Gosh it has been a while. A lot has changed since I was last on here. The biggest has been my family’s decision to give up the 100% vegan lifestyle. We have also expanded our home grown life. We have celebrated our kiddo completing a very successful Jr. high school career. Needless to say, with all the changes, my blog content is going to change as well.
Giving up the vegan life. We really enjoyed many of the benefits from the Whole foods, plant-based diet. The weight loss, the energy, loved it. But trying to be vegan when all your friends and pretty much all of your family are still omnivores really started to get difficult and was a lot of work. All the hoops to try to plan around us or us plan around them. We were losing the communal love that comes around the kitchen. The need for specialty items, the cost of gas to drive to the different stores, the cost of those items, the time spent planning and prepping. I was spending so much time hunting for recipes, creating menus and shopping lists and prepping all the meals. I was feeling trapped in the house. I don’t want to spend my life in the kitchen. I don’t even want to spend my life in the house. I am a fresh air and sunshine kind of girl who was becoming stir crazy being in the house so much. So back to omnivore it is for us. We have a few vegan favorites that will remain in our regular repertoire and the Hubs and I agree that we should keep a regular rotation in our diet of meat, veggie and vegan meals. We are also big fans of almond milk over dairy milk so we won’t be going back to dairy milk unless needed for a recipe, but not for drinking or cereal. We also are striving to stay away from processed foods as much as possible, but the Kiddo loves ham sandwiches for her lunch and sometimes a box of rice mix on a busy weeknight is the easiest and fastest way to get it done.
Going right in line with not eating processed foods, we have added chicken keeping to our lives. We’ve built a lovely coop/run, are raising 2 chicks we purchased from a hatchery when they were about 1 week old and purchased six 7 month old laying hens from a FB friend. Read about the construction of their home here http://wp.me/p26uu9-1x
Cluck & Hoe 