This is sooooo good when it's warm and fresh!

My kitchen has been invaded by ants this week.  I find this most distressing.  All the time I’ve lived in this house, I have seen an occasional straggling insect.  This invasion goes way beyond that, though.  This week, I have found a tiny battalion working its way to the dogs’ food dishes.  I looked around for humane methods of convincing the little buggers that they should look elsewhere for food.  Chili powder, curry, and vinegar haven’t worked.  Combinations of all three haven’t worked.  The last time I tried the chili powder trick, I found them walking through it to get to the food dishes.  I have cleaned the dogs’ bowls, mopped the floor, emptied the trash daily and swept the kitchen floor every night hoping the stem the tide.  So far, I haven’t seen any more today.  Let’s hope that maybe they found someplace better to go.  I will admit that I squashed a few while trying to sweep them up, and I’m pretty sure a few were drowned in vinegar.  I will also admit that I felt absolutely no remorse over the casualties.  This is why I will most likely never be a member of PETA.  ☺

I had a couple of overripe bananas sitting around the kitchen, so I decided to make some banana bread.  In the interest of trying to be a tad healthier (and possibly drop the 5 or so pounds I’ve gained since becoming vegan—ick!!), I made some changes.  I used 1 ¼ cups of whole wheat flour, ½ cup of unbleached all purpose flour, applesauce instead of oil, only ½ cup of sugar (I figured it would be sweet enough with the applesauce and the really ripe bananas) and I added about ½ cup of chopped walnuts.  I shortened the baking time to just under an hour—about 50 minutes or so—because the bread was starting to look overcooked.  As it turns out, the bottom was still a little underbaked, but it’s edible and not too sweet.  The whole wheat flour made it kind of dense and it didn’t rise very much, but it’s really tasty and doesn’t taste as desserty as some of the other sweet breads I’ve made recently.

After reading Skinny Bitch (and skimming Sean’s copy of Skinny Bastard), I have been trying to cut down on my caffeine intake.  It sucks.  Not that I’m usually too crazy with it—I got myself down to 1, maybe 2 cups of coffee a day, and I don’t drink soda at all anymore—but I really should be drinking more water.  I drank a full glass of water with the banana that I ate for breakfast (trying out the suggestion of eating a piece of fruit for breakfast, wait a little while, and eat another piece of fruit if still hungry), but I still wanted something else.  So I made a cup of chai tea with Silk creamer and a packet of Truvia.  Truvia is a tricky substance for me in beverages:  one packet isn’t enough, and two packets are too much.  I hate having half-packets lying around, so I’m thinking I may just try to deal with my tea being less sweet.  Either way, I greatly enjoyed my chai with a slice of fresh banana bread.  You didn’t really think I wasn’t going to taste it the second it came out of the oven, did you?  *grin*

Tonight is Weight Watchers, and I’m not looking forward to seeing the scale.  I have been hovering in the same 5-pound range for months, and now I’ve completely overhauled my eating habits and gained a few pounds.  Ick…  I know it’s just a matter of finding the right balance, and I have been eating so much bread lately that I’m surprised that I haven’t gained more.  It’s still been kind of frustrating not getting to my goal weight yet, but I’m still working at it, still trying, and still keeping that goal in mind.  I really need to remember that just because it’s vegan doesn’t automatically mean that it’s healthy and low-calorie.  It’s still all about calories in versus calories burned, and unfortunately baking cupcakes doesn’t burn enough calories to justify eating three of them in a day.  I should probably start my running regimen again.  I’m turning into a lump…

Enough pouting!  At least I’ve been keeping up with my kitchen (granted, it’s mainly so deter the ants, but still—an accomplishment is an accomplishment!), and I’m thinking I should probably get the kids out of the house for a while today.  Maybe we’ll go to the Y and they can swim while I run laps.  It’s a perfect day for it, really.  Exercise time, everybody!  ☺

Since it was raining off and on this evening, we thought that taking the kids to the Gallery Hop downtown would be more fun than sitting in the park getting wet while waiting for fireworks to start.  They always have fun, and tonight wasn’t very crowded for the first time in ages.  Of course, the line outside Jeni’s Ice Cream was still huge even with the rain, so we skipped it.  Sad, too—I had really been looking forward to trying some of their vegan sorbet selections…  Oh, well.  Maybe next time.  ☺

For dinner, we went to Z Pizza.  They were really helpful during the ordering process, letting us know that the soy cheese they use isn’t vegan (it has casein in it—more sadness), and that there’s sugar in the pizza crust.  We got the California pizza sans cheese for the adults and a half-pepperoni, half-cheese for the kids.  What we didn’t tell the kids is that we had them use soy cheese instead of the regular.  They never even noticed the difference.  Not quite as good as all-out vegan, but it’s a step in the right direction.  And we did get to see some fireworks from the car when we were driving home.  Not too shabby a night, really.

I made a couple of new recipes today.  For lunch, I made black bean burritos with chopped onions, salsa, fresh spinach, some rice “cheese”, and green pepper strips on whole grain tortillas.  For a snack that will hopefully last the week, I made the vegan chocolate chip cookies from Skinny Bitch in the Kitch.  Sean and the kids liked them, and they’re okay, I guess, but I think I’m going to try some other recipes, too.  They were just a little crispier than I like them, even after playing with baking times and things.  Of course, the recipe called for 1¼ cup of refined coconut oil, and I didn’t have any; I used Earth Balance sticks instead.  I wonder if that could account for the overly-crispy results?  I might try it again with the coconut oil at a later date.  Sean got creative and made a chocolate-peanut butter quinoa pudding using the recipe I found here as a jumping-off point.  I haven’t tried a full serving of it yet, but what I got from the spoon was pretty tasty.

I think what I’m learning during this transition is that—well, I have a lot to learn.  There are so many things to consider that I had never really given any thought to in the past.  Just like the sugar thing tonight.  It never would have crossed my mind to be the slightest bit concerned about sugar just a few weeks ago, except from a health standpoint.  Now that I know more about the ethical ramifications that go along with sugar (namely, the use of charred animal bones to process sugar to its gleaming white state), it’s harder for me to ignore.  I feel like I’ve spent the last three weeks completely obsessed with the food that I eat, buy, and prepare, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing.  Maybe I’ve needed to pay a little more attention to what I’m putting in my body.  Maybe it’s a good thing that I’m focusing nearly as much attention on nourishment as on taste.

I will say this, though:  I am so grateful that Sean is doing this with me.  I don’t think I could stick with it if I had to go it alone!