Linda signed up to the newsletter this week, and she said that the very best tip I could give her would be “getting started” ideas for brand new vegans.  We’ve got a growing set of recipes and cooking tips on Eazy Vegan, so I’m not going to pick out some simple recipes.  Instead, here are three basic principles to keep in mind that I think can help new and experienced vegans alike:

Figure out your biggest problem

A complete overhaul of your diet is a massive change on a zillion levels of your life.  Your body may react differently, your social interactions may change, your finances might get into trouble if you stick to too many processed vegan foods, and other issues might erupt that’ll challenge your decision to go vegan.

Ask yourself, in a year’s time, if it all goes bad, what’s the most likely way you’ll finish this phrase: “yeah, I was vegan for a while but I had to stop because of…”

Fix that right now.

I don’t know what your hypothetical dealbreaker is, but it’s probably not unique.  If you’d like help brainstorming, feel free to get in touch, but work on the biggest challenge first.  Once that’s under control, repeat the exercise (nobody likes to admit this for some reason, but massive change is hard and usually presents multiple obstacles!)

If you try to fix everything at once, your brain’s going to be all over the place, and you probably won’t even realize what most of the problems are.  Fixing the biggest problem first will clear more room for you right away, and you’ll probably find that this fix will automatically fix a few other issues that you didn’t even know were related.

Ignore the fine print

In a perfect world we’d eat nothing but whole fruits and vegetables and everything would have an ingredients list of one.  Actually, scratch that, that’d be a pretty boring world.  I like the fact that there are a lot of items in the grocery store that some company has taken the time to prepare for me so I don’t have to, for instance, make my own tofu.

Lots of these items have weird ingredients in them that I can’t even spell, let alone recognize without practice.  You can burn up a lot of energy as a new vegan poring through each list, comparing each item to the entry in a list of food ingredients, and agonizing over simple mistakes you made just a few days before when you misread a label.

When you’re just starting out, focus on the easy 80%.  Consider the rest a transition process.  You’ll learn how to scan ingredients as you learn everything else (and the good news is that it’s getting easier and easier as products start to actually identify themselves as vegan.)

I’m not trying to tell you to ignore trace amounts of animal products, but you need to recognize that you probably don’t have a chemistry degree and this stuff can be hard to figure out, and animal ingredients hide in lots of places you don’t expect.  For example, every week I hear from a longtime vegan who just found out that beer is often filtered with fish guts (thankfully, it’s usually the same week they discovered Barnivore.)  Does that make them less vegan up to that point?  Personally, I don’t think so.

Focus on the big ingredients when you’re starting out.  Avoid bacon, for example.  Things like L-Cysteine will get sorted out later on in your journey.

Learn four recipes

OK, I said I wasn’t going to pick out recipes, and I’ll stick to that, mostly, but I want to call out a behaviour that I see in a lot of new vegans: they want to try absolutely everything, right away.

And this is exciting!  I remember when I decided to adopt a plant-based diet, and it was like a light went off in my head, and suddenly I had permission to explore entire aisles of the grocery store that I’d previously ignored.  I don’t know why, as an omnivore, I felt that I didn’t need to know what cous cous, falafels, millet, and, say, black eyed peas were, let alone how to use them, but there’s a tendency to think of a new vegan diet as “new everything” as opposed to “less of this stuff, more of this stuff.”

Unfortunately, this makes things a lot harder than it has to be when you’re starting out, and if something’s difficult, it’s more likely that you’ll give up.  Your body is going to be trying to get used to a new type of cuisine with different amounts of fat and fibre among other things, and if you change things up dramatically with every meal, you might have some difficulties there.  Your budget might suffer with the wider range of staple foods you’ll be buying to create each new meal (see our post on the three spices you need to get started for some help there.) And then there’s the matter of simply trying to remember everything!

Trying new things is something I always encourage, but if you’re just starting out, I recommend learning maybe four solid recipes that you can use as your home base.  Most people I know, omnivore or vegan, tend to eat pretty much the same stuff over a given period of time, so don’t worry about being in a rut.  I’d just hate for you to stop enjoying veganism simply because you can’t find the time, energy, and resources to keep the food supply moving into your belly.

I said I wouldn’t supply recipes, but here are some guidelines: learn a good bean dish, a good tofu dish (tofu scramble is super easy to figure out,) something as simple as a sandwich or wrap you can make for lunches, and finally some kind of cake or cookie recipe that’ll get you started with baking (it’s not as stereotypically vegan as my other suggestions, and you can take the desserts to work to win more people over!)

Think of these as your “home base” recipes.  You can try new things, but if you get the hang of four solid choices you’ll have something to fall back on when you’re having a rough day, or your body is craving something familiar.

What else?

These are three tips that popped into my head this morning, but there are a bunch more I could have gone with, so I’m turning it over to the other vegan readers: what one tip do you wish someone had told you when you were starting as a vegan?  Let us know in the comments so we all can learn!

Update: lots of great suggestion from fans over on the Facebook posting, check ‘em out!

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I can’t remember the last time I talked with another vegan about this and they didn’t admit to playing the grocery game.  It’s one of those instinctive things that we just do, maybe as humans, maybe just as vegans, but hey, it’s a fun way to pass the time.

What’s the grocery game?  Simple: when you’re waiting in line at the cashier, look at the purchases of the person in front of you.  If everything on the belt is vegan, it’s a win!

For me, it doesn’t really matter if they’re just buying a bottle of soda; I like to win so I make the rules easy.  Some people have higher standards, so they’ll work out elaborate bonus point scoring systems incorporating raw foods, unprocessed items, etc.  You probably have your own guidelines, and today’s post isn’t about how to play the grocery game, it’s how to really win.

“Winning” the grocery game is a missed opportunity

Nobody likes to talk about this, but there aren’t a lot of vegans out there.  I hear from lots of you (via replies to the newsletter, mostly) that you don’t even know a single other vegan in your city or town.  And yet, I’m sure some of you have “won” the grocery game and then went on with your lives wondering why you can’t meet more vegans.

It’d be awesome if we could turn those chance victories into lasting friendships, wouldn’t it?

There are lots of reasons why this doesn’t happen.  Starting a conversation with a stranger is outside of a lot of our comfort zones.  We worry that it can come off a bit stalker-y.  The other person might not even be vegan.  The other person might be insane.  Maybe it’d make veganism look bad. And so on.

For those reasons, this isn’t a post about how to talk to strangers (in all honesty, pickup guides are probably the best resource for that – as I’ve said before, I recommend The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (affiliate link); it’s not a how-to guide but it’s an entertaining story and I got a lot of outreach ideas from it, believe it or not.)

Instead, I’m recommending that you be open to being approached when you’re shopping. Remember, the person behind you might be playing the grocery game too!  Here are a few ways to create opportunities:

If you’re with someone else, mention veganism in your conversation while you’re waiting.  Position yourself as best as you can (I know, it’s a narrow aisle, but be aware of your surroundings) so the person behind you can interrupt your conversation.  Try talking specifically about a particular product, and how you’re wondering what it’ll be like, or how you like to serve it.

If you’re by yourself, please don’t talk to yourself in lieu of option one  Instead, try standing sideways, facing the belt, so your back isn’t to the person behind or in front of you.  Relax.  Smile a little.  Now’s not the time to check your email or read one of the magazines or any of those things that means someone will have to interrupt you to start a conversation.

If you decide you want to start the conversation, try asking about a product the other person is buying.  It’s easy, relevant, and gives the other person a chance to decide if they want to talk to you.  If they’re a grocery game player too, they’ll be able to scan your purchases at this point and then you’ll have done them a favour of creating the opening.

This is the kind of thing that might come up in your lives once or twice in a year, or maybe a decade, but it’d be a shame to miss out on.  It’s a simple thing to be aware of, so next time you’re shopping and you’re playing the grocery game, remember that the people around you might be doing the same thing.

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Amazingly, there's more than cereal for vegans beyond the produce section

This week we’re going to look at vegan grocery shopping with some practical tips and fun things you can do to make the most of your shopping experience – the majority of you don’t have access to an all-vegan grocery store, which means you’re stuck in a shop with the usual dairy, egg, fish and butcher sections.  Here’s the first installment of your survival guide:

Be brave; assume nothing

I don’t know about you, but have a hard time going near the rows of refrigerated and frozen animal parts in the butcher section.  Most of the time the animal’s been cut up well beyond recognition, which is usually a little better than looking at a severed head, for instance, but sometimes it can get disturbing.

The interesting thing is that sometimes grocery stockers get… creative.  There are often hidden gems (or just basic supplies) in the store that you’d never see if you stick entirely to the produce, bread, and canned foods sections.

The 3 “secret spots” most vegans don’t look

Here are some sections of the store that you might be avoiding, but there can be some gems in there, either through misunderstandings from the stockers or simple happenstance:

The meat department. I’ve found Tofurkey sausages in the bacon section, and sometimes there’s a weird ethnic section with interesting vegan-friendly options. (It could be any type of food, and I don’t mean the ethnicity is weird, just that the assortment of foods that are associated together paint a strange picture of a style of cuisine, is all.)

The fish counter. Often this is next to the deli, and some strange shelf capacity overrun issues can push Actually Tasty Food into this area.  In my regular store, the sushi section tends to be here, which is mostly takeout, and while it does include some veg options there are also the supplies to make rolls at home.

Frozen meats. In a lot of stores vegetarian frozen products will have their own section (isn’t it amazing that there are enough of them now?) but even then, things can slip.  I’ve recently found veggie chicken strips sitting right next to frozen (real) chicken breasts, and sometimes we’ll discover a brand new “just happens to be vegan but not marketed that way” product from a new company that only has one SKU in the store, so it gets put in the “we have room for this here” spot, far from anything else you as a vegan would associate it with.

Do a quarterly audit

Despite the promise of vegan riches, the sad fact is that you have to wade (not literally, thank goodness) through a lot of dead animals to find things, and this can be disturbing and depressing if done on a regular basis.  I recommend you conduct an “audit” of your store every three months or so (do it when the seasons change, for example.)  Pay attention to the three “secret spots” I mentioned earlier, but really, check out every foot of shelving – you might be pleasantly surprised at what you’ll find!

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As I said in the last segment, cooking at home is (usually) much cheaper than eating takeout or convenience food, but the startup costs can be a little scary: stocking up on the individual ingredients that recipes assume everybody “just has” can be an expensive proposition.

In this part of our cheap vegan series, I want to help with that by talking about spices. Spice racks are cheap. Filling them might not be. If you’re not careful, you can spend $3 to $5 per spice, and that can add up when your spice rack becomes a spice drawer becomes a spice shelf:

Yeah, it’s worse than condiments, isn’t it?  Sometimes I count them just to make myself feel crazy.  We’re up to around 50.

Still, when you consider that just a few hundred years ago fortunes were made by chartering risky boat trips to far off lands to secure new flavours, we live in a pretty awesome world, and the price of spice is pretty low in comparison to the old days. You don’t even need a boat! Still, I think we can save a bit more.

There are two big ways to save money here, and today we’ll cover how and what to buy when you’re stocking your spices.

How to buy spice

To some of you this will be as obvious as “garbage goes in the garbage can,” but when you’re first starting out, it’s not always even obvious that, say, garam masala is found in the spice section and not at the, I don’t know, make up counter, for instance.

When you go to your local grocery store, you’ll see a spice section that looks like this:

See those pretty little tins and bottles? They run around $3 to $5 each. It’s not hard to pick out a week’s worth of recipes that use 15 different spices (hint: pick recipes for spices that you actually have!), so that’s, say, $60 just to get some flavour into your meals, which probably kills out any savings you might have been expecting from the whole cooking thing. Sure, the spices will last more than a week, but this is one of those mental block things that keeps people from even starting.

You’ve got two alternatives:

Most stores also sell spice in plastic pouches, some of which even have little zip lock closures at the top now, which is pretty gour-frigging-met, if you ask me. These packs average a buck or so each, saving you around 75% without leaving that grocery aisle.

The next choice, which I prefer, is to buy in bulk, where you can measure the cost of spices with nickels and dimes. Now, when you do this, pay attention to the bin you’re buying from – sometimes the spices don’t sell very fast, and you’ll even see two different colours from when new stock was poured on top of old stuff. Buy from small bins (the stock will rotate faster) from a busy bulk section (if your grocery store doesn’t have one, your health or bulk foods store will, though I guess that’s obvious from the name “bulk foods store.”)

When buying in bulk, avoid buying in bulk: yes, bulk without bulk: small quantities will last a long time. When you get home, you can keep them in the little baggies, transfer them to that spice rack you got as a gift, or put them in little jars (either from the dollar store or reused from other grocery purchases: we use artichoke heart jars a lot for this.)

Lastly, no matter how you buy your spices, mark the date of purchase on the container somewhere. My palate isn’t so advanced as to be able to notice a six month age difference in spices, but ideally you want to balance freshness with the convenience of having enough on hand. It’ll also give you a better idea of how much of each spice you actually use.

What spices to buy

Even with the bulk trick, it’s a good idea to not spend money until you have to, and with spices, there’s a learning curve to deal with, especially if you’re “winging it” without a recipe.

Don’t get me wrong; a quarter teaspoon of something something in addition to the other 6 spices in your dish will make a subtle difference, but I don’t know that it’s a make it or break it kind of thing, particularly when you’re still learning how to broil, steam, and saute.

I talked about this with Angela last night and we came up with this “desert island” list of spices:

Ground black pepper. I swear, my first four years of vegan cooking relied almost entirely on a big (massive!) jar of ground pepper. It was my curry, my turmeric, my cayenne, and my chipotle all in one. Did you know they sell lemon pepper? Did you know that adding ground pepper and lemon juice (from the bottle, natch) is pretty much the same thing and you can vary the balance between the two as you like it? It’s not fancy, but there’s a reason you find black pepper on the table of just about every restaurant.

Sage. And if you’re feeling splurgy, rosemary, but I said this would be a list of three spices, so call it extra credit. There’s no nice way to put this: they add the flavour we remember from KFC to a meal.

Oregano. Alternate: “italian seasoning,” which will blend in some other stuff. Technically this isn’t even a spice, being a herb and all, but we work with the vocabulary of the average chef, and there you go. This fills in the non-spicy, non-savoury category for things like pasta.

Later on, I’d add cumin, cayenne, basil, thyme, garlic and onion powder, and other good stuff to the mix, but you’re going to develop your own list of preferences based on the recipes you decide to work with.

Oh, and as a bonus, remember that you can cheat a bit by buying pre-seasoned foods, which are often the same price as the “natural” stuff. I’m talking about pasta sauce, herbed tofu, and other stuff like that.

What about you? What’s your desert island spice list, assuming, you know, there’s a full kitchen and a grocery store on the island that stocks everything but spice?

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It seems like we’ve got a lot of people searching the interwebs for tips on being vegan on a budget.  Isn’t that a little messed up when you think about it?  For years, meat’s been seen as a status symbol intended for those who can afford it, delegating beans and rice to “poor people,” and yet the growing abundance of packaged vegan convenience food has made it way too easy to top the grocery bill of just about any omnivore.

With that in mind, I felt a little guilty with the latest round of vegan cooking videos we’ve got going on the just-relaunched Eazy Vegan Cooking Show.  Our first video is all about how to use a pressure cooker, which can run you around $100 for a good one, and next week I’ll be using close to a thousand dollars in equipment (which is mostly optional, and we got our dehydrator for free, but still!)

By way of explanation, I thought it’d be good to talk a little bit about food budgets and how sometimes “spending to save” can make a lot of sense.

First of all, if you actually use your kitchen instead of eating takeout or relying heavily on “assemble and reheat” convenience foods (I’m looking at you with a mix of love and regret, Tofurky,) you’re going to save a significant amount of money.  From there, it’s a matter of working to lower your average cost per meal.

I love using beans to fill out a meal.  OK, mostly I just love to eat hummous straight out of a bowl, yes, with a spoon, don’t you judge me, but the point is, beans are an incredibly healthful addition to any meal and they make it hard to add much else in the way of bulk.

Canned beans are the most convenient way to cook with beans, but the dry beans are significantly cheaper, and as a bonus they store easily and weigh less than cans, which can make them better choices for both you and the environment.  The only challenge is that they’re a pain to cook, in my opinion, without a pressure cooker.

I spent some time looking up prices for canned versus dry beans, but it seemed to vary by location a fair bit, so do your own math.  My main point today is that if you’re willing to commit to regular additions of beans in your diet, it doesn’t take very long (under a year, easily) for the savings to add up to the price of a pressure cooker.  (and yes, they do a lot more than cook beans…)

Of course, you have to be careful with this kind of logic!  I often find myself rationalizing far too many “money savers” at a time, which can result in racking up a lot of up-front costs for many items that I won’t end up using (just ask Angela!) – as with everything else I talk about, be sure to make one change in your routine at a time so you can easily figure out what’s working for you and what’s not without being too disruptive to everything else that’s going on with your life.

If I was more opportunistic, I’d salt this post with affiliate links to various pressure cookers available online, but honestly they’re the kind of thing that you can often find used on Craigslist or Kijiji – I think they’re like the home exercise equipment of cooking gear or something.

So over to you – what’s the one kitchen upgrade you’ve bought that’s saved you the most money?  And going the other way, what’s the one you thought would be “the one” but turned out to be a waste?  Let me know in the comments!

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Hi all, sorry for the mixup today but we’re having some computer issues at Thrust Labs today and it looks like it’s going to mean pushing today’s post and the newsletter out a day.  I’d ask you to “pretend tomorrow’s Monday” but that would mean I’m subjecting you to two Mondays in a row, and nobody likes that, but on the other hand if you really don’t like Tuesdays then, erm, you’re welcome.

Sorry for the delay, and I’ll see you tomorrow – lots of fun lined up this week, assuming the hard drives are willing!

Update: No newsletter this week, sorry! I’m going to focus on developing some of the new ideas forming in my head instead so we can grow together.  Posts will show up in a little while, check back soon…

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Today at 2PM Eastern (Toronto/NYC time) we’ll be digging into this week’s newsletter content in even greater detail with a live video session.  Missed the newsletter or want a refresher?  Here’s a 9 minute video version:

“The Heist” is a great technique to get past the cynical, doubting mental blocks that people put up even before they ask you why you’re vegan so you can deliver a quick message that’ll actually reach their brain.  It’s the basis of a lot of my work online (especially on Vegan Porn) and I hope you enjoy this walkthrough!

RSVP (and watch) here! If you’ve never attended office hours before, please join up 5 minutes early so you can set up your account (it’s free) that’ll let you participate in the live chat portion – it’s getting to be more entertaining than watching me!

Want an email reminder before each session (and notification of bonus sessions)? Sign up for our notification list!

See you at 2!  And hey, while you’re waiting, here are some recordings of past sessions!

Update: Here’s this week’s recording! Lots of fun in the live chat, thanks so much to everyone who was able to join, and we’re going to work on some different hours real soon!

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I’ve been having a hard time getting Derek Siver’s Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy talk out of my head.  Here’s something to fill 3 whole minutes of your day:

If you prefer to read, Derek posted the full transcript here, but I’ll excerpt the Big Idea for you:

It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader.

There is no movement without the first follower.

We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.

The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.

Leadership is hard, and it requires going out of your comfort zone. Way out, at least more than you feel comfortable doing. Hence the term “comfort zone.”

The thing is, we’re not the leaders in most things we do. Someone else, or generally thousands if not millions of someone elses, have done this stuff before, we’re probably modelling one or more of these people, and there’s a good chance that people you talk to have heard of those other people well before they ever found out that you’re into veganism, conscious living, raw foods, nude gardening, or whatever passion it is that floats your particular boat.

It’s OK that we’re not the leaders. We’re more likely the first or second follower, at least in our geography. I think that’s a little easier to deal with – certainly more comfortable, don’t you agree?

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Help your brain before you have to resort to the non-vegan practice of eating someone else's. Photo by Ateo Fiel.

In today’s newsletter we’re going to be talking about how to leverage a psychological study to better deal with meat eaters who might otherwise give you a hassle, but it turns out that there are a lot of little “brain hacks” out there, and many can be used on yourself.  Here’s one to build a healthier brain while you cook.

In the world of physical exercise, most trainers will advise you to switch up your routine every now and then, because your muscles get used to performing specific actions and the benefits of training will start to taper off the more accustomed you become to a workout program. Your brain isn’t that much different.

Even though we aren’t seeing as much snow here in my part of Canada as the Eastern US is getting right now, I like to imagine the brain as a series of highways in the winter.  The roads are neural pathways (yes, everything I learned about neurology, I learned from that blinking panel in Data’s head in Star Trek, OK?) that need steady traffic to stay clear of snow that slows everything down.  If you don’t use a road for a while, it gets snowed in, and it’s not just the “juggle chainsaws” skill that starts to atrophy; everything else on that “block” gets a little duller.  ”Keeping the roads clear” can be pretty simple, actually – I’ve heard many times that standing on one foot (and triggering balance practice) can do a lot to stimulate the brain all by itself!

Now, we’ve all heard that eating a healthful plant-based diet can do a lot for the body, which includes the brain (not least of which is by ensuring a steady supply of blood,) but using the snowplow analogy can make our food choices really count, even before we’ve eaten them!

Try new things in the kitchen just like you’d try new exercises in the gym.  Sure, you could try new recipes (we talk about how to avoid “recipe reruns” here,) but you can also vary the way you prepare each meal.  A lot of people have told me they enjoyed our “new” way to prepare a pepper, so I’ll link to it again here to spark your imagination, but there are a lot of ways you can prep your vegetables.

I can think of at least 5 different ways to prepare garlic, for example – how many can you dream up?  How many have you used lately?  Sure, there’s usually one “best” way that you always go to (and it’s probably different than the way your friend does it,) but being strongest at one technique means you’re by definition a bit weaker on others, so revisit them from time to time to strengthen your brain’s pathways – like I said, it probably won’t be just that skill that benefits.

This works for brand new techniques as well as revisiting old ones, and I think you’ll find an immediate bonus that working in the kitchen becomes a little more fun.  Over the longer term, you just might be ensuring better overall brain health in the bargain.

Photo by Ateo Fiel

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Longtime readers may remember a recurring feature here on Taste Better called The Colour of Money, which talked about business from a vegan perspective, mostly through interviews with vegan business owners.

The feature didn’t fit well with the new direction I’m taking this site (i.e. “tips for good green living” and whatnot,) and English speakers are pretty split on how to spell “colour” in the first place, so it seemed like the right time to move this feature to its own domain.

Vegan Friendly Ventures will focus on how people can earn a living without sacrificing their core values.  While most of the content will be directed to entrepreneurs, I’ve got some ideas in the works for people with “regular jobs” too.

The old interviews have all been moved over, but today we’ve got a new feature online: How a restaurant’s closing led to a catering business – and North America’s First vegan organic lunch truck.  That’s right, if you haven’t heard, The Cinnamon Snail will be making its debut this Sunday in Hoboken, New Jersey with service Monday to Friday thereafter.  Read on to find out how you can be one of the first 100 people to get a free vegan donut!

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