Becoming a Vegetarian
Being a vegetarian, especially being vegetarian in a small town is not easy. People scoff at you, look at you like you have recently grown a tail and say things like, “it’s just not healthy.” To make matters worse, my small town is also a dairy, beef, poultry, sheep and egg farming kind of place, so the looks are longer and the remarks a bit snider. My darling hubby is also a dairy farmer making the whole process almost comical.
There are many drawbacks to vegging it in a small town. In a small town you can’t get tofu, veggie patties or rice milk. You’re darned lucky if you can find whole wheat flour and brown rice. Your local library has never heard of “The Enchanted Broccoli Forest” or Dean Ornish and no one knows what kasha is. At potluck dinners you often get to bring yours back intact and you never get to swap recipes at the local coffee klatch – providing of course you have been invited to join one.
In a small town, shopping for groceries is a full time job. Eventually you realize you do have to go to the nearest city and if you are going there for the specialty items you just may as well do all your shopping there. Once you start shopping in “the city” your neighbours can then gripe because “you aren’t supporting the local economy.”
If your small town is anything like mine, given a couple of months the local populace is tired of you, your friends are used to the new regime and everyone is talking about someone or something else. Thank goodness. Now you can be left alone to quietly adjust to your new lifestyle – or not. Now that you are used to shopping trips that take all day, you are discovering that your palate is not quite as ready as you are to change the way things taste and feel and you discover that you are not adjusting too well to spending oodles of time in the kitchen preparing unfamiliar food you are not sure what to with only to discover in the end that “YOU DON’T LIKE THE TASTE!”
Becoming a vegetarian can have a very long adjustment period unless you started a) very young, b) are very dedicated, c) it’s a matter of life and death or d) you really like the taste of all these strange foods to begin with. I have found in my own situation and by talking to many others that our palates are not so easily trained to accept new flavours and textures and that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you ust simply cannot get used to some things. For years I tried desperately to like whole grains, whole wheat in particular and brown rice. After all those years I can tolerate some of the grains but I absolutely refuse to eat rown rice unless I am out visiting and I can’t get away with leaving it behind. Since becoming “old” (I’m 57 but my kids tell me I’m past it) I have developed three new hard and fast rules about food:
1. Only eat what you like – why torture yourself. Life is just too short.
2. Believe in what you are doing and why you are doing it otherwise you are going to a heck of a lot of trouble for nothing.
3. You have got to get out of the kitchen in 30 minutes or less. Food shouldn’t be your life.
There are a few other things that I have decided over the years of cooking. Food should be bright and colourful and look good; recipes should never have more ingredients than the cookbook has pages; and everything should be fresh, crisp and taste really good. If a recipe does all that and you can still get out of the kitchen in 30 minutes then hold on to it, there aren’t many of them. That is one of the reasons I started this site. There just aren’t enough fast and easy vegetarian recipes. Especially ones that contain familiar foods and that end up tasting vaguely familiar in the end as well. This latter fact is extremely important if you are “the vegetarian” in the family and don’t want to have to cook two meals a lot of the time. To cut this off short, I am a lazy cook who likes good food.
NOTE: Since staring this site a couple of years back, my small town has started to carry soy milk in assorted flavours, organic produce and some packaged foods, tofu in flavours and textures, meat substitutes as in weiners, cold cuts, cheeses and patties, tvp and a variety of other stuff. Seems like a great number of new vegetarians are surfacing. The local bulk food store is now touting bulgar, kasha, cracked wheat, tvp, Stevia, couscous and even s a variety of boxed mixes like falafel. Shopping at home finally got easier.
