The Smoothie Vegetarians

Having just joined the Smoothie Vegetarian family, I think I should start off by introducing myself a little bit. My name is Terri, and I live on a little rural Ontario hobby farm with my husband and 13-year old daughter. I crochet for charity, love horror movies, and spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Oh, and we homeschool too. We grow the majority of our produce here and are having a great time exploring more choices for seasonal whole food and plant-based recipes. When you suddenly have 3 bushel baskets of red bell peppers sitting in the kitchen, you have to get creative. So that's what we do. What makes our food journey a little more difficult is that I have Celiac disease, which means we have to avoid gluten at all costs. That means no foods with wheat, rye, barley and anything with malt flavoring. So you'll probably notice that a lot of the recipes that I post will be gluten-free as well as vegan. Not always, but most of the time. And now we come to...

I went vegan about a year ago. During that year there have been a few slip-ups. A few times I took a bite of something I loved even though I knew it wasn't vegan and other times were accidents. I was happily eating a particular type of bread until a friend told me L-cysteine is not vegan. Dammit!!! There is a huge learning curve here, as there is with most major changes. My daughter is a Celiac, and that, too, took a lot of learning with some mistakes along the way. I purposely have not made any concrete New Year's resolutions this year. I've come to the conclusion that it's a set up for failure. I'm a bit of a sugar addict – OK I'm a total sugar addict. I'm not going to say no sugar at all. I already know I won't be able to do it. I'm going to try to reduce it gradually, and hopefully as I consume less and adjust, I will want it less. I'm not going to have any concrete plan for this next year (except to maintain my current ...