Five months in, and I’m going to be completely honest with you. We ate meat! Not a lot, only one time, but I feel guilty. Why do I feel like that? It was my own choice to do this. I don’t owe anybody any explanation, but somehow it felt wrong to eat meat again. Let me explain what happened. Over the last few months, I have been thinking about meat on and off, especially chicken. It also had something to do with the fact that I felt a bit uninspired for a while when cooking vegetarian meals. We have busy lives and thinking of new recipes, prepping food, cooking, it just takes so much time. Slapping a piece of meat in a frying pan seemed a lot easier. I know, it makes no sense, but it is how I feel sometimes.

A couple of weeks ago we were on vacation in Greece and it was really hard to find nice vegetarian meals. This part of Europe is very meat/fish orientated. I didn’t have the opportunity to cook for myself, so we were dependent on eating out. After the third night eating some very unsatisfying vegetarian meals, we both had enough! We wanted something nice and tasty. We went to a really posh restaurant, Paul had prawns and I was ready to order meat, but changed my mind. I asked the waiter about a vegetarian pasta and he recommended one. Awesome! When the waiters came with our plates, they served a plate FULL with clams! What? This is not vegetarian! I told the waiter that this wasn’t what I ordered. He misunderstood. Apparently when he was vegetarian for a while, this was what he ate himself. They gave me a new pasta, but there was hardly any taste to it. 

Okay, this is 4 nights in a row now eating crappy meals, I want something nice! So the next evening, we went to a different restaurant and I ordered chicken. It looked nice, so I had a bite but regretted it straight away. I also didn’t eat the whole piece and it felt very heavy on the stomach. It was the only time I had meat since I tried to become vegetarian. Paul did like it and had meat throughout our week holiday, but also wanted to go back to a vegetarian diet after we came back home. 

I believe these setbacks are important, because it helped me to feel inspired again to cook some nice vegetarian meals. I’ve been having so much fun discovering new dishes, improving my cooking and enjoying my time in the kitchen. Curious about a few of my new recipes?

You can find them under the tag: Vegetarian. Let me know what you think!

We will keep going! I will keep you updated on our progress.