New Year, New Beginnings

When I first started blogging, my goal was to share my experience and recipes (failures and triumphs) making healthy meals and snacks for me and my family.  I was a first time parent trying to filter through all the chaos and garbage of food misinformation in efforts to find healthy homemade choices that worked for my family.  I wanted to involve my son in cooking.  My recipes leaned toward a more vegan or vegetarian based recipes, as my son wanted to sample as we cooked, and I wanted to insure it was safe for him to do so.  But, we still ate meat, dairy, eggs and fish.  Back then I prided myself on moderation and not categorizing myself or my family into a specific "diet".  It was not unheard of us to have a whole week of vegetarian dinners, we ate tofu once a week, and I was constantly experimenting with vegan dishes.  However, we had weekends of bacon, quiche, scrambled eggs, and buttermilk waffles and many dinners of hamburgers, roasted chicken, and pork.  But after my daughter had a terrible reaction to dairy and eggs my family decided that we would eliminate it from our household.  The change of events that erupted from this choice still astound me.  My mom suggested I watch a documentary on Netflix, What The Health, so I watched it....now granted, I've seen A LOT of "health" documentaries, but none of them had ever put the kind of fire in me to instigate change like this one did.  I'm not sure if my daughter's dairy and egg reaction made me more hypersensitive, but nonetheless I knew we had to change our diet!  I spoke to my husband and he was totally on board - we were going to become vegans!

OK, OK, maybe I should be more specific, our goal is to eat a 100% plant base diet, but in the beginning we will strive to be 95% plant base and 5% animal protein.  Initial goal is to remove all animal products from house.  If we decide to consume any animal protein it will be outside of the home.

I contacted my doctor and my children's doctor to let them know of our diet change and to see if we should supplement or if they had any concerns.  Our pediatrician was totally on board and gave me a wealth of information and support!

So let our vegan journey began....

New beginnings, virgin dutch oven!