Vegan Goodness:
Today we ate:
- Breakfast: Blueberry smoothies for Dad and LP followed by oatmeal for everyone.
- Lunch: Soup and freshly made rye bread. Lunch was periodically interrupted by LP jumping up and running to the window to check out all the snow blowers.
- Dinner: Yesmir Wot from Vegan Eats World along with injera from Vegan Lunch Box. An Ethiopian feast!
Money Matters:
Today we stayed around the house since our street wasn’t plowed until 5pm (and by that point the snow plow kept getting stuck). No money spent!
Mom Musings:
There are so, so many things I love about being vegan. But I have to say one of my favorites is the fact that it makes feeding my kids super easy. When we started feeding LP solid foods we were told to “start with fruits and vegetables, and then work your way up to meat and dairy.” Well, that made it easy for us – we just started with step one and stayed there! Now, with IP, we are trying to feed her as much as is possible (and safe) from our plates instead of making special “baby” food. It’s going pretty well since there are lots of easy, baby-friendly, things to make, that we like to eat: baked sweet potato fries, stir-frys, lentil soup, oatmeal, etc. Since we don’t have much processed stuff in our diet (since, frankly, processed vegan food is just too expensive) I really don’t worry about the food we eat being bad for our kids.
I would love to say I found a secret parenting technique to make kids “good” eaters. If I could do that maybe I could write a best-selling book and retire. But the truth is we haven’t done anything special with food in our house since we had kids, other than to make larger quantities (LP can really pack it away sometimes. For that matter, so can his little sister – I barely got any sweet potato fries last time we made them!). Our “rule” has just been that what we are all having for dinner is what we all have for dinner. No special foods for certain people, big or little. Also, we cook a lot of veggies – greens, edamame, carrots, etc. We all like the veggies! No need to say “eat all your carrots before you have more pasta” since the carrots are usually in the pasta in the first place and Mom and Dad are usually chowing down on the veggies too. In fact, sometimes LP doesn’t like something we are eating, and, after trying the requisite couple bites, he decides he doesn’t really want it. No problem. He just has more of whatever else we are having and Dad or I finish off the part he didn’t like. I do think the fact that we make food we like, and eat it, and it’s healthy, all work together somehow. Being vegan isn’t a prerequisite for this situation, but it make it heck of a lot easier. Being vegan pushed me to eat a real, whole foods, plant-based diet. Not everything we eat is perfectly healthy (hello cookies and biscuits) but it is still a lot better than the a lot of the stuff I ate before I became vegan.
I’m not saying that we don’t have food battles with our kids. We have learned to serve any bread product (biscuits with soup, for example) as a second course, otherwise LP won’t touch our main dish, no matter how much he likes it. The grown-ups often eat dessert after the kids go to bed. But, what I find myself appreciating more and more about our eating habits is how easy it is to just feed our kids what we eat, and how much healthier I eat when I know my kids are watching me. For me, being vegan is a huge part of this.
However, I’m still going to make cookies (delicious and vegan of course) after the kids go to bed.
