Category Archives: food

All Its Use

When I went vegetarian in 1993, I understood that I would be responsible for cooking pretty much all my food after that point, since my parents rarely cooked a fully-vegetarian meal. I’d done some cooking before then, and I enjoyed it — I grew up watching PBS cooking shows on Saturday afternoons — but the routine of doing so much cooking was definitely more of a challenge than the infrequent meals I’d been cooking for myself up to that point. All these years later, I’m…

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Taste Memory

Becoming a vegetarian in your teenage years can leave you with complicated memories of previous Thanksgivings. I was never much of a fan of turkey meat when I was an omnivore, but I’ve always been big on mashed potatoes, and given Mom’s predilection for sneaking some of our favourite foods into every holiday dinner, I was still able to enjoy a lot of the food at Thanksgiving dinners after I went vegetarian. (Dealing with family members outside of Mom, though, was another matter entirely.) Even…

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Lost Jars

I finally dropped below 200 pounds early in 2001, the first time I’d weighed that much since middle school. The “Week From Hell” kind of put an end to that, as the stress of everything after the house fire (and me going back to college about six weeks after that) made me forget about the healthier eating I’d been doing. I got back below 200 again a couple of years later, but then my senior year of undergraduate kicked my tail good, and even though…

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Holiday Pain

As wonderful as Mom was, she wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. She made chili every few weeks, and I never did like it, to the point where I wound up staying away from vegetarian chili recipes for most of my life. After I got here to Wisconsin, though, I knew that I needed to start making good warm-me-up meals I could take to campus with me for lunch and heat up in the microwave, so I bit the bullet and tried making…

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Klatsch Klutz

It wasn’t exactly like coffeehouses were invented in the nineties, but that might have been their modern heyday. The fictional coffeehouse that was central to a certain NBC sitcom may be the most iconic of its era, but in the middle part of the decade, back when independent stores and media were thriving, the coffeehouses that popped up around the Toledo area were lovely, and even though my hopes of becoming more social by sitting around drinking coffee there never really materialized, I still have…

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