Day 15: Back home from a (not quite) vegan vacation

I’ve been crazy busy with traveling and work the last couple of days, which is why you haven’t heard from me.

Being vegan at home was challenging, but also interesting. My sister made a lovely vegan cherry cake for me, that was great! Danke nochmal! 🙂 A similar recipe can be found here .

This isn’t it (camera broken still), but it tasted as great as that one looks. Image taken from here .

My mum, on the other hand, seemed to have a bit of a harder time understanding.
I told her that I am vegan at the moment and tried to explain what that implied, and the food I won’t eat. After some negotiation about lunch (she really wanted to make something for me, as in the good old times), we decided to just have some vegetables, spinach and potatoes. Sounded good to me. We agreed that she’d cook dinner, while I unpack, do some laundry, have a shower.
When I was done, I quickly sneaked into the kitchen to see how dinner was doing. On the kitchen counter, right next to the oven, I saw an open pack of butter. For a second, I thought about speaking up, complaining. But no – I didn’t say anything. When I came back to eat, the butter was gone. I think that in this situation, it is better to overlook the incident. The only thing I could have done, anyway, is to not eat any of the dinner – but since she was cooking purely for me, that surely isn’t a good idea. I don’t see my family all that often any more, so I think there is no point in having a fight about a little butter. Do challenge my point though, fellow vegans: what would you have done in the situation?

Lastly, my cookbook should arrive today – Yay! Hopefully, I shall be able to start cooking again soon (The last couple of days I’ve just been living off the AMAZING German bread I brought from home. Nom nom nom… No better thing. Truly the only food I have been missing since leaving Germany.)

Day 9: Failure.

Today really hasn’t been the most succesful vegan day. In fact, I have failed my veganism on several occasions.

Failure #1: Firstly, I realized that during all this time I’ve been attempting to go vegan, I was happily walking around in my leather boots. Sigh. I love my leather boots, but shouldn’t I make this sacrifice as well? Clearly, to call oneself a vegan – even just for this limited period of time – one shouldn’t be wearing leather. Luckily, the weather is clearing up and becoming warmer, so it should be easy to get some new spring shoes anyway.

Failure #2: I have had bad headaches the last couple of days since I haven’t slept so much and had loads of work to do. So against the headaches, I have been taking an Ibuprofen occasionally. Well, guess what I realized today as I was mindlessly ‘popping the pill’? Yes. Exactly. Not only are they of course tested on animals, they also contain some animal sideproducts.
Edit: Nevermind. Only the gelatine-covered ones contain, obviously, gelatine. So I’m good at least for this one.. (apart from the animal testing).

Failure #3: One of my last guilty pleasures, since I had to give up vending machine chocolate, were potato crisps that I had, after checking a couple of packets, found to be vegan. So, I went my way to a vending machine to get some crisps to cheer me up. Halfway through the pack I look at the ingredients list, just out of routine. And what do I see? Contains: Milk Lactose. Great. Just great. End up chucking the other half of the pack. Meh.

Lastly, I’ll be flying home in a few hours. I used to love to stuff myself with expensive airport fast food to help the frustration I usually get at all the people, all the waiting around, just traveling in general. Now instead, since I didn’t bother packing food, I’ll probably be munching on a salad. Sigh.