Vegan, Gluten-Free Quiche, Omelette, Burgers

Top 3 recipes I found this week for scratching some of the food itches I've been having since going vegan:









Crustless, Vegan Mini-Quiches









Vegan Omelette










Black Bean Burgers

Going vegan

After nearly a year of Sophia requesting to become vegetarian, I finally decided to grant her wish. I was hanging out near the edge for some time, but 3 things kicked me over the edge:

1. Late one night, I couldn't sleep. Turned on TV and was flipping back and forth between the original Planet of the Apes (have you seen that as an adult?) and an episode of 30 Days. 30 Days is a smartly-made reality show that puts someone in an environment quite opposite their own lifestyle for 30 days. In the one I watched, an avid hunter, NRA type guy lives with a vegan, animal-rights activist family. It showed graphic video of cruelty on dairy and poultry farms. The mix of that with Planet of the Apes and it's depiction of man's treatment of animals was a big kick in the pants.
2. I told my vegetarian neighbors about this and they loaned me a copy of Skinny Bitch. Have you read this? If not, let me mail you a copy! On the surface it sounds like a book about eating well to look good, but at the heart and soul, it's about getting smart about what you put in your body, loving yourself enough to do that, and about eating vegan. It has a painfully honest chapter about the cruelty of the meat industry, about inhumane slaughtering. Thinking "oh I try to eat free-range organic meat"? Try this thought on for size: even free-range animals are taken to the slaughterhouse. Even in the most humane slaughterhouse, the animals hear & witness the pain and dying of other animals around them. Sometimes their young have just been ripped away from them. Those animals are filled with fear, rage, panic, grief, stress, adreneline, suffering. If "you are what you eat", think about eating fear, rage and grief with every meal. The book then drives home the crap in found animal products - hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, etc. It also takes a hard look at corruption in agriculture, even in "organic" product lines, the EPA, FDA and more. With 2 basic premises: "read the ingredients" and "trust no one", it was an eye-opener to say the least. Even if you don't give a flip about animal cruelty, the unhealthiness of eating rotting animal carcass and carrying it around in your colon for years was enough to drop me completely over the edge of vegetarian and into the land of vegan! Since we already don't eat dairy, it's not that far to go.
3. Lastly, I went to the chiropractor recently and was weighed. I'm like 6 pounds shy of what I weighed when I was 9 months pregnant! That was definitely a wake up call, so here we are, vegan.

So in keeping with this, I rejoined my former online haunt, Foodlab, a support slash idea/recipe sharing group of mostly parents looking for a way to feed their families with food sensitivities, allergies or dietary restrictions. Great people, check it out if you need help or inspiration.

And there I found my new favorite blog, FatFree Vegan Kitchen. I'm going to start storing recipes from there on here, as I need a place to track them, and might inspire others at the same time!