Time to consume

I was the type of person who told myself i don't have time to eat healthy or cook at home. I'm here to let you know you can and it's not really time consuming and think about it 10-20 extra minutes a day to make a healthy meal free from pesticides that is delicious and good for you. Making excuses never works I know I spent years doing it granted my husband does a lot of cooking as well if you think you don't have the time or money to eat better and live locally I will help you you tell me how many people you are feeding along with ages and dietary preferences or restrictions and how much you have to spend on groceries a week and how many meals plus snacks you will eat. I will send you a meal plan heck I'll come cook your meals for a whole day :) If you want to adopt a healthier lifestyle I would love to help and I know some of you are thinking but shes still fat she has no clue but this isn't about weightloss it's about eating well and not poisoning your body! if you'd like some help email me at skcrank@gmail.com or get ahold of me on facebook.com/stephaniepirtle :)

Thoughts consume the night

So as I sit here I look at the clock and it's 5 am and sleep evades me once again so here in Texas our seasons are wonky yesterday was nice and right now it's supposed to snow :( well thunder hit and i immediately made my hubby get up so we could go to our home and get the kitties yay for a walk in the rain with 2 cats who are freaking but now they are happy! :) I've been super busy getting the last edits on my boudoir photography just in times for Valentines! Through this whole process of going vegan we start to talk about giving up things for lent I have 3 options:
1) Television- It stays on from the time i wake up till its time for bed
2) Cussing- I tend to do this not too often and i've been trying to stop involuntary mishaps.
3) Bread- This by far is seeming the hardest to wrap my head around as i eat no dairy or animal products or by products meat etc... and minimum soy hardly processed but gosh darn i love my bread.

So in the true spirit of lent it should be the hardest thing you give up right? Anyways onto my wonderful meal i made today agave roasted acorn squash stuffed with brown rice with a little garlic and aminos and some french fries haha (i couldn't resist!)

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

it was pretty delicious though i will do my rice a little differently next time! 

How to deal with accidents!

Well i'm sorta new to the whole vegan thing we are going on 3 weeks haha ok so really new though i've been an off and on vegetarian for 12 years.  If you know me I hate to make mistakes it's just not a pretty side that comes out of me just not pretty, anyways while we were shopping the other day we bought what was packaged and thought to be vegan cheese :( sadly once we got it home and started eating a little of it we realized it in fact had casein :( well it's been sitting in the fridge for about a week and out of the fog of my mind today decided to make a veggie burger and just saw cheese and grabbed it I immediately felt bad once i realized what i was eating and threw away my burger ! Looking back that may have been a little rash haha because now i'm just hungry but  I saw a thing on facebook today that said to look at "perfection" as a vegan as impossible because its easy to make a mistake. Say you only make a mistake 1% of the time then look at it this way at least you are doing something right 99% of the time. That kind of calmed me down a little. The reason behind my foggy head was I took my babies Tumbles and Chewie to get spayed and neutered :( I'm not keen on doctors of any sort but we just had a litter of four sweet puppies which we kept and know that we need to do our part in helping control (i hate this word) the pet population and they both had to get rabies shots :( I wouldn't do it if it wasn't required by law or they would take them away from me. We don't vaccinate our animals and when we have children we will not vaccinate them either. Anyways that's why my heads been in a fog ive been chasing around 2 dogs who don't care they've had surgery :( Bonus my hubby made me more funnel cake cookies which im sure i just ate too much off haha!

Great stuff coming your way!

Well coming my way I guess haha. I recently went to my weight watchers meeting (I don't use this for the plan I use it to hold me accountable and they have a precise scale and i don't pay for it ) and I lost 4 more pounds! For a total of 25lbs and making a total loss of 5% of my body weight!! That was a super great day and something I noticed for all of you people ou there trying to lose weight here were my weigh ins for January:
1-10-13 lost 1 pound (this was starting just organic foods for 1 week)
1-17-13 lost 2 pounds (this was 2 weeks in on organic foods considering veganism)
1-24-13 lost 3 pounds ( 3 weeks in all organic and now vegan for 4 days)
1-31-13 lost 4 pounds ( 4 weeks organic and 11 days vegan )

So the farther I cut out processed foods and all animal products the more weight i lose and the more energy i have and better i feel. There's also something to be said about the deeper connection i feel to all animals and the earth and how clear my conscience is :). My husbands really gotten in to cooking and he made us some really delicious "pasta"

It was super delicious it consisted of his homemade tomato sauce, spaghetti squash, eggplant & lots of garlic (no vampires here!) mmm good and to spruce up our leftovers we made open face sandwiches with vegan bread and daiya mozzarella. Anyone who says that its hard to eat healthy for cheap i challenge you all we bought was 4 tomatoes $3, 1 spaghetti squash $2, 1 eggplant $2, can of tomato paste $1 and a clove of garlic $.50 (prices may vary) we've been eating on this for 4 days :) so $8.50 for 6 meals for 2 people add in a loaf of bread and a bag of "cheese" and your still under $20 so that's roughly $1.60 per person per meal so I say not bad and it's filling and so much better for you than regular pasta. We also made a rather large purchase (well for us) we bought a ninja mega kitchen system! This is a great machine my husband loves it I think he's used it every night which is awesome lots of homemade goodies :) We are in the process of trying out different recipes to open our own vegan bakery/foodtruck! wait thats supposed to be a secret but oh well  and keep a look out for my husbands creation funnel cake cookies! yummy! we also went out and ate today at thai orchid and we split the stir fry tofu with yummy beansprouts and steamed rice!

Yummy Yummy Yummy i've got love in my tummy!

So I woke up a little sick this morning but my wonderful husband made me some yummy rice :) Tofu, peas, brown rice ad braggs aminos :)

We have been having so much fun exploring foods unfortunately if your like me you grew up eating pure crap you cringe at the thought of "weird vegetables" haha it's a long journey to revamp your tastebuds but you get to try lots of wonderful food most for the first time. This is going to be a short post with no DIY but on Monday I will be lining out foods that people think are "weird" and others that are everyday staples :)

No Day But Today!

Wow was today fun and eventful or what ha! Well i love that DH has embraced this whole heartedly he even made lunch which was an awesome mix of a salad with kale spinach and romaine with a wonderful garlic vinagerette dressing yum and some mashed red potatoes with spinach and corn mmmm :)

 

and all vegan yay!!! also he ventured into the diy world today by making his own oat milk! I have to say it turned out awesome and i plan on making some vanilla oat milk ;) (oat milk is way better for you than soy)

I've been having a fun time explaining what being a vegan really is to people some of the comments we've gotten : "why the hell wouldn't you want to eat meat?" "so are you just some tofu loving weirdo now?" "Are you sure you're getting enough protein and other nutrients?" etc etc now i have simple answers to these questions (which I don't go around with the word vegan on my forehead broadcasting trying to "convert" people)  so question 1 why the hell wouldn't I want to eat meat? because I love animals all animals no matter what size and do not wish to harm them and yes hunting is murder :) onto question number 2 So are you just some tofu loving weirdo now? why yes I do love tofu it's delicious and I was weird long before becoming vegan :) and question no 3. are you sure you're getting enough protein and other nutrients? (rant time) First of all if you really cared about how many nutrients and protein I am eating you should have been more concerned when I was eating fast food everyday with not a vegetable in sight while I was slowly killing myself with toxic foods not now that i've adopted a super healthy lifestyle :) and yes I am getting all my nutrients :) haha sorry bout that last one but the more i open up to people about things the more jeers, sneers, criticism and questions I get so i'm going to host a dinner party and not tell anyone that everything is 100% vegan until the meal is finished and hopefully they enjoy it! and here is our DIY of the day Oat milk!!

Homemade Oat Milk

Needed Materials:

Oat Groats ( we use the bag yourself organic from our supermarket)

water

bowl or jars

strainer (we used cheescloth this time but can use anything really)

blender

Ok so you start out by soaking your oats in water we did it overnight you can leave it as long as you want though 

now when they've been soaking for at least 6 hours you can empty bowl into your blender and blend for several seconds or until blended 

and strain it yay your done other than finding a container to store it in we are using an old martinellis apple juice bottle but you can use whatever you want to :)

and voila you have oat milk!! It ias rather tasty and a great alternative to cows milk or soy milk :) and I promise next time i'll give the recipe for homemade shampoo :)

Baby steps

How do you tell someone your the big V word no not a virgin but a Vegan? This is the question my husband and I have been asking ourselves and seeking online for also how do we answer the question as to why we are and what sparked our change. Well first off i've been an on again off again vegetarian since i was in high school always for ethical reasons but i always approached it the wrong way eating a lot of processed junk. My husband on the other hand was a hardcore meat eater the redder the better. 2013 is our year of enlightenment our journey to veganism started at the beginning of the month we cut out all extremely processed foods and switched to only grass fed free range organic everything lucky for us this was not our stopping point! I had told my hubby that i wanted to stop eating meat because for one i felt like crap just awful and weighed down after i ate it (which I thought wasn't a good thing) and two because i look into the face of my babies (which are my 2 dogs and their 4 puppies and my 2 kitties) and think i couldn't do it I wouldn't eat them so I don't feel like I could eat anything with a sweet face. Although we are far from perfect   vegans as we have just began it's super exciting to see my hubby embrace this so openly (he is loving all the cooking and i'm not complaining!) as we speak he's cooking us some potatoes :) Wanna know a good way to start your decision on whether or not to try veganism watch the documentary Vegucated. So as of now when posed the question why on earth would you want to be a vegan? My response shall be this because since i've adopted this lifestyle I have a clearer conscience I feel better have more energy and have lost weight and a lot of my ailments are gone :) I do this for ethical as well as nutritional reasons. The purpose of this blog is to educate you as well as myself on how to live the Vegan life on a small budget doing it yourself! So you may be asking why is this called the diy vegan hippie well ask most people we know we are "hippies" we live in an old 83 rv to which we are remodeling as we speak I know this is not an ideal living  space for most people especially with animals but we love it! We did ask what ourselves i think every new vegan ask themselves when they make the decision to not buy any animal products is what do i do with all of my things i already own that have animal by products? at this moment we are working replacing these things and donating the rest :) onto my first diy project baking! Here's a picture of what I made tonight!

MMMMMMMMM Banana nut bread!

So I was apprehensive about baking because i was taught to bake  with severely processed junk so the task seemed daunting but once I started I ended up making 2 batches it was so freaking easy I love it! My husband also raved about it says besides his moms this is the best banana nut bread he's ever had :) So here's the recipe  

Banana Nut Bread (Vegan)

1.5 cup flour (I used arrowhead mills organic)

1 cup of sugar (i used full circle organic cane sugar) (which I would not recommend because of it being processed in  place that also processes dairy)

3 very ripe bananas

1 tbs vanilla extract (full circle organic)

1 tsp salt (organic)

egg replacer for 2 eggs ( i used applesauce 1/4 cup= 1 egg)

1 tsp of baking soda (bobs red mill pure)

1/2 cup of melted vegan butter (we use soy free earth balance)

(this recipe was found on vegweb.com)

Mix all ingredients with blender add nuts if desired and preheat oven to 325 F grease whatever kind of pan you want to bake it in and coat with nonstick coating (i just use more butter) bake for around 40 minutes (may take longer depending on oven and type of bake ware. the results are 5 out of 5 MMMMMs!

The best thing about this wonderful bread is people want you to share so I am I posted on my Facebook saying i'd bring some to whoever wanted to try it and 8 people said yes! so that's 8 people who will taste cruelty free food and that makes me feel really good! stayed tuned in my next entry i'll be talking about where we get our food and how to make cruelty free natural organic shampoo and conditioner!