vegan

A few weeks ago, I woke up with three words in my head: cookie butter frosting. I'm not saying that God herself tasked me with making a vegan recipe for cake frosting for you. But I'm also not saying that she didn't.

For those of you who don't know, I used to sell cupcakes many years ago. So veganizing my cupcake recipes has been on my to-do list for a while. But cookie butter frosting wasn't ever on my radar. I've seen some recipes for traditional (non-vegan) cookie butter frosting, but so far I haven't seen any vegan ones!

Back in October 2019, Disney World announced new plant-based offerings all throughout its parks and resorts. I couldn't wait to try them, so I saved up my coins and headed to Disney earlier this year (pre-COVID). Together with a friend, we sampled vegan eats and treats throughout all four parks. Over three days of dining, we each kept our food spending under $70! Here's a list of what we ate, and what I thought about it.

I cut costs by bringing my own water flasks to the parks to avoid buying bottled water throughout the day. It does add weight to your bags, especially in the morning when the flasks are full, so you'll have to decide if that's worth the savings. I also brought breakfast foods to eat in the hotel before heading to the parks. At Disney World, I shared almost every dish with my travel partner, so we got to sample twice as many foods!

I've changed my diet many times in my life. At the age of 10, I abruptly stopped eating meat. In my 20s, I switched over to a mainly organic diet and started cutting out most junk food and fast food. In my 30s, I gradually went vegan. Every time I made a change to my diet, I used different approaches and techniques. Some were better than others. But I didn't "go on a diet." Instead, I changed my eating habits. I've been able to sustain all these changes over the long term, without feeling like I'm missing out on anything. This is my ultimate guide to how I did it, with my most effective methods (and how you can too!)

Note: I personally am vegan and eat mostly organic foods, but these methods can be applied to any changes you want to make to your diet, whether it's cutting out sugar, eating whole foods, or any other diet change you want to make. I'm not here to tell you what you should or shouldn't be eating, because that's up to you!

One of my favorite flavor combinations is chocolate and peanut butter. Since I don't eat Reese's peanut butter cups anymore, I have to get my fix from other treats. Fortunately, peanut butter is a good vegan protein source. So with this recipe, I can have my flavors and get my protein too! (Feel free to substitute out the chocolate chips for nuts or dried fruit if chocolate's not your thing).

Recently I wrote about vegan protein and getting enough of each amino acid. If you haven't seen that post, you can find it here. Adding complete proteins to our diets can help us avoid amino acid deficiencies. While there aren't a lot of vegan foods that are naturally complete proteins, we can make our own complete proteins by combining protein from different sources. This recipe does exactly that.

Brunch is the best meal. Lazy weekends, sleeping in, and eating the best breakfast foods later than we should, with people we love. What could be better than that?

Of course, no brunch would be complete without a stack of light, fluffy pancakes drenched in maple syrup. In this version, we're combining plant milk and vinegar to create vegan buttermilk. The vinegar curdles the milk and helps it develop a buttermilk flavor.

In the PVT (pre-vegan times), I cooked pancakes a lot. Like a couple times a week. I would eat them with lots of fruit to make them "healthy". Once I became vegan, I tried some pancake recipes that were okay, but none of them were so good that I thought, "I have to make this again!"

Everyone talks about how much protein vegans are getting.... but I rarely hear anyone discussing what kind of proteins vegans should be eating. And no, not all protein is the same!

Yes, protein is used to build muscle. But our body uses proteins for so much more than that. For example, our bodies produce the protein keratin for our hair, skin, and nails. Our skin also uses the proteins collagen and elastin, which you may know are responsible for giving our skin its elasticity and fullness.

Proteins are also used in our organs and bones. They help us see, they produce hormones, and assist with replicating our DNA. Antibodies are a type of protein—these proteins are critical for our immune response to outside invaders that shouldn't be in our bodies, like viruses and bacteria.

As a vegan, I have been chocolate brownie-deprived for a very long time. I've tried many vegan brownie recipes, and none quite stacked up to the brownies I made from a box as a child, with the chewy edges and fudgy middle. Until now.

These are hands-down the best vegan brownies I've ever had. With a rich chocolate flavor, these fudgy brownies are not only the best vegan brownies I've had, they may be the best brownies period.