I Married a Vegan

Well, it didn’t start out that way. Forty plus years ago when we first met, my husband was your typical meat and potatoes guy. He has always been health conscious and works hard to stay in shape. If I do say so, he is a pretty good looking 67 year old guy! 🙂

After we both followed a vegetarian diet for many years, my husband, whom I affectionately refer to as MVH (my vegan husband), made the decision to move to a vegan diet. Making this change meant not only continuing with a meat free diet, but also saying good bye to things like milk, cheese, eggs and fish and saying hello to things like quinoa, beans, lentils and almond “milk”.

Life With MVH

So here we are about a year into MVH’s transition to a vegan diet and even though I am not adopting a vegan diet, as the chief cook in our house I am along for the ride. Based on this, I have the following (tongue in cheek) observations and helpful hints:

• Get your knives out. You are going to be chopping food until the twelfth of never! Who knew I would become so proficient at slicing, dicing, chopping and even mincing all manner of fruit and vegetables
• When recipes say “the best vegan recipe for …..” take it with a grain of salt. I have had some epic failures making recipes that say they are “the best”. And this doesn’t just apply to vegan recipes. Perhaps this is a reflection on my cooking skills? No, couldn’t be that….. I also want to give a big compliment to MVH who, despite my serving him some questionable tasting vegan meals, has NEVER said he didn’t like something I cooked for him. I think maybe he ascribes to the “happy wife, happy life” thing.

• You can learn to love (well, maybe like) lentils, despite how they look. And you will learn to tell the difference between red, green and brown lentils. Believe it or not one of our favorite meals is lentil sloppy joes. Just close your eyes when you eat it – tastes delish!
• Stock up on pasta as you will be eating A LOT of it. You will also be eating lots of beans and chickpeas. See lentils above for advice on this.
• Dinner hour will be an hour. As you can see in the picture below, the sheer quantity of food means it takes some time to eat it all! I do feel it is only fair to note here that MVH is also currently training for a half Ironman race (if COVID ever gets under control) and so he has upped the quantity of food he consumes.

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• Nutritional yeast DOES NOT taste like cheese to me, try as I might to make it so. Luckily, MVH has been able to say goodbye to cheese without a look back, so finding a good substitute for cheese flavor has not been a high priority. I, on the other hand, love cheese and would fight you for the last piece on the plate, which is probably one of the reasons why I am not vegan…..
• Peanut butter is your friend! When you’re tired of all that chopping or for a bedtime snack, a good old peanut butter sandwich can come in handy. Lately MVH has taken to jazzing up his peanut butter sandwiches by adding blueberries and/or peaches which gets him some strange looks and where peaches are concerned, often leads to quite a mess.
• Fruit is also your friend and this is where living in the Okanagan Valley comes in handy. Orchards abound, so all summer long local fresh fruit is in abundance. MVH even has a personal favorite orchardist (hello Jassar!) who constantly marvels at the quantity of fruit that he buys.

Really?

I know what you’re thinking right about now – is this guy for real, vegan and an Ironman? Well, yes he is for real and there is more – he is also a yogi and meditates daily. Here are some pics to prove it and in case you’re wondering, the little guy doing thumbs up is our grandson!

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To say I admire MVH’s commitment to a vegan diet is an understatement. I do hope to follow in his footsteps, but first I have to get over the cheese thing…..

We plan to publish a new post every Monday, so stayed tuned for our next one entitled “February is the Shortest Month”