Cutting high-fructose corn syrup or the quest for ketchup

Bob and I aren’t health nuts. Not really. We like kale. We love vegetables. Except celery. I hate celery. We like nutritional yeast and couscous and soyrizo is pretty darn awesome. But we also consume enough cupcakes for six people on an almost weekly basis.

I’m going to interrupt myself here because I have the new cat on my lap as I type and it’s causing typos. I apologize in advance. But here’s a picture of him, which will explain why I can’t make him get down.

Rory Stormageddon is hard to say no to.

Back to ketchup. Bob and I do try to eat healthy but we try not to go nuts. And you know I still eat cheese.

A few months ago I started thinking about cutting high-fructose corn syrup out of my diet. I’m pretty sure I had no idea what HFCS was until I took a trip to Spain in 2009. I drank my first Coke in probably 5 years while I was there. I remember thinking it tasted different — it tasted good to me for the first time in years. I don’t remember who I was talking to but one of the people I was hanging out with in Santiago, Spain, told me he loved soda in Europe because it’s made with sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. Two weeks later — and a lot of Spanish Coca-Colas — I sat down to research HFCS. My understanding of why it’s bad is … simplistic. It’s a byproduct of corn processing, it’s been found to cause cancer in mice and it seems to be part of the obesity problem in this country. And it’s used as a pesticide in other countries. But you know, the FDA says it’s food.

Lucky for me when I floated cutting yet something else from our diet, Bob was all for it.

He had to give up Oreos, which were pretty much the only grocery store cookies he could eat. I gave up my favorite salad dressing and Hostess Zingers. I was pretty excited that we only had to throw out a few bottles of salad dressing and some barbecue sauce.

And then we ran out of ketchup. Bob has this crazy awesome black-bean burger recipe that we like to make with waffle fries. I found pickles without HFCS (Nalley pickles in general are safe. Vlassic and Steinfeld, which were what I used to buy, both have it). And even off-brand yellow mustard is safe. I’d gotten in the habit of reading labels so I grabbed the same ketchup I’d bought for years and looked at the label. Yep, high-fructose corn syrup — as the second ingredient! Why does ketchup need that much sweetener? I’m not even sure why ketchup has sugar.

The added complication is of course that not all sugar is vegan. I read the label on every bottle of ketchup at both Fred Meyer and WinCo, along with whatever stores I happened to be in during the next few weeks. The only thing I came up with was a bottle of prohibitively expensive sugar-free ketchup. We resigned ourselves to ketchup with sugar. Organic sugar is vegan so I started looking for organic ketchup. Heinz makes one but it doesn’t come in large bottles — and we go through a lot of ketchup.

Yes, we bought three bottles. Like I said, we go through a lot of ketchup.

Thank god for Trader Joe’s: Organic ketchup for $2 for a regular-sized bottle.

Organic sugar is vegan.

Being vegan can be hard on Bob — and me by proxy — in Vancouver. And we were adding this extra complication by cutting something from our diets that is in something like 35 percent of food on grocery store shelves. But we found pickles, cookies, salad dressing and ketchup. And maybe it doesn’t make a difference in the grander scheme but I feel healthier not ingesting this weird chemical byproduct that I don’t quite understand how it’s made. I understand tomatoes. I understand pasta and beer and eggplant. I even understand vegan whoopie pies from Dovetail Bakery.

Like I said Bob and I aren’t health nuts. But we do spend a fair amount of time talking about food and planning meals and trying not to be statistics. I’m not saying it’s easy — I spent three weeks on ketchup — but for us, it’s working.

Post-wedding euphoria

I guess I should change the name of the blog to I Married a Vegan but since we still live together, we’ll call it good.

I’m married! Yea!

I don’t have to plan any more weddings! Yea!

Back to real life (yea?), which means spending some quality time with my much-neglected blog.

In all seriousness, our wedding was wonderful. Friends, family, a best man in a vest with no sleeves — don’t ask — and an amazing vegan reception dinner which I am told was very good but don’t actually remember eating. Hoda’s Middle Eastern Cuisine offers a vegetarian menu that is 90 percent vegan and the food is amazing. Mujadra, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, grilled vegetables with tahini, stuffed eggplant: The menu goes on and on.

In a guest list of 23, including Bob and I, we had a celiac, a dairy allergy, my dad who can’t eat hot food, spicy food, aged cheese, caffeine, chocolate or much fat, five vegans, my sister who can’t have gluten, anything from the cabbage family or dairy and my mom, who has to have her gallbladder out and couldn’t eat any animal products.

And yet — everyone was able to have a great meal at our reception. It was phenomenal. Hoda has kebabs and whatnot but skipping meat there doesn’t make you feel like you’ve missed anything.

Mother of the Bride

I’d been worried about my mom before the wedding day. She was diagnosed with gallbladder problems about two weeks before the wedding. I had my gallbladder out in 2001, and it was a horrible experience. Pain for months before diagnosis and then trying to eat on an extremely restricted diet until surgery was something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I lost 30-plus pounds in six weeks.

It was not a good look on me.

Once the doctor diagnoses the gallbladder issue, they tell you to lay off fats. In simple terms — because I am a copy editor not a doctor — the gallbladder processes cholesterol. Cholesterol comes from animal products. If your gallbladder doesn’t work and you take in cholesterol, you end up laying on the bathroom floor feeling like you want to die. For both mom and I, eliminating that pain meant no animal products of any kind. In 2001, living in Albany, Ore., I was down to eating Subway vegetarian sandwiches daily. I’ve never been much of a cook and it got even harder when the three basic meals I lived on — burritos, grilled cheese and chicken parm — were completely off the table.

That was then.

A few days after my mom was diagnosed, Bob and I took her a vegan care package: kale, Tofurkey kielbasa, soy yogurt, mushrooms, nutritional yeast and vegan cupcakes. (The best prices on Tofurkey are at Trader Joe’s and Chuck’s Produce and Street Market. New Seasons has the largest selection of soy yogurt that I’ve seen pretty much anywhere.).

And after finding a few more things to eat — she’d already started on Boca Burgers and quinoa — her spirits lifted. I know she to have been to be thinking about how miserable I’d was before I had surgery — how sick and pathetic and tired all the time because I had no idea how to get protein without eating meat.

When the wedding day rolled around, Mom wasn’t 100 percent, but she wasn’t hampered by the dietary restrictions. She had energy and was pain free. She glowed, she was so happy for Bob and I. She remembers dinner better than I do and said it was amazing — including the vegan cupcakes. (Sweet Pea Bakery, how I love thee.)

Once she has surgery, she’ll be back to eating her regular diet. But she already told me she’s found some of recipes she wants to try, vegan or not. And she likes some of the stuff she’s already eaten. But she also wants fish and chips for her birthday dinner in October. So, not really a convert. But that’s OK.

Still, there are kale chips on the counter whenever I come over now. Score.

Adventures in baking

I’ve always been more of a baker than a cook. Before Bob and I moved in together, I survived on grilled cheese and salad most nights, but it wasn’t that strange for me to get the urge to bake chocolate …

I still love cheese

Being sick is wretched. I was all gung-ho to be writing again and have a list of topics I want to blog about but when my nose is runny and I have to eat crackers constantly (Wheat Thins are vegan, by the way) to keep from feeling nauseated, writing about food is less than appetizing.

But I’m no longer on a strict diet of grilled cheese and hot tea so it’s back to blogging. Or as I like to call it, semi self-indulgent rambling.

Anyway.

So, way back when Bob and I started dating — or, as most people call it, September — he offered to cook for me. Lucky girl that I am. For our second or third date, he pulled out an amazing recipe for Edamame pesto with mushrooms and red onion from the Post Punk Kitchen website. I’d never heard of it before but I’m not sure I can say enough good things about this site. Isa Chandra Moskowitz is pretty freaking amazing. She’s also the author or co-author of several vegan cookbooks — we have ‘The Veganomicon” and “Vegan with a Vengeance.” I both do and do not want the cupcake book. The recipes look amazing; I may not looking quite so amazing after partaking of them.

We’ve tried quite a few recipes from the site: Scalloped Potatoes with Eggplant Bacon, the edamame pesto, Homemade Seitan, Marbled Banana Bread and Peanut Butter Blondies. And Bob was lusting after the Pesto Risotto with Roasted Zucchini. I have a feeling we may make that next week.

So here’s my advice to anyone who wants to eat vegan — and not end up with tasteless, dry food. Find a good vegan cookbook and follow the recipes to the letter — at least the first time. Unless you have much more experience in the kitchen than I, trying to covert a traditional recipe to vegan — especially when baking — is well, a recipe for disaster. Rice milk and almond milk may be interchangeable in a recipe or they may not and you could end up with soup instead of cookies.

The recipes from PPK don’t just take out the cheese and meat and leave you with a tasteless, boring dish of steamed vegetables and rice. Not that there’s anything wrong with steamed vegetables and rice, I’m a fan of both. But it’s not exactly Friday night nachos now is it? Oh, we made nachos last week, they were pretty epic.

Eating vegan food can still be decadent and delicious and awesome. The blondies are a favorite cookie and are definitely decadent. They still have fat and flavor and will want to make you eat an entire pan in one sitting — which is my measure of a good dessert.

It takes practice and some crazy awesome recipes but not relying on meat and cheese for flavor opens up a huge world of food that is quite amazing.

I still love cheese. But the more Bob and I experiment with lentils and tofu and mushrooms and spices that I could only spell before our kitchen adventures, the more grateful I am that he is vegan. Food is something we do together and we’ve learned lots of new things to do with garbanzo beans and that I don’t like stewed eggplant and that cooking with the dog underfoot is a challenge.

There is so much food out there. So here’s to the next adventure.

He said yes!

Bob was vegan before we started dating. And he makes amazing baked tofu.

So it turns out that not only do I live with a vegan, I’m also marrying one. Bob the vegan and I will be married Sept. 9, 2012, in Portland, Ore.

Squeeeee!!!!

OK, now that’s out of the way.

I’m not vegan. I’m not even vegetarian but I’ve found myself surrounded by people in most facets of my life that made a choice, either because of ethical or dietary reasons — or some combination of the two — to eschew animal products. And in November 2011, my vegan and I moved in together. I’ll be honest, I had no idea how it was going to work.

Having many vegan friends, I knew about a lot of the good vegan restaurants in the Northwest (more about those in a future post) and I never had a problem eating at any of them. But I also went out for hamburgers and sausage and pepperoni pizza on a regular basis with non-vegans.

So now there’s tofu in the fridge and home-cooked vegan meals waiting for me when I get home from work. And while I still love to have cheese pizza after belly dance class, I find for the most part I don’t really miss the cheese or the meat most days.

But because I get asked so often how I deal with living with a vegan, I eventually came up with the idea to start this blog. My hope is to chronicle some of the highs and lows of eating — or trying to eat — vegan in the Vancouver-Portland area. I want to share some of the best recipes and hardest parts of being vegan. I’m hoping to at least not bore the pants off anyone. Even if the only person who reads this blog is my mom.

Hi mom!