquered the tricky world of tofu. Seriously, I was a semi-vegetarian for three years and couldn't manage stir-fried tofu that stayed in the neat little cubes I cut it into. Yes, you seriously have to press it. When you get all that water out of it, you make it into a sponge for any flavor you want. And it is delicious.

And then you bake it and it gets this amazing crust on it and you forget you've ever had a potato chip. Or bacon.

Now you are asking, "What about Husband?" Yeah, he's not a vegetarian.  He is more like a vegetarian sympathizer. If there were vegetarian McCarthyism, he would be blacklisted. He doesn't eat meat in the house because I don't cook it. What he does in a restaurant or while he's at work is his own business. I try not to guilt trip him. I'm not on a mission with my vegetarianism.

But when he sent me an email about making his own seitan this weekend (for barbecue "ribs," natch), I did a happy dance in my office chair. It involves crazy ingredients--including liquid smoke--and that is right up his alley. I think he's wavering on his meat resolve. We spent the weekend with our vegetarian cousins, talking about being vegetarian, and I think it changed something in him.

And now I will post this and he'll read it and go have a baconchickenwingtunahamburgerpepperoni sandwich. Or a turducken. But don't let him make you think he doesn't enjoy raw beet salad, kale stuffed with feta, or carmelized onions with quinoa. Because his reactions to my meat cooking were never as enthusiastic as his reactions to my vegetarian cooking are.

I'll try to report back on Mission: Homemade Seitan.

(Honey, if you go full veg, I'll have something to blog about. Just saying.)

thirty

Tonight is the last night of my twenties.

I sat--alone, Husband is at an employees-only-because-we-are-too-cheap-to-pay-for-drinks-for-your-significant-others holiday party--eating frozen pizza and watching Julie & Julia. Realizing that I prefer the movie over the book specifically because it's a Nora Ephron film.

Perhaps I've been thirty since age eleven (probably around the time I saw Sleepless in Seattle for the first time). 

I only made it through approximately the first fifteen minutes. The Queens-bashing (more prevalent in the book) gets under my skin. But what got under my skin even more was Julie Powell's feeling of failure upon turning thirty.

I've written a novel. And I'm constantly rewriting it, so its latest iteration is only approximately thirty pages long. Appropriate? So perhaps in essence I haven't written a novel at all. I have a Masters degree I'm not really using, since I have the same job I had before--and during--the program. I feel a little like Julie Powell. Except with a lot more love for Queens.

So I stopped watching the movie--in spite of all the cooking, all the France, and all the Streep--in order to work on my novel. I tend to plot while I'm falling asleep (is this normal?) in a daydream-type pattern. And I figured out what to do with the scene I've been working on like a week ago. But I never got around to writing it.

But then I opened my laptop and had a Blogger tab open and remembered that I wanted to write a "birthday" blog post. This is it, I suppose.

For many years--since I turned twenty-five, I think--I've dreaded this day. Well, not this one. I'm still twenty-nine. Tomorrow is the day I've been dreading.  Except at some point in the past year, I stopped dreading it. But why did I dread it to begin with?

More than any other seminal age--sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one--thirty feels like a true milestone. I really feel like an adult. I'm married, I've had the same job for five years, I've lived in the same apartment for five years, and I feel settled. Settling down, getting away from the constant moving, upheaval, and change that can riddle our twenties feels amazing to me.

Yeah, I've been thirty for a while, if that's my definition of thirty. I'm ready for what's next. The real settling down. Starting a family, maybe investing in real estate (or continuing to rent because real estate is insane and we like having a super to fix the toilet), and, before all that, really figuring out what I want in a career. I think that was the thing that made me hesitate about turning thirty. It seemed like I should have had that figured out, and have been moving up the ladder already. But I don't feel the need to move up the ladder. I think when it comes down to it, raising our family will be my real career, so why try so hard to pursue anything else? I'd love to freelance, have a bit of a schedule and some projects to keep me on task--and be able to stay home and watch my kids grow up.

There. I said it. I'm turning thirty in a postfeminist world and I want to stay home with my kids. If I can stay home and we have enough money to feed them, I'll feel very lucky indeed.

That's what thirty means to me. The blossoming of the things planted in my twenties. Maybe it won't be this blog turning into a book--eek, who wants to hear me talk about myself that much?--like Julie & Julia. I only hope that ten years from now, I'll be tending my harvest.

update: home office fail

I have tragic news.

We took a trip to West Elm over the weekend. The Parsons desk, in real life, was as disappointing as the movie we saw afterward.  While I realize we're not going to get solid wood at our price point, when we're willing to go above our price point for something, we'd like it to feel like it's worth it. I think floor models are very telling in how pieces of furniture will fare in the future. These puppies hadn't fared well. On one model, the drawers looked off kilter, on another, they didn't seem to be on their rollers at all.

It didn't seem like a "forever" desk to us, even though it was at a "forever" price.

And while I could spend a considerable amount less on something from Overstock, I think we're over the West Elm Parsons desk and its knockoffs.

Thankfully, my recent trips to Ikea.com have given me great insight into their categorization. It turns out we don't want an office desk. At Ikea, these are approximately 19" deep--aka: not deep enough to provide the expansive work space we desire and have the space for. We want a work table instead.

With Ikea, we know what we're getting. We, like many twentysomethings, have had many liasons with an allen wrench and variously-labeled MDF pieces. And instructions written in the language of a stick figure with a question mark over his head.

Honestly, if all we're going to get at any price point is MDF with veneer, I'd rather pay the MDF price.  Ikea may not be forever.  But Ikea never pretends to be anything it's not.

Now please excuse me as I put my feet up on my solid wood, vintage 1970s coffee table that I got for free because my parents had good taste when particle board was just a glint in everyone's eye.

home office

Oh my God, you guys!

I have been such a bad blogger. I have plenty of things to write about (throw pillows, eco-friendly holiday decorations, new year's resolutions, turning the big 3-0...) but I have been very remiss in putting together any coherent posts.

That's all going to change. Today.

Because we are back in business! The holidays knocked us for a loop, but I'm now inspired to go forth on what seems to be a neverending project: the living room.

I thought we might be almost finished. But, you see, in a  New York one-bedroom apartment, a large living room serves many functions. Thankfully ours doesn't also have to function as a dining room, since we are blessed with an eat-in kitchen. However, its two main functions--living room in general and office--didn't get equal footing in our fall overhaul. I gave up one computer desk in exchange for a small kitchen table, and it's definitely not cutting the mustard.

It looks like an afterthought. And with our terrible tendency to collect clutter, the work space gets smaller and smaller every second. Husband was working from home the other day, with one tiny laptop amid a sea of paperwork waiting to be filed, extra holiday cards, returned holiday cards, and computer paraphernalia. It looked like he was being punished.

And he shouldn't be punished. You know what would make both of us feel like we weren't being punished while working at home? A Parsons desk:

West Elm

Oh yeah baby. That's 8 square feet of work space, better known as 8 square feet for us to clog up with clutter.

Or will we? Right know we're struggling with the files of 2 adults stuffed into 2 Rubbermaid file drawers. And the accessories of countless electronic devices (German cell phone, anyone?) stuffed into 4 smaller Rubbermaid drawers. The two sets of drawers don't match. It's not good. It's not well thought out.

Enter our new friend Erik:

Ikea

Erik has a friend:

Ikea

Are you counting what I'm counting? 4 file drawers! And a total of 3 smaller drawers, including the 2 on the desk.

Again, I warn you that this is not a blog on saving money or scrimping when it comes to home decor. The West Elm Parson's desk is not cheap, but short of the customizable solid wood (or whatever other material you want) version from Room & Board, it feels like a smart investment to us. A Parson's desk is a classic in modern design and will truly fit its surroundings, even if one day we have a separate office space. I love that it doesn't have much to it, but still manages to have drawers. With some smart desk organizers, I think our office space will look more like a statement rather than an after thought. And perhaps encourage me to upload all the pictures I take with this blog in in mind and actually write the posts.