A Little Bit More About Me, and How I Roll

My introductory post is here, but I just wanted to mention a few more things.

Although I am a born-and-bred Oregonian, I now live in Austin, Texas with my husband and our two daughters. I never thought I'd ever live in Texas (you know, because of stereotypes and preconceived notions and the like), but we LOVE it here in Austin.

In this space, I will refer to family members with nicknames, and I probably won't post pictures of faces. My husband's native language is Spanish, so here, he will be know as El Hombre. He's awesome. We have two daughters: SweetPea, a nine-year-old, and SweetPotato, a seven-year-old. They're awesome, too.

As a matter of fact, our girls are the very reason our family has become vegan. Just a little more than a year ago, they both decided to stop eating meat for ethical reasons (first, SweetPea, and then SweetPotato shortly thereafter). We had also just previously learned the reason for SweetPotato's chronic belly-aches: dairy. We weren't huge carnivores anyway, but the thought of no meat and no dairy for growing kids put me in a sort of panic. After all, WHERE would they get their PROTEIN? Their CALCIUM? You know, the usual concerns of the uneducated.

So I began to research. This is something I'm good at. And the more research I did, the more I realized that transitioning to a plant-based diet was good for ALL of us. And it was good for the planet. And its good for the animals. Duh. I mean, I already knew this all this. But the more I learned, the more I realized that I couldn't come up with one good reason NOT to go vegan. I cooked vegan at home, and then one day El Hombre surprised me by announcing at dinner that he was ready to go full-board, too. Soon, we begun to apply this philosophy to other areas of our life as well, beyond the food we eat: the clothes and personal-care products we buy, etc.

So that's us, in a nutshell.

But before I go, a word about how I cook: unless I've said otherwise, I will modify these recipes so that there are no added oils. I'm not trying to go "fat-free," but I do want my dietary fat in it's whole-food form, not processed and extracted. Like from, say, nuts, seeds, olives, avocados. (Here is a good list with plenty of reasons to avoid oil, and here is an excellent commentary on the topic.) For example, instead of pouring cooking oil into the pan to saute onions or whatever, I'll will saute without the oil, using a technique similar to this.

And that's all I can think of for now...