Vegan Challenge, Day 2

So yesterday Iris and I took our vegan challenge seriously. It started for me as early as my morning coffee, which I normally take heartily diluted with 2 % milk. We had no vegan milk substitute. I can't stand black, unsweetened coffee: it has to have either milk or sugar (or, as they drink it in Borneo, sweetened condensed milk... so yummy, but alas, too fattening for me to drink regularly). So I put sugar in my coffee and drank it black. Suboptimal, to say the least, and more calories than with my 2% milk.

It turns out that the Nature's Valley granola bars I've been eating lately for breakfast are vegan, so that was easy enough. Iris has been having oatmeal instead of her usual cereal in milk.

Later in the day, Lola and I walked to the playground, and I picked up a soy latte at Spike's Coffee, which was a big improvement.

Iris was worried about whether the snack would be vegan at her soccer game. "What will you do if it's not vegan?" she fretted. (Snack is the highlight of the game for the U7 Viking Soccer League players. There's no official score, and the real winners are the team with the best snack). Often there is fruit, but yesterday, it was slices of cheese and cupcakes. Iris was about to inhale a cupcake when Anton called me to check in. Since most frosting has butter (not to mention that the cake part probably contained egg and milk), I said it could not be considered vegan. Poor Iris put the cupcake down and felt a bit glum.

We hadn't managed to get to the grocery store, so I insisted we eat at Nirvana. Nirvana is like the Drunken Housewife: boozy and Buddhist-influenced. It's not a vegan or vegetarian restaurant, but it was easy to order a ton of yummy vegan food there and eat until we all agreed we needed to go home and lie down. We had spring rolls, lettuce wraps ("Bodhi cups"), noodles with tofu or seitan and vegetables, and lemonade drinks (mine with Ketel One, the girls with raspberry or mango juice). We could have gone on to dessert and had the sticky rice with mango, but we were all too stuffed for that.

I begged the husband to go by the grocery store after dinner, but, in what I thought was a passive aggressive move, he didn't pick up the stuff I needed for my vegan recipes. He did get some soy milk, but he also got half-and-half, cream cheese, cheddar cheese, and parmesan cheese. Oy vey.

This morning, Lola jumped up and down shouting, "IRIS IS A VEGAN! IRIS IS A VEGAN! IRIS IS A VEGAN!" She refused to try my granola bar. "That is veeeeg. I am not veeeegan." Iris and I definitely have no buy-in for this challenge. We'll see whether the non-vegans can resist tonight's nut loaf (British recipe) and french fries, followed by vegan lemon cupcakes (the only thing which cheered Iris up from the loss of her cupcake yesterday was the promise of multiple vegan cupcakes today).