{"id":1749,"date":"2011-09-05T09:26:41","date_gmt":"2011-09-05T14:26:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/?p=1749"},"modified":"2011-09-05T09:30:26","modified_gmt":"2011-09-05T14:30:26","slug":"the-vegan-tales-sampling-new-products","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/?p=1749","title":{"rendered":"The Vegan Tales &#8212; Sampling New Products"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My vegan adventure is a little rockier so far than I anticipated.  I thought it would be easy for me to go vegan because I&#8217;ve been a vegetarian so long.  I thought I knew what to eat, and I thought I knew what vegan products tasted like.<\/p>\n<p>I was just a little off on those assumptions.<\/p>\n<p>One thing I didn&#8217;t understand was the bread issue.  I eat a lot of sandwiches because I&#8217;m always eating on the go.  Regular bread is not vegan.  Who knew?  Most commercial breads have some milk products in them.  I think bagels and tortillas are the main breads available that don&#8217;t routinely use milk.  I thought I&#8217;d read somewhere that English muffins were safe, but I must have been mistaken because the pack of English muffins I bought has milk listed as an ingredient.  Oops!  Who wants my barely nibbled English muffins?<\/p>\n<p>I did finally find a load of wheat bread at the regular grocery store that does not appear to have any milk in it.  If it does, please don&#8217;t tell me.  I&#8217;m desperate for bread here.  The brand is <a href=\"http:\/\/oroweat.com\/Default.aspx\">Orowheat<\/a>.  I bought the whole wheat version.  I&#8217;m giving it a thumbs up.  It&#8217;s good bread, and it also claims to be free of high fructose corn syrup, which can&#8217;t be a bad thing.  <\/p>\n<p>I also tried some rice cheese.  You need something to put on your sandwich, don&#8217;t you?  I know I need something, but it will not be rice cheese.  That was a real gagger.  I spit it out and tossed the whole package in the trash.  I&#8217;m not the kind of person who usually does that, but this was awful.<\/p>\n<p>Next I tried some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.earthbalancenatural.com\/#\/products\/vegan-sticks\/\">vegan margarine<\/a>. I found this at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cornermarketms.com\/\">Corner Market<\/a> on the rich end of town.  I don&#8217;t know if they have it at the other locations or not. First, I melted some on a sweet potato.  I put it in the microwave, so it really melted.  It was good that way.  I very much enjoyed the potato.  <\/p>\n<p>I expected I&#8217;d enjoy my Orowheat bread toasted with some vegan margarine spread on it the next morning.  <\/p>\n<p>Wrong.<\/p>\n<p>It didn&#8217;t melt on the toast. It cooled the toast off instead of the toast warming it up.  It tasted like I&#8217;d spread Crisco on my toast.  Considering that it is made entirely from vegetable oils, that may be essentially what I did.  <\/p>\n<p>To be fair, I used the stick variety, and they do sell a tub variety for spreading, but I&#8217;m not sure I&#8217;m ready to put any version of it on toast again.  I bought some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smuckers.com\/products\/ProductDetail.aspx?groupId=1&#038;categoryId=16&#038;flavorId=85\">Smucker&#8217;s Simply Fruit<\/a>, and I&#8217;m thinking I&#8217;ll be better off to put it and nothing else on my toast. <\/p>\n<p>If the &#8220;natural flavors&#8221; listed in the Simply Fruit ingredients are not vegan, please don&#8217;t tell me.  I just don&#8217;t need to know.  <\/p>\n<p>I know I&#8217;ll make it through at least one more week of being vegan.  I have my soup that I made on Saturday.  I have my sweet potatoes that I baked yesterday.  I have a bag of apples.  I have this bread that looks like it&#8217;s okay to eat.  And I have the great new vegan discovery called canned peas.  <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m eating cereal with soy milk, and I like it.  I bought some Kashi cereals that I like, but I&#8217;ve also discovered that some of my normal standbys like Life cereal are vegan, so that takes care of the breakfast issue.  <\/p>\n<p>For the most part, though, dairy substitutes are not cutting it with me.  I&#8217;ll just have to get my calcium from the dark green leafy things.  That ought to help with the weight loss issue.  Last I checked, you could eat a lot more spinach per calorie than Cheese Whiz.  <\/p>\n<p>Going vegan, it turns out, means not eating so many processed foods in favor of eating more fruits and vegetables.  Who knew?      <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My vegan adventure is a little rockier so far than<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-going-vegan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}