Hello again, my little blog! And to any readers out there, hello hello!

Sooooo, looks like I haven’t written or posted anything on here for a while! And a lot has changed in my life since this blog was more a part of it. Including a lot of experimenting in the kitchen (please enjoy the pictures). I have missed writing and posting on this little space I created for myself, but as life continued to move forward, change and evolve, I wasn’t sure how to combine this growth with what this blog was.

 

Mostly, it was a blog used for school assignments when I was a culinary student at George Brown College. I have since graduated (w00t!) from the Chef Training program, which was a wonderful, inspiring, and life changing experience. Not long after graduating, I returned to vegetarianism. Or, to be more specific, I began to transition my lifestyle from one of meat eating at almost every meal, to meat still once and a while, to where I am now: a mostly vegetarian, sometimes vegan, occasional pescatarian.

I was following this mostly vegetarian lifestyle before chef school but realized that maintaining this would be next to impossible while training in a mostly classic French style of cooking. There was meat and fish and dairy everywhere!

One of my required classes was all meat all the time, where each week we would focus on one main animal ingredient (such as the usual suspects of chicken, pork, beef, but also things like game and offal [which was awful, har har]), and we would have to prepare each five or six different ways. At the end of a three hour lab, I would come home with containers full of left overs, and to cook it all and then not eat it seemed like too much of a waste for me to justify.

Despite my desire to be vegetarian, I also found myself thoroughly enjoying the process of butchery, taking a whole animal and learning how to divide it into parts, and learning the best way to prepare each so as not to waste, essentially: the practice of nose to tail butchery. It gave me a whole new respect for the animals we eat, and for the skill and craftsmanship of the trade.

However, I always had this niggling feeling in my heart that this wasn’t really for me. This wasn’t my style of cooking. This wasn’t the message I wanted to share through my cooking. I respect it, and I appreciate it, but it’s not for me.

So I suppose that’s where my distance with this blog began, once I graduated and realized how my personal values weren’t being properly reflected through the content I had created. Having a food blog has always been a bit of a dream of mine, and by being in Chef school I was given the nudge forward I needed to start. But seeing as how these posts were all based on assignments I had been given in an extremely meat heavy environment (to even say you were a vegetarian amongst other students and your chefs was to be met with rolled eyes and a sneer) I was’t quite sure how to mark this transition.

Do I delete everything and start over? But I’m still proud of the writing of these pieces and want to maintain this history. Does this make me a hypocrite? I feel like the vegetarian and vegan community has quite a few pure-ests out there, and I’m not one to offend. However, I believe most people who are veg today came from this world of the “Standard American Diet”, and unless you were raised vegan, we all have to start somewhere.

Which brings me to my current stance on pesca/vegetarianism.  May 2015 marked not only my graduation from Chef School (aka Meat Haven), but also my third time going vegetarian. I am definitely not one of those people who watched Food Inc., went to bed, and woke up the next day as a raw till four vegan.

If you, or anyone you know, is one of these incredibly strong souls, I commend you/them! I have the utmost respect for those who were able to wash their hands clean of all cruelty overnight, and secretly think they’re basically unicorns from Narnia, or some other pure, ethereal creature not of this world.

But, (but!), that was not the case with me. It has taken years for me to even get to the point where I am now, and I’m still working my way towards my goal of being totally vegan on day. In the meantime, I hope to continue to update this space as I experiment and grow as a pesca/vegetarian cook, and I hope I can inspire a few readers along the way!