Vegan day 1: rude awakening and pizza night!

This morning I was walking downstairs ready to face my first day in this new diet when I got my first surprise:



I knew my beloved hazelnut creamer was non-dairy, so I thought it would be ok. But no, animal products are on the label. I used some vanilla soy milk instead, but was sad. To be fair, the hazelnut creamer was on its way out because I had apparently never read the label, but I wasn't quite ready to give it up.

The other surprise is that I realize that superbowl sunday is about day 8 of my 10 day challenge. Man, why couldn't it be two hippie teams playing like San Diego and Seattle? Ms. Becky - are you going to have vegan brats at your party?

A Saturday morning tradition is to make some breakfast item with the boys and we usually alternate between pancakes and waffles. I had been experimenting with different (whole food) recipes, but I never had done a vegan one. The boys were up for the challenge:



But the results were surprising:



The taste was very good, but aparently vegan baking is going to take some getting used to.

The day went by with no problems until the afternoon. I was a little hungry and was planning on making a smoothie and have some granola. Then it dawned on me, the only granola I had on hand had butter in it. Not vegan. I started to get a little down at this point. Then Mark came home hungry. He only had TWO hot dogs at the basketball game and had a leftover hamburger for a snack. I really started missing meat and cheese, but tricuits and hummus satisfied me for that moment.

We also have a traditional pizza night at our house. Usually it is Friday, but I was going to have pizza on Saturday. Again, this is a tough non-vegan meal. Earlier this week I came across a four cheese pizza recipe. It is really good. If you aren't vegan you should try it. However, that wasn't an option for me. Ideas started coming into my head and once I started thinking, I couldn't stop. I made a vegan white pizza. First of all I used a different recipe for pizza dough, one with beer. My normal dough recipe has butter and milk so I was trying something different. (ie, where it is ok for my kids to have pizza dough with beer, it is NOT ok for me to have dough with milk and butter). After rolling my dough out, I baked it for 5 min at 425. I then spread some olive oil on it then spread some boiled potatoes that had been mased with garlic, salt, and peper. Then I sprinkled some northern white beans over the potatoes. Another sprinkle of nutritional yeast (which is like a cheesy spice), then some non-diary cheese (which really wasn't all that bad), and some green onions. I baked for about 10 more minutes.





Results were...not bad. Not bad at all. I was feeling much less sorry for myself after dinner and lets face it, some things are easy to fix: