Vegan Week - Day Seven THE END

Ding dong the soy cheese is dead. Well, gone at least. Tonight is officially the final night of Vegan Week. We've done it and we survived.

Menu:

Breakfast:
Rice porridge with soy milk and toast

Lunch:
Sandwiches, fruit, corn thins, cauliflower soup

Dinner:
Tomato and cheese sauce (soy milk, soy cheese, GF flour, margarine) pasta bake with zucchini.  I do have a wee picture of this to put here but blogger has thrown a tanty and won't let me upload it. Rude.

Hindsight....

Overall it was a good week. I've learned though that I'm definitely not a person who can do vegan full time. I reckon I must have a very speedy metabolism given the number of tiny women in my family and my inability to put on weight no matter what I eat.  This week I'd eat a full dinner and be dreaming of takeaways an hour afterwards. I seemed to be constantly hungry, which was frustrating, because I thought I was balancing my meals properly with the right amount of protein and carbs.

To be a good vegetarian or vegan would require me to eat a big balanced breakfast every day and a lunch with protein in it. I'm not good at either of those things and I think that's where my downfall has been. In my busy chasing after kids, running to and from school, fitting 100 things into one day kind of life I tend to forget food until it's dinner time and then I eat like a horse to make up for it. This works for me when I have a big plate of meat but with a bowl of soup or a meal of vegetables it most certainly does not.

What did we learn?

We found out that we all enjoy tofu. Yes, even the kids really liked it. I'll be researching ways to prepare tofu and it'll be a permanent fixture on the dinner plan from now on.

We discovered that while we do like meat at night, we don't need it every night. Not by a long shot. After this week we'll be reducing our red meat to once a week and increasing our meat free nights from 1 to 3.

We realised that most of our worries about the kids not eating vegetarian meals was in our heads. Not once in this entire week did either child ask where the meat was. They ate everything they were given without exception and that goes to show that we can be a bit more adventurous from now on!

Overall it was a great experience and something I'd recommend to any meat eaters out there.
Now where's that burger.....