What I Ate in a Day #52 (Actually, Two Days) When Having a Hard Time

When I came back from Oklahoma, I couldn't think. I have all sorts of priorities with food, but as I learned from How to Keep House While Drowning, under high stress, we need to choose the most important ones. I disagree with K. C. Davis (the author) saying veganism is something that can be easily dropped, but there are other things I did dispense with in order to make it through.

So instead of the using-stuff-up focus, it was just a getting-fed-easily focus for most of December. I ran to the store for food I could prep without thinking much and with very minimal effort, but would still try to be somewhat nutritious. Here are two days of that.

This breakfast was an English muffin with vegan butter and apple butter, non-dairy yogurt mixed with peanut butter, and sliced banana. I had this with herbal tea; it was nice enough.

The lunch I had on this day was boxed noodles in a vegan cheese sauce (Goodles), canned baked beans doctored up with a bit of onion and bell pepper, and broccoli. You'll see a lot of broccoli in coming meals on this blog; it's the green vegetable I can cook in my sleep, since I generally just wash it, cut it up, and steam it in the microwave. But having freshly cooked veggies seemed to heal some part of my soul, so they were important.

And dinner (for several nights) was the very simple classic burger (using Beyond Burger, vegan mayo, lettuce, tomato, onion, and dill pickle) with tater tots and ketchup. Beyond Burger has a new, smaller burger patty (the "Stacks" burger) that is much more aligned with my appetite. I can eat a whole one at once, and you can cook them from frozen. They're otherwise just like the Beyond Burger that comes in a size twice as big that you have to thaw first.

On another day, I used my English muffin to make a breakfast sandwich with some frozen veggie sausage and a chickpea flour "egg" patty. It was a weekend and I was somehow in the mood to actually cook something, even if it was a single "egg." It had veggies in it, too, which seemed to help me feel less like I was having what one, not-so-nice vegan influencer calls "bunker food." (But I'm sure she'd disapprove anyway.) I had that with orange juice and a soy-milk based mocha latte-type drink. The mocha is my own shortcut to hot cocoa using Sanka, grain-based instant coffee granules, cocoa powder, sugar, a tiny bit of salt, vanilla, some hot water, and soy milk. Trust me, it's delicious!

For lunch, I dumped a bunch of stuff in a rice cooker--veggies of whatever sort I found in my fridge and smoked tofu with the rice--and I made a gochujang-based sauce to add to it when it was done. I topped it with sesame seeds and had it with a frozen veggie egg roll I baked in my oven and the end of my sweet chili sauce. This felt somehow more wholesome than a lot of what I've been eating otherwise.

For my evening burger, I did something a bit different and had sauteed mushrooms and onions and some non-dairy cheese. I put a dill pickle and tater tots with ketchup on the side. This was delicious!

Someone had brought some homemade sugar plums to work that nobody seemed to like but me, so I adopted them. The recipe was attached, and it consisted of dried fruit, nuts, jam, and sugar--an explicitly vegan recipe. There is a sprig of rosemary to serve as the stem of the plum. I had never had anything like this but I loved it--and it gave me a boost of fruit, too.

Not pictured, I also had a lot of cereal with soy milk, sandwiches with chips, and frozen Daiya pizza with salad. I'm surviving--and I'll see you again soon.