Veggie Tales

Last January I decided to cut out meat from my diet. Several friends of mine are vegetarian and I had been a pretty scant meat eater for several years. I NEVER prepared it myself. Ew. And there are a nice amount of veggie entrees at all my favorite eateries that were tasty. I knew taking the vegetarian plunge wasn't going to be too big of a shock to my system, I had long felt it was only a matter of time before I "went veg."

I am not going to go all "vegetarian propaganda" on you and preach the merits of being an herbivore, for me it's a personal choice to lead my life this way. I get shit about it from a fair amount of people and that's the most annoying aspect of it. But I take it with a grain of salt and chalk it up to the red-meat clogging the arteries to their brain to be able to recognize that this is MY choice and when thought through logically, a healthy & economical one.

"BUT what do you EAT????"

C'mon people. Beef, Poultry and Pork. I've eliminated 3 things from my diet (full disclosure, I am NOT vegan (mmmmmcheese) and I'll still eat seafood if that's the only option or I'm craving fish tacos from Los Tules - YUM). A little creativity and online research and I'm never at a loss for what to make for dinner.

The only notable areas of my life impacted are eating out, which was minimal, and eating at my parents'. My dad had a hard time grasping the idea.

"What??? You won't eat no meat? What about Chicken?"

"Nope. That's meat."

"Lamb?"

"Still meat, dad."

Baffled look.

"Tell you what, since a few of the reasons I made this choice is because I don't want the hormones/steroids/chemicals from the animal in my body, I will eat anything you catch or hunt yourself."

Needless to say, he now just keeps a box of veggie burgers in the freezer. In fact, the parents typically do more than that and always have a meat-less option for me for dinner when I come over. My parents are AWESOME. My dad, I believe, has a secret fear that I'm a lesbian and this just probably propagates his fear- but he's doing an excellent job of hiding it and is so very adorable when he calls me to give me the week's vegetarian menu.

My original intent was to see this through for at least a year and I know I'm not going to have any problem reaching that goal. And I'm going to stick with it beyond then as well. Maybe in the future I'll consider putting free-range/grass fed, locally raised, chemical & hormone free meat back into my diet, but for now I'm perfectly content not have animal flesh clogging my intestines.

Too gross?