Tuesday, February 19, 2008

A Day in the Life of my Belly

Alright, so here's a fairly average day of food for me. Hopefully as the weeks/months go by, a lot more of this will be things I have prepared myself. Sorry for the bad camera phone pics!


An organic, soy vanilla latte. I have been weaning myself off the ridiculously expensive Starbucks, but I do love their chai lattes. This morning I had to fight for my coffee because most peoples' regular place had a broken coffee machine.


A pear and a banana, both polished off by 10:30am. Sometimes I sneak in a peach too, depending on how quick I am to the fruit box that's delivered to my work!


Lunch: usually something store bought these days, like sushi, rice paper rolls, salad or a sandwich of sorts. Today it was baked veges from an Italian place. It didn't agree with me greatly, and although it was all vegetable, it was probably just reheated and chucked in the display so there was little to no nutritional value left. And I ended up feeling hungry within a couple of hours, so I had a pear at around 4pm (not pictured because I was so eager to eat it that I forgot! But it looked much like most pears do so you're not really missing out).



I never usually do this but I was so hungry when I left work at 6pm, and I didn't want to work out with no energy (tried this last night and it wasn't fun at all), so I ended up getting a vegetable sushi roll (sans mayo). A banana would have been perfect but there was none left in the fruit boxes and all the shops were closing up, so it was the best I could do. Thankfully it helped a lot in terms of my stamina. And I wasn't almost nauseous with hunger when I got home just before 8pm, like I usually am.



This is my meal that I dream about all day. My wonderful salad. I made a much smaller one than usual, I normally fill up a large mixing bowl. I also omitted a few of the more calorific items in the salad due to the sushi roll and not being quite so hungry (ie sunflower seeds, flaxseed oil, olives and sundried tomatos). But it was still perfect. It includes mixed leaves, baby spinach, sprouted mung beans, alfalfa sprouts, fresh tomato, cucumber, avocado, mushroom, raw brocolli, dulse flakes, balsamic vinegar and tahini. Believe it or not, there were no carrots at the supermarket yesterday so they're missing too. I grated some sweet potato over it last night to compensate. The whole thing is just a million kinds of YUM.

I bought myself a nifty little lunch pack today, and I tried my hand at some rice paper rolls of my own. I'll see how they stand up tomorrow and get my blog on!

Monday, February 18, 2008

Biting the Bullet

Okay okay, I know the first post is the hardest so I'm just going to get it over with. Hi, I'm Alison. I've finally decided to try my hand at some vegan blogging. I tend to go off on tangents fairly quickly, so I wouldn't be surprised if I talk 20% vegan, 80% random crap. But I'll try my best to stay focused. Oooh, look, a water bottle!! Oh, sorry.

I feel kind of bad for starting this blog out with a horrible, overexposed, no-natural-light photo of a fairly bland meal, but I guess it's better than nothing for now. This was my early dinner last night after my 2 hour bus ride from my mum's house in the Central Coast, back to my house in central Sydney (trains weren't working on the weekend, which is nothing unusual!).



Wholemeal penne pasta with vegan coriander pesto (psst, that's cilantro for pretty much every one else).

I used to buy the most amazing vegan pesto in North London when I was living there, and it took me quite a while to find any when I moved back to Australia. Finally I found this at a supermarket in Newtown and nearly cried from happiness. I also like to use it as a base for pita bread pizzas. I will post the brand name when I manage to get close to the fridge again.

Anyway, looks aside, it was yum, so much so that I ate all of what I cooked, even though the plan was to have leftover to take to work today (thought I must admit, I don't think there was quite enough for 2 serves there).

Generally, my night meal is a big salad. And I do mean BIG. I will have to take a photo one night just to demonstrate. I have been spending my evenings after work at the gym, and it's such an awesome thing to chow down on after a work out.

Anyway, I actually do have some real nice photos from some desserts my mum and I tried out this weekend, and I am itching to start doing more cooking of my own. Hope you'll come back to read my rambles about it!