To(fu)ronto: Who Knew?!

My friends! I've just returned from a four day getaway (visit home) to TORONTO!

Silly me... expecting the average trip home: Mamabear's yummy cooking, dinner out with my Dad, coffee with my brother, lunch at the Jewish deli with my Grandma and Great Aunt (the same one they've been going to for thirty years. One day, just for fun, we calculated how much money they must have spent there after all these years. Let's just say they could probably buy a small car. Or two), and quick catchups with whichever friends happen to be in town.

This was not 'that' weekend.

This weekend, in fact, was beyond 'that' weekend. It was magical. Colourful. Fruitful, I might even say. And that, my friends, is because this weekend will go down in history as The Weekend I Realized Toronto is a Great Vegan City! It may have taken me all of my twenty-and-a-half years to figure out, but my God was I impressed.

So, through the epic skills of my iPhone, I bring you...

Toronto the Vegan

I arrived via train late Thursday night. Mamabear, knowing that I wouldn't have eaten beforehand (she's a Mamabear... Mamabears know all), cooked up the most delicious vegan meal for me! This is where it began. It was so pretty, I had to capture it forever, so that the next time I was eating really terrible vegan food, I could gaze longingly into my phone and remember my fond memories of my Mom's ever-so-accommodating kitchen:

Brown rice with, quite possibly, the most delicious tofu I've ever had, which came from the market (details below), greens entirely from my Mom's garden, with tomatoes and mixed nuts, and sliced avodcado with a spiced oil on top. De-lic-ious. Almost too delicious...

Then, as if that wasn't enough, my Mom had a little surprise waiting for me at home. A JUICER!

'For me' is a bit of a stretch, as it, well, wasn't for me. But I kinda pretended it was for my four days at home, and definitely put it to work...

I'm not sure what it is -in fact, it very well might all be in my head- but I swear I sleep so much better after drinking a green juice before bed!

Side note: Last Monday, after working for four hours at the yoga studio, I decided to take the 90 minute class. It happened to be a particularly great class for me, and afterwards, I rode my bike up to Crudessence for a green juice. I drank it, biked home, showered, and had the best sleep I've had in SO long. SO long. I woke up feeling delightful -so refreshed and happy and smiley! It was the first green juice I've had in a while, and coming out of a weekend full of them, I have to say, it's confirmed. I'm a believer.

Next up was the Evergreen Brickworks Farmer's Market! The one with the dreamy tofu. It was gorgeous! Fragrant, bright, and full of people (and their dogs) who love food as much as I do! I had no idea this gem existed, but it's right in the city, in Toronto's incredible ravines, linking together endless walking/cycling trails.

We started the trip off with a mini hike, and met this little guy:

...Ohmygod I love turtles...

What really blew me away, aside from the many young, bright eyed, baby slinging, golden retriever owning couples who usually frequent farmers markets, was the number of YOUNG(er) people there. There were a ton of folk my age, and that was super nice to see. It reminded me that a) markets are affordable, and b) this IS our generation's cause.

If only you could see me smiling right now.

Just as I thought this place couldn't get better, the crowd parted like the red sea, and a Godly light shone through the nonexistent clouds, leading me to this:

LPK's Culinary Groove (click here to see their site!)

D'aww.. aint they cute? What was even cuter, my friends, was their mostly vegan selection of goodies for sale. I wish I had a picture to show you, but sadly, the ginger cream cookie I devoured was, well, devoured far too quickly for film to pick up. But let me tell you, it was pretty perfect.

Then it was off to The Distillery District! Another adorable area unique to T.O. Famous for their (mostly meaty) sandwich shops and (definitely dairy-filled) ice-cream shops, I was sure that my vegan weekend had come to an end. But then we peeked at the menu at Cafe Uno (Click here for their website -it's cute!), and I was, yet again, proven wrong...

Apple-beet salad, and this explosive wheatberry medley... so simple, yet so delicious. Thanks Cafe Uno.

The next day, which happened to be this morning, we started the day off right at Fresh, my all-time favourite vegan restaurant in Toronto! I had the 'Brunch Special', which offered scrambled tofu with onions and spices, grilled whole wheat pita bread, baked beans, and home fries. It was pretty great, but nothing beats lunch or dinner at Fresh. More on that another time, I'm sure.

Just when I was sure it couldn't get any better -just when I thought I had tapped all of Toronto's vegan weekend specials, I decided to spend my last afternoon before heading back to Montreal in my very favourite Toronto hangout: Kensington Market on Pedestrian Sunday.

If you haven't been, go. Enough said:

It was a lovely, vegan weekend, and to end this post on a Toronto-appropriate note, take a gander at this little piece of graffiti I noticed just as we were leaving...

Hehehe... Only in Toronto.

Dream Job...

It's summer. I'm in Montreal. I have an awesome internship, and can take all the hot yoga I want for free. I feel like a very lucky girl these days.

BUT even more so -I feel lucky because a couple weeks ago, I sent an email to someone who has my dream job,and she wrote back!

Meet Jennifer Chen, VegNews editor:

Juuuust in case you don't know me, and you've never experienced the awful(ly wonderful) squeals that come out of me when I receive a new issue (or buy one early because I just can't wait) - you should know that VegNews is my faaaavourite magazine. And Jennifer Chen writes for, and edits it. Swoon.

So I sent her a couple of questions, which she graciously answered on her own blog, which you can see here.

And she even agreed to answer a couple questions for my blog!

So here you go! An adorable peak into the life of magazine writer and young adult author Jennifer Chen:

1. When was the moment you realized/decided you wanted to write for a living?

Gosh, since I was a kid. At 16, I wrote in my journal that I wanted to be a writer, fall in love, and travel to Europe. And I'm happy I've done all three. When it was time for college, I only applied to writing schools. I think for me it's the one thing that's made sense in my life, if that makes any sense.

2. Where do you usually get your writing done? Do you have any interesting or quirky rituals you’ve developed throughout your career?

After many years when I didn't have an office, now my husband and I have an office apart from the rest of the house to get writing done. My hubby is a TV writer and comic book and graphic novel writer. So one of us is always working in the office. But before I had any of that space, just a desk in my bedroom wherever that was. The best place I ever got my writing done is an amazing women's writers residence called Hedgebrook (http://www.hedgebrook.org) where I got to spend two weeks in the woods writing in a little cabin and being fed amazing veggie meals. I encourage all women to apply there. As for interesting or quirky rituals -- probably just keeping a schedule and planning out my writing dates so I get my work done.

3. Any funny stories to share about working in an all-veg environment?

Gosh, it's been great to work somewhere where I can bring in a green juice or crazy big kale salad, and people don't look at me funny. I'd have to say we have several dogs in the office and nothing makes me laugh harder than hearing Khane, a small 10-pound Chihuahua snore like air is getting let out of a balloon while I'm trying to edit at my desk.

4. If you could only eat one vegan/vegetarian meal for the rest of your life, what would it be?

That is way too hard! Okay. Right this very minute I would have to say Patxi's vegan deep-dish pizza in San Francisco. It makes life worth living.

5. Can you tell us about a project you’re currently working on?

Outside of my job, I just finished a book proposal for a photography book I'm co-authoring, which hopefully I'll hear back about soon. I'm writing a draft of the first book in a young adult series that I've been dying to work on. I loved Sweet Valley High and Babysitters' Club so it's been my dream to write my own YA series some day so that's what I'm doing right now.
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QUICK BUDGET UPDATE: I think I'm going to make it! In case you missed it a few posts ago, I'm seeing if I can work a $100 budget for the month of June. We're 2/3 through the month, and I'm 2/3 through the budget. All I can say is that it is TOTALLY doable! Deets to come at the end of the month, when (hopefully) I've made it through without any splurges (almond butter....)!

On a serious note...

While answering a couple questions that were sent my way in the last month or so, one popped up in my inbox today (from a close friend of mine) that blew my mind. Not because it was a particularly special question -but because I had SO much to say about it. A little while back, I posted a poll asking what you'd like to see more of: interviews, baking recipes, cooking recipes, or musings about my personal life. I was pretty surprised to find out that y'all wanted to hear about my personal life...So, two birds with one stone! It's long. It ain't pretty but it's honest. And if you couldn't care less -hold tight, yummy recipes are soon to come!

WHAT'S WITH ME AND WEIGHT AND FOOD? If you've ever been curious, or heard me mumble something about weight, body image, disordered eating, or the like, look no further for an explanation. You asked for it, so here you go.

I have a complicated relationship with food.

Don’t let me fool you… I love the stuff. But it hasn’t always been that way. In fact, it used to be quite the opposite. Up until about a year ago, my mind was a bit of a battlefield, waging a constant war against myself using numbers, tracking, measurements, and rules as weapons. Every move required multiple calculations. Was I allowed to eat this? What would I have to do, or not do, if I ate that? This was the constant circle my mind spun in. As a curvier girl, this battle was a vicious circle, to say the least. The heavier I was, the more imminent I felt my restrictions had to be, and the more obsessive I became. The more obsessive I became, the less able I was to see and think clearly about what it was I really wanted. It was a catch 22, a cycle of false revelations, fuelled by a constant search for more tools, more tricks, more things to hide and commit my energy to with a religious sort of devotion. I mistook these ambitions as attempts to be healthy, which, as promised to me by the media, shallow individuals, and popular weight loss culture, insisted I could only be if I lost weight. This idea of ‘optimal health’ has led me to just about everything other than just that. The synonymous use of the words ‘health’ and ‘thinness’ led me to every diet you can imagine, a cohort of gyms and exercise regimes, the master cleanse, raw foodism, weight loss camp and, ultimately, horrendously disordered eating. This is a past that, until this point, I have opted to only share with those who knew me well enough to have figured it out for themselves. But the more I talk about it, the more I realize that I’m not the only one with these experiences, and that these stories need to be shared so that even more people know they’re not alone.

In retrospect, I have spent a great deal of my life trying to become something else. I’ve justified any dissatisfaction with my life with the idea that I shouldn’t worry because it will get better ‘when I’m skinny’, and thrown away countless experiences with this promise. I’ve dedicated hours and hours of my life planning, tracking, counting, measuring, weighing, contemplating, evaluating, and avoiding food, only to soon find myself eating everything in sight to soothe the anxiety that my rigid routines had given me. I have stuck fingers down my throat, gone days on only salad and tea, and felt, quite simply, disgusting, for long stretches of my life. I became a firm believe that it only mattered that I seemed like a ‘together’ person on the outside, regardless of whatever incorrigible thoughts and ideas were marinating in my head at the time. But the truth was, no matter what good news or opportunities came my way, it always boiled down to my weight in my head. I can’t do this unless I lose 15 pounds by this date…no matter how much this person says they love me I know they secretly think they are settling/are only being nice out of sympathy…

Things started to really change for me about a year ago. After at least ten years of this insanity (I put myself on my first official ‘diet’ at nine years old, though I’m sure these thoughts came long before that) I began to understand just how deeply these destructive thoughts and behaviours had penetrated my life. Weight loss hadn’t happened. I had fought and screamed, cried and begged, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t seem to do it healthily. I couldn’t lose weight, it seemed, without losing my mind along with it. I was miserable. I needed a break. I needed to exhale, and see what was left in my head when it wasn’t churning out a constant new stream of reasoning, justification, and self-defensive, self-convincing, self-hating, over-compensating obsessive thoughts about my weight.

I did everything I could to stop my brain in its tracks, and decided that this was it. Not the sort of ‘this was it’ that was followed by a new, stricter, more aggressive attack on my body. This was the sort of ‘it’ that required a complete submission to who I was in that moment, a willingness to spend a little time not wasting the person I was (whoever that was) by trying to be the person I thought I should be. I was sick of measuring my life in calories in and calories out. Since I had been mostly unsuccessful at actually losing weight, despite the extreme emotional investment I had put into the endeavour, I figured I could take a bit of time off of dieting without missing some grand opportunity to lose weight and finally become my true, perfect self. So I decided to see what would happen if I existed without the only purpose I had ever given myself: to lose weight.

My mind fought me so intensely I was almost impressed with my own deeply rooted, highly developed dieting mentality. At first, it was as though my mind was subconsciously still functioning in its usual disordered way. Even after my first day of not tracking what I ate in, well, years –I still went to bed that night only to find the number of calories I had eaten for dinner floating innocently in the back of my mind. I could have sworn I wasn’t counting! It quickly became clear just how serious this was. It’s hard to see out of the fishbowl when that’s the only world you’ve ever known. Regardless of not dieting, my weight stayed the same, and I slowly began to put two and two together about how and why I became so obsessed with weight loss and food monitoring. There are moments I think back to that still terrify me –moments when I felt so out of control, so beaten down by my own mind, I actually felt frightened for (and of) myself. I still have yet to really make sense of how it got to be so bad. But after about a year of letting myself just be, I finally began to see clearly. I started to distinguish between the things I enjoyed, and the things I had convinced myself to enjoy because they acted as a disguise for my real interest: weight loss. I had to fill in the blanks, and that meant, well, a whole lot of soul-searching.

The first time I visited home after reaching these revelations, I made the storage room in our basement my very first stop, where I found boxes upon boxes of my old journals. I spent the entire night ripping out every single page where I had recorded some new plan, or tracked what I had eaten, or cried over how weak I was and how much I hated myself for what I was doing. I ripped out all the pages, tore them up into little shreds, and –I kid you not- jumped up and down on top of them, separating the words from each other beneath my feet, and picturing the meaning I attributed to them sinking so far down into earth, getting stuck forever within the cracks below me. When I got back to Montreal, I tried to throw out my scale (something that had always seemed like some romantic, fantastical impossibility), but was stopped by my then-roommate, who wanted to know if she could have it. My first inclination, of course, was to scream “NO! YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’D BE GETTING YOURSELF INTO!” and break it in two with my bare hands in order to save us both –but whether or not my ex-roommate had a healthy relationship with her weight/mind/body/self was not going to depend on a scale. I had learned that it was a much bigger issue than merely weight alone.

So where am I now? Well, I still have to correct my thoughts when they go astray. And some days are really, really tough when I don’t have my weight to blame for everything wrong in my life. But the way I feel about myself today is astronomically, beautifully, stupendously improved from the way I once felt about myself. There is no achievement that would be worth what I put myself through, and I wouldn’t wish that much self-hatred on anyone. Today I do yoga. I meditate. I am continually learning that ruminating about the past and planning compulsively into the future does terrible things to who you are in the moment you actually exist in. Where I used to want to change myself, now I just want to be kind to myself and allow myself to enjoy my life. This blog helps me to do that. It lets me look at food with love and creativity, as opposed to guilt and compulsion. And it allows me do so in a way that promotes the compassionate food choices I have always made, while also reminding me of the importance of seeing myself as yet another receiver of my own awareness and compassion.

Summer time, and the livin' is cheaply

It’s DONE! The Good, the Bad, and the Eggless it is! I love it! Thank you to everyone who voted, and a huge huge huge shout out and thank you to Nikki Shaffeeullah, punner-extraordinaire for her suggestion –and to everyone else who sent in ideas. THANK YOU! It really means a lot to me to have received so many wonderful options.

Now, back to business. Although it’s hard to imagine from within this debilitating pre-storm heat that has completely overtaken my deep and dreamy love for Montreal… I was freezing cold the other night, and decided to heat things up with a bit of spice.

If you didn’t already know, I am in a deeply committed relationship with quinoa. Quinoa, I am convinced, is the ultimate gluten free super-food. It’s super high in protein and super high in fiber... it's pretty much just super. Plus, it can easily replace rice, couscous, noodles, etc. It’s healthy and delicious, and if I'm a firm-believer in anything, it's that you should cook some and invite me over for dinner.

ANYWAYS, today I’d like to share with you an ORIGINAL quinoa recipe.

YUM!

It all started when I was hungry, as most things that end up on this blog do.

I decided to take a stroll to my favourite cheap (and horrendously sketchy) grocery store a few blocks away from my apartment. It was a beautifully sunny day, and as I was skipping gleefully down my street, I realized I had forgotten my wallet –and the only mula I had on me was a couple of measly (or so I thought…) nickels and dimes.

Simple, you would think. I was only at the bottom of my street, and could have easily backtracked my way up to my third-floor apartment to grab my wallet. But something told me not to. And that something, of course, was laziness –the sort of laziness your mind tries really, really hard to justify.

So I began to wonder… what could I buy from The World’s Cheapest and Most Sketchy Grocery Store for thirty-five cents?

I decided it was worth finding out. I walked into the grocery store with a giant reusable bag and thirty-five cents, and left with a giant reusable bag, zero cents, and…

3 slightly overripe peaches!

YUM!

So I went home, and threw the peaches (yes, the peaches) into the oven, and baked them for about 7 minutes.

Meanwhile, I cooked a bit of quinoa (and you know how I feel about quinoa…), and sautéed some chickpeas, spinach, and tomatoes that were starting to see the end of their time in my fridge. I sliced the baked peaches, mixed everything together, and put a tiny bit of super spicy peanut sauce on top to bring out the nutty flavour or the quinoa (and to warm me up).

Voila!

I ended up with a quite delicious dinner, I must say… and only using thirty-five cents worth of new groceries!

So, obviously, I was a little proud of my innovativeness (cheapness), and have been thinking about it ever since.

How often do I buy a ton of new things at the market or grocery store even though I still have perfectly good food in the back of my pantry?

And similarly,

How much fun is it to use things you’ve had forever in new, creative ways?

In light of all this thinking, as well as my generally itty-bitty-sized budget, I’m giving myself a REAL challenge, based on curiosity and thriftiness, as opposed to laziness and apathy:

Yesterday I took $100 out of the bank, and I am going to see if I can only use this $100 to get me through until July 1st, for food, coffee, drinks, everything but rent (though wouldn’t it be awesome if I could throw rent in there too?), and all, of course, while cooking delicious veggie meals. No ramen noodles here.

I’m curious to see how this pans out… what, if anything, I’ll have to sacrifice, and what new discoveries come up.

But first, I want to know how YOU ‘eat cheap’ as a veggie?

Any tips or wise words for me?



*****On a side note, I wanted to add that I am LOVING (and I mean really, really loving) all of the questions you guys are emailing me! Please keep them coming, and expect a blog post with answers in the near future. If you have any questions at all for me, please feel free to email me at MarleeRubel@gmail.com, or leave them in a comment! Again, thanks for all of the enthusiasm, support, and inquiry!