Day 5 : Journal - Customize Your Vegan-ness

Hello there, Mosno here,
I just want to start by saying the vegan community here is Baltimore is amazing, they have a wealth of information, and they share it unconditionally.  This is beautiful,  but it can also be a problem if not used with care :)

One of the 1st things you learn when becoming a vegan for the first time, is that you will end up cooking and preparing most of your meals. I'm on day 5 right now, but from Day 1, the group email was buzzing with recipes for all sorts of delicious dishes. This is great, if your a person who cooks.

I did not cook pre-vegan pledge, so when all these recipes come flying at me, I get over whelmed. I'll be honest, it scared me a little, but I wanted to figure out a way to make it work. So I decided to customize this new life style to make it easier for me to adapt.

First thing I did, created a "label" in my gmail email, "labels" are like "folders". Any time I get a vegan recipe, I just move it into that folder.
This serves two purposes:
1. I get to accumulate some recipes for future use
2. It keeps it out of my field of vision, there for not reminding me that I can't cook, yet!

Second thing I did, started a Vegan folder in my Evernote account.
Evernote is great, its free, works on phones, tables, and their website. I use it all the time to take notes for ideas and lyrics for my music and personal life. And I have access to my notes at anytime, from any of my devices,  as long as they are connected to WiFi of course.

In this vegan folder, I started writting different notes, starting with observations and advice from the Saturday lecture/demo, to ideas of simple dishes I can make.
This is helping A LOT, you see, I was an assembler, I made sandwiches and heated things for my meals, so I started there, replacing the food choices with Vegan options to keep the process fairly similar,  for now.

The more I'm learning, the more I'm finding it comfortable to add more elements into dish ideas. Today I'm finding that my overwhelm-ness is slowly being replaced by excitement.  Simply because I shifted my thought from "having to learn to make fried chicken tofu" to instead "learning to veganize a dish I already know".

So to my new, non-cooking Vegans, take a deep breath, organize yourselves,  and start small. Take your favorite dish and use Vegan ingredients,  I believe that will make a world of difference.

Oh and have a fun Playlist or a favorite album playing in the background as you cook, it will help you un-stress, put you in a good mood,  and there for implanting the experience as a positive memory in your brain, encouraging you to do it again.
Trust me, it worked for me.
Never underestimate the power of music my peeps :)

I hope this was helpful
I'll blog you soon.

Much love,
Mosno