The Lazy Vegetarian: Giving Thanks for Tempeh

Tonight's post isn't about our house, so feel free to stop reading if it's reno you're after.  But it is about one of the reasons we were able to get out of debt and save for our first house, so I guess it's sort of blog-appropriate if you squint.

When we moved to Oregon we'd been living on credit for a long time-- between graduate school and the high cost of living in New Haven and my inability to find a full-time job there (at one point I was working three retail jobs and teaching part-time at both a prep school and a university, but no matter how many jobs I got there was never enough money to go around)-- and we had a fair bit o' debt to pay down.  We'd opened a savings account for the wedding-gift money we'd received and we were so happy to have a little nest egg; we were absolutely crushed when we had to clean out the account to pay for our cross-country move.  We felt like we'd never be able to buy a house-- much less that we'd do it exactly one year after we arrived in Oregon-- so this November we're very thankful for our quirky little old home with all its water damage and weird plumbing and backless cabinets and hole-y wood paneling.  

But as I mentioned in my first post ever, we made a lot of sacrifices to get here, and some of them have turned out to be unexpectedly rewarding.  

Last October we sat down with our first paychecks and made a budget: this much to the debt, this much to the savings account, this much to the bills, and so on.  I realized when I made my first trip to the grocery store that my food-shopping habits were going to have to change.  I'd always planned my meals for the week (one dinner = one meat, one starch, one vegetable) and shopped judiciously according to my list, and I've never been one to spend money on a bunch of processed foods, but my first week of groceries ate up nearly half of the monthly food budget we'd set for ourselves.  Something had to give, and so I cut out the most consistently expensive thing I bought: meat.  

I didn't intend to become a vegetarian, and really, I'm still not one; I order meat occasionally in restaurants and if I come over to your house for dinner and you fix me a steak, I'll eat it and enjoy every bite.  But I no longer buy meat or cook it, and it's changed my life for the better in a lot of ways.  Without further ado (and there's been a lot of ado here already, sorry), I present to you a list of reasons why I'm thankful for my reduced-meat lifestyle:

1.  STRESS, OR LACK THEREOF:

I've thoroughly enjoyed cooking ever since I learned to do it in graduate school, and I do it every night.  There's something deeply satisfying about mincing onions (okay, mincing in general-- I even like the word), watching your roux get all golden and bubbly, grating an enormous block of good parm, smelling chopped cilantro, etc etc.  But as soon as I stopped cooking meat, I realized how much I'd hated dealing with it-- did you forget to thaw the chicken for dinner tonight?  Well, now you're going to have to put it in the microwave and it's going to get all partially cooked and rubbery.  Did you trim the fat off your roast with that knife and then accidentally use it to chop some parsley for garnish?  Is that salmonella on your cutting board?  Is it okay to eat this pork loin even though it technically expired last week?  Did your lamb reach an internal temperature of 150°F?  Well, when you don't eat meat, you can feel free to use the same knife and cutting board all day long.  When your food is hot enough for your liking, it's cooked.  No worrying, no guessing, no nothing.  Phew.

2.  CREATIVITY (AN ODE TO DRIED BEANS):

As I said, dinner used to mean a meat, a starch, a vegetable.  I'd find myself wracking my brains for another good chicken recipe, another way to make pork chops, a creative use for ground beef.  Now that I don't feel I have to follow a formula, I'm free to cook whatever the hell I want.  We eat a lot of falafel.  And a ton of black beans (the poor man's meat), tofu (fry it in cornstarch-- you'll thank me), lentils (so. many. colors), etc.  Are we healthier now?  Probably not-- we consume a lot of cheese (don't tell Courtney Love).  But I've discovered the joys of versatile proteins like tempeh and tofu and polenta, with which I'd never have bothered if I'd stuck to the old rotation of chicken-pig-cow-chicken-pig-cow.     

3.  NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU'RE SORRY TO A BEAKLESS CHICKEN:

After we stopped eating meat at home, we watched Food, Inc, and I read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma".  If you're at all attached to the idea of eating meat I don't recommend either of these things.  While I feel terrible for animals and all the horrors they suffer as a result of factory farming, what really hit home with me was the squick factor.  You know when you buy a pack of chicken breasts and they're like enormous slabs of meat?  Yeah, you don't want to know how they got that big.  And I didn't want to know either.  And now I'm thankful that I don't have to wonder whether the chicken I'm eating was beakless and featherless and footless, because that. is. disgusting.

4.  THIS PILE O' BRICKS AND MORTAR:

Cooking veg saves me around $200/mo.  Vegetables and dried grains and canned beans and extra-firm tofu are really cheap and they last forever.  Nothing's ever wasted, and there's never smelly meat going bad in my fridge, and I never have to remember to thaw the main course before I cook it.  So many veg meals are superfast and easy and they taste delicious-- even my meat-loving husband doesn't complain about eating spinach lasagne and split-pea soup and mac 'n' cheese and lentil curry and paht see ew.  And that extra $2400 I saved last year meant we were $2400 closer to this, our little dream house.

So it's funny-- I remember a conversation I had with my awesome (vegetarian) sister-in-law maybe two years ago, and I distinctly recall telling her that I could NEVER live without bacon.  But now I know that less literal bacon in my belly means more metaphorical bacon in my bank account.  And for that lesson learned, I'm truly grateful.