failure to post

For shame. I have taken another leave of absence from the blogging community. While my flickr remains reasonably up-to-date, my poor little blog has sat stagnant. to remedy this, I have resolved to refocus on a new topic to get the ball rolling. My most recent adventures have been in the realm of cooking and baking. After maintaining a "vegaquarium" diet for around a year (also called pescatarian, or abstaining from eating pork, poultry, and beef, while still consuming fish) I slowly excluded fish, eggs, gelatin, and eventually dairy from my diet. Veganism is a new adventure, and has inspired a great deal of cooking and experimenting the kitchen. While it is easy to be a bad vegan, or mostly eat frozen gardenburgers and other pre-packaged foods, my diet changes include limiting the amount of pre-made junk I consume. Cooking from scratch rather then buying mixes is a great way to maintain control over what you are eating, and how much. Foods that are pre-packaged often contain preservatives, require a great deal of processing for shelf-life, and produce an incredible amount of waste due to inefficient packaging. So, all good reasons. It is not just an ethical choice, but nutritional and environmental as well.

So that's my spiel. Every day I do a bit of research and learn more about the foods I eat. Yesterday I was reading on making smart decisions at the grocery store about how to eat well and not spend a fortune. While eating only organic food is ideal, the cost of produce that is certified USDA organic runs around twice that of non-organic. Especially when you're eating veg, maintaining variety and balance by eating a wide range of fruits and vegetables is essential. Some produce retains pesticides moreso then others. By choosing what is and isn't essential to buy organic can save some serious cash.

For the next few weeks I will try to update regularly with food adventures, past and present. Flickr photos can clue you in to my past experiments (at least the ones that photographed nicely). Cheers to better blogging!