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I have always strived to eat as healthy as possible and to incorporate more vegetables into my diet. People I have known for years and people I've just met will ask if I'm a vegetarian. I get made fun of (often) for eating the way I do...and this is before I stopped eating meat and dairy. 

So, in January 2017 after the decadence of the holidays and its lingering leftovers, my body was telling me that I was in need of a cleanse or detox or something. I talked my husband into a "veggie week" where we cut out meat and dairy while eating as vegetable-densely as possible. By the end of the first day, I hadn't eaten any sugar either (which is my biggest vice!) so I decided to cut that I too. A week passed, my husband was happy to eat normal food again, but my body was loving this new way of eating. So, I just kept going and my excuse-piece "I'm not eating meat, dairy, or sugar right now" morphed into "Oh, I don't eat meat, dairy, or sugar."

The most surprising things were that it wasn't a chore to be eating this way and that my body wasn't craving or feeling like it was missing anything important. People would ask if I missed eating anything or exclaim that they could never stop eating steak or cheese or sugar. You know what? I never thought I could stop eating those things either. Nor did I think that I would ever want to!

Here's where things get tricky. Yes, I'm eating differently than most of the people around me but my goal is not to evangelize and convert. (And if you know me in real life and I did make you feel like I was judging you when I first started eating this way, I'm truly sorry. I just got a little excited about how it was working for me.) This is just what I'm doing and I'm loving it. Coming up with new things to cook and new ways to get nutrition excites me. We should all be eating more plants and this is just my next step into living a more enjoyable life.

That being said, my cooking and recipe style here is plant-based, clean, minimalistic using mostly one-item, whole food ingredients (such as produce, grains, beans, etc.) and a little cooking, baking, or steaming as needed. I tend to stay away from oil and frying foods as much as I can, but am not against it. I will talk a lot about my switch to a plant-based diet and emphasize nutrition, but I also don't want to alienate people who eat meat and dairy. I'm here not to emphasize what you shouldn’t eat, but what you can be eating and how delicious it is.

Lastly, you won't see any advertisements on my page. I find plugging products to be obnoxious, insincere, and distracting (both physically and mentally) from the actual content of a blog. Plus, I don't like being sold to either. Advertising makes us want things we don't need and empowers those that are already too powerful in our society. If I do mention a product by name or brand, it's because I really like the product and it's probably a local company. I will be mentioning a lot of farms and local companies when I use their produce or foodstuffs in my cooking, not just because I may know them from the local farmers markets but because their foods are fresh, handmade or grown, and of the most fantastic quality. 

Thanks for stopping by.