Old MacDonald had a farm and all his daughters were vegan.

I'm in the mood to talk about food.

With my recent change into Veganism, I thought it best to share one of the websites I have found that have made this transition relatively easy and painless.

 VegWeb.

This site is looks clumsy at first glance but when one starts to navigate it you come to realize it is made for users by users.

Recipes are added daily, with a vegetarian/vegan option for pretty much anything you can think of. Mock Fried Chicken? No problem. A hearty chili for a cold winter's day? Type it into the search and you'll be serving up bowls in no time.  Chocolate loving vegans get their fix with many items on deck, such as the five Star Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie ( shown above).     

All of the recipes are rated by users and have comments by other vegetarians on additions or substitutions to the recipes. 

In addition, a forum is offered for those who need to know just where the heck to get nutritional yeast as well as many other helpful topics.

My standby recipe from that sight is one for Easy Pancakes submitted by user Sarah Hoff:

2 1/2 cups of all purpose flour

2 tablespoons sugar

2 tablespoons baking powder

1 tablespoon salt

2 1/2 cups of soy milk or water

(optional: dash of cinnamon)

               

My little addition that I like to add is when I am feeling like a dessert is to add some cocoa powder and about a 1/4 cup of sugar and and another 1/2 cup of water ( or to consistency). This makes a delicious chocolate pancake. I discovered it one a whim when I had to use up some old baking ingredients. I have been making them ever since.

So head on over and start cooking or baking or just browse. Be warned though: Once you start making these easy recipes it's hard to stop.

Fill it up with petroleum distillate, post haste!

Ahoy hoy!

My name is Jennifer, but for readership sake and the sake of my internet anonymity, lets call me Metta.

I hate writing about myself but I certainly like to ramble about either the odd day to day things that make up my life or the blow off the steam that fills this volatile head of mine sometimes.

I shall start with that wonderful day of gluttony we call Thanksgiving or , as we in my family like to call it, "Turkey day."

Now I could go on about the history about the day but I will go on about my favourite part – the food.

Food – my secret lover. For years our relationship has been on a roller coaster ride of ups and downs, diets and binges, weeks of salads over breadsticks  and days of poptart breakfasts followed by neat and tidy popcorn dinners.

Let me frame the situation by saying I, in no means, am ever going to be a size zero, but when I stepped on the scale again a month ago I almost hit the floor. I am not going to say the exact weight right now, but let me tell you if I continued the way I was going I was swiftly on my way to becoming one of those people you see that need the wall of their house torn down when they die just to bury them in a piano box.

So I immediately set up an appointment with a dietician. I knew that If i was going to loose weight I couldn't crash diet. I needed to go slowly and make small changes. I explained my situation to her and she understood.

She told me I wasn't eating enough. Go figure.

I took the small of advice she gave me and made the small changes. Soon the weight started to come off and I quickly dropped 10 pounds.

Then came "Turkey Day."

I figure one cheat day wouldn't hurt.

I don't eat meat so I forwent the actual turkey itself and helped myself to all the trimmings: Vegetables, potatoes, stuffing, and pie – Oh my! The Pie.

I knew I was full when I reached for that first piece but it was my mother's apple pie, so I needed two full helpings.

Now I felt gross.

I relinquished myself to my room to relax and settle my stomach, only to soon to hear the inner workings of my digestive system soon going into overdrive. "This can't be good," I thought.

I drank some water and fell asleep.

Big meals, I find, give you some odd dreams. I can't remember exactly what I was dreaming about but It involved a fishing boat and an easy bake oven. Enough said.

All of a sudden I was woken up with a feeling of nausea. The room was spinning and I felt like I had been drugged.

I pushed my dog ,who was nestled comfortably in the crook of my legs, off my bed in a hurried attempt at getting to the lavatory in time. In an instant my glorious Thanksgiving dinner revisited my senses in a wafting blaze of glory. This is punishment. This is evil. This is overeating.

My point is that I used to eat like that a lot. The portions I ate at Thanksgiving meal wasn't so grotesque looking that people would stare. It was what most people would consume.

I think my body has just gotten used to eating less amounts and less fat– and that's a good thing. 

I guess it goes to show that just because something tastes good going down doesn't necessarily mean your body is going to like it. I was shown exactly that the other night.

Oh and for the record: No matter how good the pie is, it doesn't taste nearly as good the second time around.