Meatless Monday in the Spaz House

We had a lovely Thanksgiving in North Carolina with my family. It's a bit of an annual tradition to head up to my mom and dad's second home in the Great Smoky Mountains. All three of the Bs head up there with our families and pile into the house to eat and laugh and drink and eat and cook and bake and eat.

There is a lot of eating. My brother-in-law is an amazing cook. I've actually never eaten anything he's made that I didn't enjoy and he seems to really love to cook so a lot of food comes out of the kitchen when we're all together. And it's all good. So I eat a lot of it.

I don't know if I gained weight this past week but I'm pretty sure there's no way I didn't. I certainly didn't lose any. But more than the weight thing, I just feel a little full still. Even though it's Monday and we've been home since Saturday night. I feel like I'm still digesting.

As you may know, I've struggled with vegetarianism/veganism for years. I've been on the wagon, off the wagon, and halfway dangling off the wagon while trying to climb back on board as it clambers down the road.

Morally, I'm a vegan. When I think about it I feel terrible for eating any sort of animal product.(Except for Jojo's eggs. Jojo lives nearby and has the happiest chickens I've ever seen and I don't think there's a single thing morally wrong with eating the eggs they create.)  The Man, however, is kind of a carnivore.  He is seriously unhappy if he doesn't have meat. It has caused a few rifts in our home, actually, but in the end I knew him when we decided to mesh our lives together and it's not fair of me to expect him to change at this point. Believe me, I've tried to get him to see the light.

So in this house we buy and eat meat and dairy. I try to reduce it without causing too many waves in the house. I buy almond milk, I make substitutes when I can. I try to think of meals where the meat isn't the centerpiece of the meal.

But today will be the first day I implement Meatless Monday. The Man even agrees that there doesn't need to be so much meat in our diets, so he's on board. Not only will it reduce our meat intake for moral reasons, but it will be healthier and cheaper for us to go meatless one day a week. Excited? You betcha!

I'm pretty sure I'm making vegetarian chili for dinner tonight with cornbread (you can't have chili without cornbread), I'll report back on Wednesday to let y'all know how it goes.