La Vida (Almost) Vegana

I've had to supplement my vegan diet with a few non-vegan foods in order to combat my bone issues (thank you, osteoarthritis, for adding new problems atop the old.) I also have moderate atherosclerosis, so I can't take calcium supplements. Instead I drink two 16 oz. glasses of fat-free milk every day. This gives me 1200 mg of calcium that my body is more likely to add to my bones rather than my already clogged blood vessels. I have to take pills to help me digest the lactose in the milk, of which I'm intolerant, but that's been an issue since childhood.

Sadly drinking milk is not a treat -- I've hated the smell and the taste of it since I was a kid. Basically I hold my nose and drink it as fast as I can, like cough syrup. The things we do for the body in old age.

Aside from the fat-free milk, I still avoid all dairy and egg products products, or use vegan alternatives. Here are three I've found that are actually very good, and hardly different from the real deal.

I love bagels, and Thomas's has some varieties that are vegan, like their whole wheat. Not having cream cheese to put on top of my bagels, however, was a pain until I started testing some of vegan alternatives. Daiya had one that was okay, but Kite Hill is better -- and tastes almost exactly like the real deal.

Most vegan cheese alternatives aren't all that great, and they can be expensive, so I don't invest in them very often. When I make homemade pizza, however, I use Violife mozzarella shreds to top my slices. They have a different texture, but they do taste just like the real cheese.

Not being able to use mayo to make my favorite homemade salad dressing limited me to using vinaigrette, until I discovered Vegenaise. It is exactly like real mayo in taste and consistency.

Comments

nightsmusic said…

You know I'm not vegan, but I am lactose intolerant thanks to aging. I drink Fairlife milk. When I first tasted it, I thought it was so much more refreshing than other milk I'd tried. Turns out, it has 50% less sugar than other milk and it's lactose free which they weren't capitalizing on when I first started drinking it. I like it for those reasons, but it just tastes good. They have a 2% chocolate that's amazingly tasty cold and makes great hot chocolate too. Just putting that out there.

I can't take calcium either, but it's because my calcium levels have always been high so other than a little milk on my cereal and the occasional hot chocolate, I try to avoid it when possible.

February 17, 2020 at 7:12 AM

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to...

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

Valerean

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