Happy Vegan MoFo!

After a super stressful move, I've made it! I'm here in Toronto!
I cannot justify writing much, due the the mass amounts of furniture from Ikea I have to set up still.

Today was great though!
I woke up, walked to the grocery store (as apposed to the 30 minute drive I'm used to), bought a few things, came back, made coffee, ate cereal, then made some popcorn. 

Later in the day I went for a walk with two of my new roommates to the park, where we discussed our equal appreciation for lentil soup, so we went back to our place and I made a really good lentil stew! It was from the top of my head, so I unfortunately don't have any photos, but in brief it was:

2 cloves of garlic
1 onion
1 tbs coconut oil
2 tbs curry powder
2 tsp paprika
1 tsp oregano 
1/2 tin crushed tomatoes
1 litre veggie stock
2-3 cups of lentils
2 carrots
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp tahini
salt, pepper

Sautée the onion, garlic, curry, paprika and oregano in the coconut oil until onions are translucent. Add the tomatoes and simmer.
Combine the rest of the ingredients and bring to a boil
Reduce heat to simmer and let sit until the lentils are soft!

It was really really good, and really nerve-wracking cooking for people you've only just met!

I'm off to bed now, being as it's 2am.
Expect a better post tomorrow ;)

It's happening!

In with the old, out with the new, right?

Right!

I’ve been gone for so, so long.

But I am back! And I’m better than ever.

Here’s a quick recap of my past year:

• Having fun in university
• Cool job!
• University gets hard
• Boyfriends? No. I’m over boys.
• OH LOOK, BEARDED BOYS.
• New boyfriend
• Dumped by boyfriend over text message !!!
• University is still hard and now it is sad
• Wow university is really sad and stressful
• OH HEY, Panic attacks!
• Hospital
• Hospital
• Hospital
• Cool job?
• “Sorry, we’re going to have to let you go.”
• That’s ok, I’ll just take some time off to get my life back together
• Hey, not working is fun.
• *travels everywhere*
• Hey wow this milk is making my tummy hurt
• Should I go vegan?
• *goes vegan*
• Hmm September is coming up, maybe I should register back into school.
• Haha nope! I’d rather move to Toronto and start my life as a vegan foodie!

And I've even changed dramatically in looks too!

And that's only in seven months time!

Alright, so, that wasn’t a quick recap persay. But a year is a long time! Long story short, I dropped out of university to move to Toronto to literally, just be vegan.

Now, I know my blog is called “Rural Herbivore”, ergo implying that I am living in the country. Well, for now, I am. In a week or so, I will not be. Yes, I will be living in the big smoke that is Toronto, Canada. Why Toronto, you may ask? Well, after being in school for so long and knowing that I was only there to get a degree (that I had been bullshitting my way through), my plans were then to move to a big city and open some sort of cafe or quaint little restaurant (I don’t know if I had mentioned this in earlier posts). School and stress were bringing me down, and I started having panic attacks that landed me in the hospital each time. Scary stuff! I decided it would probably be in my best interest to drop out of school and find something else I liked doing, at least for a year. I looked around at culinary schools, but every school I found had mandatory butcher courses.

“But I’m vegetarian!” I would say.

“You have to do it anyway!” They would say.

Their logic being?

“If we have to learn and teach about vegetables, you have to learn about meat.”

I. Call. Bullshit.I’m not going to get into why I have huge issues with that statement in this post though. I can rant for days on why that logic is skewed.

At this point, I was pretty much vegan anyway. So I searched for alternative schools. Anyone who could teach me culinary skills that were more, sustainable , I suppose.

And that is when I found Kristen.
Sweet, kind-hearted, loving Kristen who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but who wouldn’t take bullshit from anyone. (Bullshit’s probably not vegan anyway)
Kristen runs a course called Know thy Food, a step by step vegan cooking course for an array of people, from people who are interested in learning about vegan but still loves their meat, to going-on-their-30th-year-of-being-vegans who are looking to spice up their cooking life!

She’s even mentoring a man who came all the way from Trinidad to work with her! And boy, let me tell you, am I ever thankful for her. Because of how much I love the food and the cooking and the whole vegan community, I thought, “quit dabbling in this! You love it. Go ahead, dive into it!”

So that’s what I’m doing.

I’m giving up quaint, rural living and trading it all in for the busy, fast-paced metropolis life.

And it will be different, for sure. Being vegan in the country, you gotta get creative. You can’t really eat out, grocery stores don’t have all of the supplements and replacements that most recipes call for, so you make do with what you've got. I believe this has given me a unique beginning to my (future) life as a vegan chef. In the city, every second shop is either vegan or vegan friendly. It’s great. It’s amazing. It almost sort of feels like cheating to me!

I will be working intensively, one on one with Kristen come October. But, in the meantime, she has challenged me to sign up for VeganMofo, a 30-day vegan blogging challenge. To me, this sounds like a perfect way to document my change from extensive country culinary to intensive city living. I will (hopefully) be posting a recipe every day! I already have a few in mind that I have created in the past while.

I hope you’re ready for this, because I for one, am not.
(But I’m still excited!)